Yesterday's Miami Herald column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. [registration required] offers the kind of black-and-white perspective (as opposed to all-white) on Ronald Reagan's passing that most media outlets have been afraid to publish, perhaps because our current leadership is protegé and extension of the Reagan ethos, and to speak any ill of the past in this instance is to speak ill of many of the Bush administration's founding principles. Pitts opines

To the degree those things are missing from their analyses, news media have embarrassed themselves this week. They have rewritten history and slapped on a happy face.

It's not an issue of respecting the deceased. It is, rather, an issue of telling the whole truth, fulfilling our obligation to write history's first draft. Imagine analyzing a recently departed Bill Clinton and leaving out Monica Lewinsky or memorializing Richard Nixon and forgetting Watergate. That would be what this is: dishonest. Lies of omission.

So let me say this for the record: Some of us watch these proceedings with the sober respect you'd have for any loss of life, but also with dry eyes. The media have sold us a fraudulent version of history. Everybody loved Ronald Reagan, it says.

Beg pardon, but 'everybody' did not.

...

It's hardly uncommon to speak well of the recently departed. And there is certainly much about the former president's tenure that merits celebration. He restored "can do" to the American lexicon, his vibrant optimism a jolt of adrenaline after the dour Carter years and the criminality of the Nixon gang. He pushed communism to the breaking point. He famously called the Soviet Union what it was -- an empire of evil. He changed the political landscape.

But my point here is that some of us also knew another Reagan, and he is conspicuous by his absence from much of this week's coverage.

Some of us remember his cuts in federal lunch programs for poor children and his claim that ketchup is a vegetable.

Some of us remember his revival of the old canard that Martin Luther King was a communist.

Some of us remember Americans dying by the thousands from AIDS while their president breathed not a word.

Some of us remember finding homeless people sleeping under freeways.

And some of us were there when the cities imploded, rent by a cheap and insanely addictive new drug called crack. It turned our mothers into prostitutes, our fathers into zombies, our children into orphans, our communities into killing fields. We looked to the White House for help and received in response a ruinous "war on drugs" and this advice from the first lady: 'Just say no.'

[via Mutinous Winds]

Many of my recollections of the Reagan years were not that pleasant, either. Yes, the Wall came down, and the Soviet Union collapsed; these were dreams come true for the Cold War generations. But like a monochrome Hollywood Western, that era's administration frequently window-dressed America's image to the world with "shining city on the hill" sentiment - while concealing the truth of hunger, poverty, disease and growing unrest behind a freshly painted, single-sided movie-set facade, even to ourselves.

My memory of the Reagan years were of being quite poor in a small rural town in New York near the Canadian border, going to a high school with ever-decreasing budgets, "Just Say No," the Star Wars initiative - teachers telling us that nuclear war was extremely likely in the next few years, and we'd just better get used to the concept.

In my eyes, the Reagan years were national implementation of the 'actor's strategy': people will believe you are what you pretend to be. If we dressed ourselves up as the uniformly well-to-do, faithful, 2-point-5-children-per-home-plus-the-dog, white-picket-fence Mayberry RFD nation we believed ourselves to be on Golden Age TV, then just maybe, magically, that's what we would be. No racial unrest, no hunger, no AIDS, no crack, no nuclear weapons here. Sweep, sweep.

Unfortunately, we still have all these problems, and then some. The difference is, I think many of us are accustomed to living in a more cynical, more grey-area world than were were willing to concede to 20 years ago. And certainly, all the cheerful bromides we were dispensed couldn't soothe a young person's fear of the everpresent Doomsday Clock.

Our old enemies are now our 'friends', but I'm not that crazy about the enemies we've traded them in for.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think believe the Reagan Years were all bad back then, or that it's all bad now. It's just that it wasn't "all good," either, and if we propagate the myth that it was, then we're only brushing a fresh layer of paint on the old movie set, and writing half-truths on a piece of used parchment.

Reminds me of blue-eyed UK soul singer Paul Young's first obscure hit from 1982's No Parlez: "Iron Out the Rough Spots." I used to know the words, but that was a long time ago. The problem is, when you only paint over rough spots, the rough spots don't really go away. They get bigger, broader, and harder to eradicate.

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