Letter From America: Conservatives Ruined My Sex Life!
Not to brag, but while Nancy Reagan was telling girls to "just say no," I managed to get more than a few to say yes
By Gersh Kuntzman
Newsweek International
Dec. 29/Jan. 5 issue - Ronald Reagan was the best thing that ever happened to me. Not politically, of course. I'm talking about my social life.
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Hard as it is to believe, I was a loser in high school. It wasn't just that I was unpopular. I lacked all sense of political passion. That changed when Reagan became president, back in my college years when American students were still liberal. Anything he did—from claiming that the ketchup in school lunches qualified as a vegetable to illegally funding the Nicaraguan contras—sent us scurrying to the College Green decrying the end of civilization. "U.S. out of Grenada!" I screamed when American troops invaded the tiny Caribbean island that had fallen under Marxist sway. "Bonzo goes to Bitburg!" I yelled when Reagan laid a wreath at a Nazi cemetery in West Germany. "Build homes, not bombs!" I shrieked when Reagan claimed that homeless people slept on the street "by choice."
It may sound as though I were passionate about my country but, really, I was just trying to get laid. Every "Rally on the Green" was another chance to sidle up to a comely coed and see if the anger we shared about apartheid would lead to a shared bed. Not to brag, but while Nancy Reagan was telling girls to "just say no," I managed to get more than a few to say yes.
As you might imagine, my take on Reagan's legacy is different, say, from that of the political conservatives who run our country. Reagan isn't dead yet, but the battle over his legacy is underway. Significantly, it's less about his place in history than about conservatives' efforts to control history. The latest salvo in that fight was the recent TV mini-series "The Reagans," which was supposed to air on the CBS network. Perhaps there was no way for "The Reagans" to avoid controversy. It not only starred actor James Brolin—the husband of conservative bete noire Barbra Streisand—but depicted the 40th president as the insensitive, simplistic, somewhat doddering marionette that he was. Faster than you can say "Iran-contra," conservatives threatened CBS with a boycott. For them, it's simply unpatriotic to attack Ronald Reagan—even though these same people hounded a Democratic president named Clinton for eight years as their "patriotic" duty.
The greater irony is that today's conservatives also claim to represent the common man, yet are constantly afflicted by that uniquely upper-class notion that the common man isn't smart enough to know the difference between a TV movie and a documentary on the History Channel. Of course, the issue is far bigger than Ronald Reagan's legacy, and "The Reagans" is only a tiny fragment of a much larger, much angrier dialogue between American liberals and conservatives. Many topics can't even be debated today because conservatives believe there are just some things on which everyone simply must agree, lest our nation crumble.
We see this in President George W. Bush's re-election campaign. When we liberals oppose the White House's upper-class tax cut, we're slammed as unpatriotic. When we complain about Bush's evisceration of environmental regulations, we're hit as un-American. When we point out that things aren't going so well in Iraq, we're derided as unwilling to confront America's enemies. No wonder none of the nine Democratic candidates generates any traction from their daily attacks on the president. Clearly, we're a long way from the political climate in which I matured. Conservatives have not only stolen politics, they've ruined my social life.
