The following is a piece I wrote for a local radio station regarding the late President Reagan's funeral in June of 2004.
June 2004
Being an Understanding
of the
Reagan State Funeral
“THINGS I SEE”
An anonymous writer once opined, positively on the human condition,”…it’s an ill wind that blows no good…” . So said, a cold wind blew out of Germany in the 16th century reforming nothing, sewing the seeds of the American revolutionary continuum, a violent mid-wife for a constitutionally directed Republican democracy, publicly celebrated virtues of civic militarism, and setting the funeral cortege of Ronald Wilson Reagan on its inevitable path down Pennsylvania Avenue, the Protestant Revolution.
It has ever been that the crown jewel of consensual government has been a lively tradition of civic militarism from Sparta, Republican Rome, Great Britain, to the present American continuum. The slow relentless tread of booted feet, moving to a measured called cadence are reminders to the polity of its collective will and strength; it evokes a common cultural memory rooted in the best of its past as it ponders dimly perceived futures fraught with challenge, danger and always uncertainty. And as a measured called cadence it is nakedly unambiguous as to its meaning, a warning to the world, whether in triumph or funeral processional,“…mankind, enemies in War, in Peace, Friends…”.
In the annals of Rome, from Livy to the “Twelve Caesars”, a “triumph” was a ritualized formal victory procession. In this spectacle one could see and vicariously be a part of all of those elements that contributed to that occasion. Allies and the vanquished in the processional were publicly viewed all along the parade route. In as much as a triumph was granted to a living conquering general [Imperator] it was not altogether unheard of that a triumph was granted posthumously to a fallen general. The phrase of Roman parents and mothers to departing sons: “…come home to us carried on your shield or borne upon it…” had a stark finality and simplicity to it that is not easily acceptable in today’s culture of equivocation and the draw, pristine in its clarity, victory or death; one sees the funeral of Ronald Reagan as a triumph.
From the temple of Jupiter Cunctator, patron of the city of Republican Rome, to the National Cathedral is a straight line of 2000 years, yesterday. So as the Pontifex Maximus would intone,
“…sic transit gloria mundi…” [so passes the glory of the world] the words of Dame Thatcher, evocative of a bygone Churchill, echo with simple grace, elegance and prescience of the American condition:
…he freed the slaves of Communism…”. In the parade of vanquished enemies, 21st century Americans see the silent respect paid by a Gorbachev at the catafalque. In the ecstatic and not altogether objective immediacy of the present Gorbachev will be seen as the vanquished enemy, some object of mild ridicule, but most certainly as a non-entity of historical curiosity. The light of the historian shall some day deal with him more magnanimously and show of him a more balanced perspective. In any contested feats of arms there are the vanquished. In the victory of Ronald Reagan [the American people] over Godless Soviet Communism there had to be a unique leader with that incomparable gift of the spirit, humility, for there to be a vanquished and a victory. In this instance, any alternative is unthinkable.
In the last ritualized goodbye of the funeral service, the White Anglo Saxon variant of the Protestant Revolution recognized, by their respective turns, the individual Judaeo-Christian exercises of the faith communities of the nation in their representatives attendant. No other tradition but that could have accomplished such as the Revolution let alone that respectful instance in our National Cathedral. It is that tradition that allows of the Muslim an Imam to be present at the triumph, arguably a friend demonstrably an enemy, though treated civilly with a cold indifference. The Muslim is an alien in an alien land. He was not there at the founding and did not sew, yet expects to stand apart and reap. In the valley that is called “Forge” he left no arms, he left no hands, he left no legs; he left no sons. We settled once and for all time the moral evil and legal issue of general slavery; a year after Appomatox Court House, his ancestors were taking, buying and selling slaves of all colors, sexes and conditions from eastern Europe, Constantinople, to the Horn of Africa; his seed continues so to this day. No Muslim went up Suribachi in the swirling blizzard of splattered brains, bloody matted hair streaming entrails and shattered bones that was Iwo Jima; he froze not in the Ardennes or stood damned alone and forgotten at Bastogne; not did he man death’s watch in “Looking Glass”. He came here unbidden, unasked for and is not welcome.
We do rightly and properly view him with suspicion. In the midst of our National Cathedral we are now set upon a war of cultures for our very own survival. The Muslim in this triumph and funeral shall answer to and for all of these things clearly, with simplicity and without equivocation, or ” We” shall answer them for him; this is not Damascus.
Novus Ordo Seclorum
We are “Romans”; we are New Rome. We are the “new order of the world”. President Reagan understood this with translucent simplicity, “…Mister Gorbachev tear down this wall…”. Anti-Americans from within and from without, and those unforgivably ignorant often cite Rome as a warning and a model, both of our purported imperialism and intended collapse. He understood that the threats to American preeminence were more dreadfully mortal on the 4th of July 1776, than ever they were on his first inauguration. The differences that some two centuries demonstrated to him were not results of imperial over reach on the outside, but of something that was happening and that Americans were witnessing on the inside.
Born free, from colonial times onwards, he recognized that Americans rarely doubted that their libertarian institutions offered a generalized template for human happiness and material prosperity. As Americans moved into capitalism less and less wealth came to be inherited; more than less, good luck was the confluence of disciplined application with opportunity resulting in more and more people holding wealth in resources and instruments that rose more rapidly in value than in the previous orthodoxy. He knew that capitalism had the best chance of producing a classless society in practical terms. What President Reagan knew was that centrally planned economies would inevitably result in societies with self perpetuating elites of apparatchiki, giving rise to his historically famous phrase, “…evil empire…”. Reagan understood that libertarian politics and the soundness of our domestic economy indissolubly linked at home and abroad were based on three fundamental truths:
--U.S. foreign policy was a basic expression created by the architecture of domestically generated imperatives.
-- Economic expansion abroad was best accomplished through open world markets to trade and foreign investment and is absolutely necessary as a precondition of AmericaÂ’s domestic well being and therefore is the nexus of American strategy.
--The cause of peace was best served by the United States occupying a position of unchallenged global dominance.
Likened unto earlier Romans before him, he knew Roman virtue* and what it was to be a Roman [American], why it was immeasurably better than any alternatives, and why our culture had to be
victorious.
*Note to reader—
Virtue is a masculine attribute only. Its root is found in the Roman Latin word “vir”, which means “Man”. Virtue is the noun descriptive of the sum of all of those ineffable attributes that we normally associate with manhood:
srength, perseverance, implacability in the face of an enemy, courage both moral and physical, honor, and commitment
As it is used today its meaning is entirely heretic and without its primitive meanings. The use of the word
“virtue” today would be greeted with amusement if not outright derision by a Roman. There is no such phrase as, "...a virtuous woman...", it is a contradiction in terms.
Anchor;s Away/Semper Fi
CPO Bull
