Long live Saint Ronnie

Kevin called me to say that Ronald Reagan had died. I nearly cried out in excitement, until I remembered that I was walking around Colorado.

I feel like Hunter S. Thompson's eulogy of Nixon is somewhat applicable.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

I remember "Morning in America" and what a hollow lie it was. I fully expect more revisionist history from the conservatives, as they name everything in sight after him. Some people are nostalgic for that era--many of them are in the current administration--but I am not one of them.