(with Marilyn Monroe in 1954)

The question I want someone on TV to ask right now is this: How did killing 300,000 Central Americans hasten the end of the Cold War?

So far, the subject hasn't come up. As of 5:00 p.m. Monday, a Nexis search of newspaper articles and television transcripts containing the words "Ronald Reagan" and "Guatemala" in the three days since his death turns up only eight results. Two are the same article, which says Reagan "succeeded in nudging" Guatemala "towards democracy." (How?) Three others mention either Guatemala or Reagan incidentally, not his policies there. 

Only three articles (the Australian, the Irish Times, and the Associated Press Worldstream) mention Reagan in connection with the tens of thousands of people killed in Guatemala. Of those, only the Irish Times mentions "torture."

By contrast, there are 202 articles with the words "Ronald Reagan" and "personality" in them. None of these mentions "torture," either. And neither, by the way, does Tom Carson's hilarious but fatally conventional liberal take on Reagan's war at home:

Starting with the way he broke the air-traffic controllers' strike in 1981, an augury of things to come from which the labor movement never recovered, Reagan certainly demolished the American left�what passes for the left, anyway. Since repeating "what passes for the left" strikes me as tiresome, I'll abbreviate it: WPFL. As you may recall, under veteran station manager Jesse Jackson, WPFL switched to an oldies format soon after the Great Communicator took office, and has remained too much on the defensive to come up with a new songlist since. Instead, in one of the great through-the-looking-glass paradoxes of Reaganism, "progressives" have become, in practical terms, reactionaries�cluckingly trying to protect this or that milestone (equal opportunity, Roe v. Wade), against a right wing that's singing "If I Had a Hammer�Oh, Wait: I Do."

My question, Tom, is if Reagan didn't respect American popular opinion as his true enemy, why did he take his war on Central America underground? (And incidentally, why is longtime WPFL personality Noam Chomsky now sold in airports?)

Contrary to the current surreal flood of commentary, Reagan was easy to hate. His personality was curt and facile and dismissive and severe, from "There you go again" to "I don't remember--period." Against the landslide elections of 1980 and 1984, there was the small fact that Americans don't vote (plus a narrower margin between popular vote percentages: 50.7 Reagan, 40.1 Carter, 6.6 John Anderson in 1980; 58.4 Reagan, 41.6 Mondale in 1984). Against his status as our most enjoyed president (classic King of the Hill line: "God I loved voting for that man"), there is the smaller fact that most Americans disagreed with him "on the issues." Reagan was as magnetic and remote as the moon, but his charm was transparently fragile and actorly. George W. Bush has the ease of the self-convinced, by comparison. Reagan's lifelong pattern of contradictory and desperate lying suggests that he took the full knowledge of what he had done, and its human consequences, with him into mental deterioration.

I was acquainted with many of Reagan's victims in the 1980s, and I don't mean Mondale voters. I became friends with a handful of the thousands of Central Americans who fled Reagan's paid torturers (and had the scars to prove it). When I left Wisconsin for college in Washington, D.C., in 1988, I encountered the ubiquitous homelessness that was also Reagan's legacy, and met addicts who were by then consuming the drugs that had been introduced or supplied in significant measure by his who-gives-a-shit mercenaries in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. I met women and men from South Africa who fought Apartheid by doing things like organize unions, and were labeled terrorists and necklacers for their efforts. Combine these stories with everything else you know about Reagan--from his FBI informant days in Hollywood to his fantastic attitude toward nuclear holocaust--and there's nothing especially contradictory about his story. The personal ambitions and public mission of this world-class phony were of a piece.

Reagan did not, as he claimed, fight in World War II, or take part in liberating the Nazi death camps, though he did honor the Nazi dead as president. He did not have anything to do with the social upheaval that ended Communism in Eastern Europe, though he knew a good video-op when he took one, and saw advantages in Gorbachev's historic goodwill, which persists in eulogy to the dead president. Reagan did not care about his enemies' victims any more than he cared about his own--in fact, Reagan supported Pol Pot through the '80s, another name that doesn't come up much now. Saddam Hussein and the Kurds? Forget about it.

The legacy of Reagan's Christian millenarianism, military Keynesianism, and demonstration-interventions against weaklings in Libya and Grenada was international mistrust, the war on the 40-hour work week, an unchecked AIDS pandemic, the militarization of space, the S&L bailout... Am I bugging you? I didn't mean to bug ya.

Yet many liberals seem to dissociate items on this well-rehearsed list of horror and shame from the greased, loopy, stupid has-been-actor at the center--as if he were as used as any of his fans. The divorce between "personality" and "torture" was Reagan's greatest achievement, and his most terrible.