funerals

We must like funerals. Six Feet Under just started another season. Reagan's send-off has gotten lots of coverage.

I am old enough to vividly remember the television coverage of Kennedy's death -- I once, many years ago, worked with a man who said he only dated women who remembered that dark event. Anybody younger was too young.

So while we have not had many state funerals since, I think I must have looked at some of the coverage this week curious about how Reagan's was carried out.

Watching old videos of Reagan reminded me of the intense feelings I had in the 1980s about him and his presidency, feelings that have cooled down a bit over time. Rest in peace, I thought, to his family and to him.

He was no great saint, and I am too partisan and too of this time to think of him as one of the great American presidents. Perhaps, in addition to still disagreeing with his policies, I blame him for the whole gang of further right winged folk that he encouraged in American politics. Historians and folks in the future will weigh the evidence better than me.

There is this trend in my lifetime for Republicans to become more conservative. When Nixon was president, I thought he was too conservative. When Reagan was elected (and I do have this standard of understanding about presidential potential. I thought a few years before his election that he would never be elected. Now when somebody says, Can you believe that so-in-so could be elected president? I respond, , Yes, I do. Reagan got elected)...when Reagan was elected, I thought he was too conservative. He made Nixon look quite liberal. When Gingrich and company took over the Congress, I thought they were much more conservative. But now we have GW Bush, Frist and DeLay.

Are liberals more liberal? Some are. But there has also been within the Democratic Party counterweights to its liberalism (Carter and Clinton's presidencies point to that).