Destructive Anger
"Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power, that is not easy." - Aristotle.
To even the inattentive or preoccupied, Ronald Prescott Reagan, the son of former President Ronald Wilson Reagan, is outwardly his father's son. You can see it in their shared confident gate. You can see it in their famous and endearing Reagan smiles. You can even appreciate it in the same way they shake their head and say, "Well." However, on a more fundamental level, in their world views, in their personalities, in their decency, they could not be more radically different.
Ron Junior is not only a liberal, but radically so. He has been active in the "Creative Coalition," a Left-wing group to politically organize artists. Ron Junior voted for Ralph Nader in 2000; Gore was not liberal enough for him. The elder Reagan was not only a Conservative, but "Mr. Conservative." Ron Junior is a self-proclaimed atheist, while his father was a quietly religious man. These are important intellectual and essential spiritual differences. Though such differences can vastly separate two people, the hope can remain that through honest dialog some differences might be bridged and those that remain may at least not be the source of prolonged bitterness. But unfortunately, there are ironic and sad dissimilarities in the temperament and dispositions of the former president and his namesake.
Ron Junior had it right when he said of his father when eulogizing him, "He was the most plainly decent man you could ever hope to meet... Dad treated everyone with the same unfailing courtesy." It would have been out of character for President Reagan to have descended into the personal vituperative attacks of a political adversary in the same way that Ron Junior has done with respect to President George W. Bush. When exasperated, a smile would crawl across the elder Reagan's face as he would light up and lament, "There you go again." By contrast, most are repelled by the single-minded bitterness of the younger Reagan when he says of the current Administration, "they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie."
Upon what evidence does the younger Reagan assert this pervasive mendacity? In a recent opinion piece, "The Case Against George W. Bush," that appears in Esquire, Ron Junior cites George Bush's presidential 2000 campaign when Bush eschewed an activist foreign policy, with the US actively confronting adversaries across the world. Now, Bush has deployed troops to Afghanistan and then Iraq. This might suggest to a reasonable person a dishonest election campaign by a closet internationalist, that is, if the United States had not been attacked on September 11, 2001. The one most crucial event in the twenty-first century and the younger Reagan seems to have ignored the obvious explanation for the change in Bush's approach.
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