I have a friend who grew up in Cooperstown, New York, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. When he told me that, my eyes took on a far away, dreaming gaze. “Wow,” I said, “that must have been great…” My friend snorted with contempt. He disdains the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Of course, that makes sense. I visited Cooperstown once, for a day, and I thought it was great. Ben spent his entire youth trudging through the streets of a baseball shrine, where everything was baseball worship and baseball Babbitry; his only protection from all the sugary boosterism was cynicism. (Hmmm, there’s that word again…)
Although he was a heretic in the Church of Baseball, that’s not the same as disliking the game itself. Ben and his friends put together a baseball team, but to signify their derision, they called themselves the “Cooperstown Idiots.”
Actually, this has nothing to do with baseball. Today is the release date for Edmund Morris’s authorized biography of Ronald Reagan. As I’m sure you’ve already heard, the book is a mess. Ronald Reagan, confident of his historical worthiness and always eager to put a proactive spin on things, authorized Mr. Morris to begin his work in the mid-1980s. Mr. Morris has unprecedented access to the president throughout his second term.
Now, 15 years later, the book is published and we find Mr. Morris thinks the best approach to Mr. Reagan’s life is not fact, but fiction. Not for nothing, but I could have told you that in 15 seconds.
On the other hand, I have sympathy for Mr. Morris. Following Ronald Reagan around for 15 years must have been very much like growing up in Cooperstown, New York. The Reagan worshippers all get a little giddy when they tell him how lucky he is to be so close to the great man. Mr. Morris, who by now was choking on his steady diet of Gipper, was no closer to finding the true Ronald Reagan than he was when he started.
As in the case of Ben’s feeling toward Cooperstown, it’s easy to see Edmund Morris’s problem when you stop to think about it. For Ronald Reagan, there is no objective truth. The truth is whatever Ronald Reagan thinks it is and “facts are stupid things.”
If Ronald Reagan believed inner-city queens drive Cadillacs and get rich off welfare, then they do. If Reagan thinks trees cause pollution, they do; if he thinks members of Hitler’s SS were victims of the Holocaust, they were.
Worse still for the biographer, other sources, the people Reagan surrounded himself with, were susceptible to the same virus. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general said, “If you’re not guilty, you wouldn’t have been arrested.” David Stockman, Reagan’s economic architect, said throwing tax breaks at the rich will benefit the poor. The list goes on and on.
So Edmund Morris tried to write a factual book about a man who learned American history from the back lots at Warner Brothers and “Death Valley Days.” He had a mob of rancid Republicans breathing down his neck, ready to break his legs if he included an inconvenient fact or unpalatable truth about their hero. So what did he do? He made stuff up. He took the Reagan crowds’ penchant for self-delusion and turns it to his advantage. “Some of this is fiction,” he says, vaguely, and when the Reaganites see something in the book that doesn’t jive with “Morning in America,” they don’t blame Reagan, they blame Morris.
That’s the thing about Ronald Reagan – just when you think he’s being stupid, he turns out to be shrewder than you ever expected.
Reagan’s Idiot
I have a friend who grew up in Cooperstown, New York, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. When he told me that, my eyes took on a far away, dreaming gaze. “Wow,” I said, “that must have been great…” My friend snorted with contempt. He disdains the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Of course, that makes sense. I visited Cooperstown once, for a day, and I thought it was great. Ben spent his entire youth trudging through the streets of a baseball shrine, where everything was baseball worship and baseball Babbitry; his only protection from all the sugary boosterism was cynicism. (Hmmm, there’s that word again…)
Although he was a heretic in the Church of Baseball, that’s not the same as disliking the game itself. Ben and his friends put together a baseball team, but to signify their derision, they called themselves the “Cooperstown Idiots.”
Actually, this has nothing to do with baseball. Today is the release date for Edmund Morris’s authorized biography of Ronald Reagan. As I’m sure you’ve already heard, the book is a mess. Ronald Reagan, confident of his historical worthiness and always eager to put a proactive spin on things, authorized Mr. Morris to begin his work in the mid-1980s. Mr. Morris has unprecedented access to the president throughout his second term.
Now, 15 years later, the book is published and we find Mr. Morris thinks the best approach to Mr. Reagan’s life is not fact, but fiction. Not for nothing, but I could have told you that in 15 seconds.
On the other hand, I have sympathy for Mr. Morris. Following Ronald Reagan around for 15 years must have been very much like growing up in Cooperstown, New York. The Reagan worshippers all get a little giddy when they tell him how lucky he is to be so close to the great man. Mr. Morris, who by now was choking on his steady diet of Gipper, was no closer to finding the true Ronald Reagan than he was when he started.
As in the case of Ben’s feeling toward Cooperstown, it’s easy to see Edmund Morris’s problem when you stop to think about it. For Ronald Reagan, there is no objective truth. The truth is whatever Ronald Reagan thinks it is and “facts are stupid things.”
If Ronald Reagan believed inner-city queens drive Cadillacs and get rich off welfare, then they do. If Reagan thinks trees cause pollution, they do; if he thinks members of Hitler’s SS were victims of the Holocaust, they were.
Worse still for the biographer, other sources, the people Reagan surrounded himself with, were susceptible to the same virus. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general said, “If you’re not guilty, you wouldn’t have been arrested.” David Stockman, Reagan’s economic architect, said throwing tax breaks at the rich will benefit the poor. The list goes on and on.
So Edmund Morris tried to write a factual book about a man who learned American history from the back lots at Warner Brothers and “Death Valley Days.” He had a mob of rancid Republicans breathing down his neck, ready to break his legs if he included an inconvenient fact or unpalatable truth about their hero. So what did he do? He made stuff up. He took the Reagan crowds’ penchant for self-delusion and turns it to his advantage. “Some of this is fiction,” he says, vaguely, and when the Reaganites see something in the book that doesn’t jive with “Morning in America,” they don’t blame Reagan, they blame Morris.
That’s the thing about Ronald Reagan – just when you think he’s being stupid, he turns out to be shrewder than you ever expected.