Reagan and AIDS
Jun. 6th, 2004 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmRonald Reagan didn't say the word AIDS in a speech to the public until 1987. That this sin of omission is being recommitted in the endless coverage of his legacy that refuses to note this is appalling to me. He was our first AIDS-time president. And what he didn't do, and the vitriol with which he was reviled for it, is as critical to today's political and social landscape as anything else.
I don't think he was as craven as our current leaders (words I never thought I'd say). But people died because of him and the rhetoric he and his supporters spewed and perpetuated. In the 80s it was a perfectly normal idea that some AIDS patients were innocent -- meaning that many were not. That was fucking appalling; it remains fucking appalling.
It is the nature of being president that all of them must at some point take responsibility for terrible things. For people that were once here and are no more.
But it should never have happened like that.
And while he was an old man, with Alzheimers, and there may well not have been much of a point in being angry anymore, I can't believe that we are somehow supposed to forget that we were.
And while we're quoting Reagan in the comments -- read this folks: http://www.livejournal.com/users/insomnia/422922.html?mode=reply
I don't think he was as craven as our current leaders (words I never thought I'd say). But people died because of him and the rhetoric he and his supporters spewed and perpetuated. In the 80s it was a perfectly normal idea that some AIDS patients were innocent -- meaning that many were not. That was fucking appalling; it remains fucking appalling.
It is the nature of being president that all of them must at some point take responsibility for terrible things. For people that were once here and are no more.
But it should never have happened like that.
And while he was an old man, with Alzheimers, and there may well not have been much of a point in being angry anymore, I can't believe that we are somehow supposed to forget that we were.
And while we're quoting Reagan in the comments -- read this folks: http://www.livejournal.com/users/insomnia/422922.html?mode=reply
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-06 01:06 am (UTC)Some of us have never forgotten, and have been disgusted for some time at the premature and undeserved political canonization he and his presidency have had conferred upon them.
And now that he's just died, after "bravely" suffering a degenerative ailment and diminishing faculties for the past several years, it will be a bit longer before anything approaching a truly critical assessment of the man and his legacy is forthcoming.