he world took a long, mournful pause, or perhaps a quiet vacation, when Ronald Reagan passed away of natural (or supernatural) causes June 5, after a long bout with Alzheimer's that apparently plagued him all his life. He was ancient.

Despite the week of funeral processions, not all machinations in America stopped, as grief-stricken politicians began the work of "tidying up" the Reagan legacy as president of the United States of America, 1981-1988, and a phantom on the political scene ever since.

A week of remembrance has reminded us frequently of Reagan's strong moral values, his deep faith, his dedication to democracy, how he made it "okay" to be a "patriot," and that charming way he had of ignoring important questions. Mostly forgotten are Reagan's fundamentalist cow-towing, his close-minded prejudices, his fascistic pursuit of global democracy, the mania of conformity he embraced, and how the poor dangled on the shit stick for the entire duration of his reign. All minor changes in the book of American history rewritten in the wake of the president's death.

A proponent of America as the Enforcer, Reagan ran up a national deficit in the trillions of dollars chasing military superiority, even though our nearest rival, Russia, had no hopes of keeping up. Conservatives point to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had begun happening long before, as proof Reagan's policy was a success, which is quite like saying taking out six mortgages on your house is worth it if your neighbor can no longer afford his house payments.

The military build-up came with a price, of course, as social programs were mauled as if by a big Libertarian bear. Welfare slashed, minimum wage ignored for years, leading to a growing body of working men and women living beneath the poverty line, and don't make anyone piss themselves laughing by asking about school funding and the arts. So important was the stealth bomber the president even slashed the runaway costs of school free lunch programs, and made ketchup a vegetable to meet national health requirements.

Blind to any problem created after communism, Reagan led a government effort to ignore the AIDS crisis until it had ravaged whole communities and helped conservatives who believed AIDS a homosexual plague carried on by promiscuity remain comfortably ignorant. A wise decision, since avoiding spending anything to save American lives allowed the purchase of the Patriot missile, which didn't work, and of course allowed him to piggy bank money for his masterpiece: Star Wars, a cheeky name for his imaginative laser defense system that would stop "just about" every nuclear missile aimed at the United States and give us real tactical superiority over Russia should a Roland Emmerich movie ever occur here. But don't worry, nostalgias—the current president hasn't given up on the fantasy.

But we shouldn't, however, forget Reagan the man. The wealth of misinformation he gave us entertained people everywhere. According to Reagan, trees were bad for the environment, homeless people preferred living on the streets, hired mercenaries fighting for right-wing causes were "freedom fighters," and important decisions betraying your own political ideological statements weren't worth remembering. Lest we forget, he also expanded presidential powers into strikebusting by firing the air traffic controllers like a $400,000 a year Pinkerton.

Even as the sorrow winds up for America, text book manufacturers are busy as we speak preparing the Reagan legacy for the next generation of leaders.

According to Shouton-Felix's Greg Ward, a history book editor: "I think we've decided to skip all the irrelevant material from 1981-1988, people only seem to remember The A-Team and New Wave music from the decade anyway. We think Reagan's presidency is best represented by a full-page headshot of the president, with the caption: 'Win one for the Gipper!'"

he death of former president Ronald Reagan was followed by a week-long awkwardness as non-conservatives, especially the left-leaning and liberal-slanted individuals across the nation, searched for something socially acceptable to say about the late Californian.

The normal mixed feelings of seeing a longtime political adversary take a dirt nap were compounded by the unrelenting, merciless coverage of sunny-side up Reagan throughout the week since his death on June 5. For liberals, who had previously been pouring on the rancor against two-dimensional Reaganite George W. Bush and his re-election campaign, the "sudden" death of the 93-year-old ex-president and conservative icon created an uncomfortable air for expressing their views of the modern political climate, and the right-wing politics inherited from Reagan’s administration.

Daniel Kirkland, a talk show on the left-wing radio network Air America, summed up the difficulty of liberal commentary in the past week.

"You hate to see anybody die, regardless of their politics," said Kirkland, "but if Muhammad Ali died, and everyone was going around pretending he won every boxing match when he stepped into the ring, you’d start to feel the urge to remind everyone about the losses. Why does someone have to all of a sudden be perfect just because they died?"

Even the usual safe-havens for liberal free speech have felt the pressure to be nice during the funeral hoopla, and the pressure has begun to show.

"You’d think God himself died," grumbled Tina Crowley, a Green Party campaign organizer in Trenton, New Jersey. "Nobody here has even wanted to talk about politics all this week. And we’re the friggin’ Green Party. Some people were even saying some nice things about Reagan here, it was enough to drive you batshit. Like ’Maybe James Watt didn’t intend to do all that environmental damage.’ Yeah, that’s possible."

Professor of Sociology Deatria Lumley experienced the same difficulties with the ex-president’s death.

"Separating a man from his work is easy outside politics, but becomes all the more impossible when that man was a president," said Lumley. "He may have been a nice guy in his private life, but as someone who works with deteriorating underclasses and witnessing first hand the cuts to social programs and the damage it does, myself and people in my profession find it difficult to conform to social expectations of funeral etiquette."

Adding her own thoughts on Reagan, Lumley complimented him, "The man didn’t blow us up, no matter how close we might have come. It keeps me up at night thinking about just how close."

Other liberal mourners included public defender Jacob Howitzer: "He always gave us a lot of laughs. Not directly, or at least I guess he didn’t realize it was funny. Phil Hartman, he did a cool Reagan impression on Saturday Night Live." Howitzer added: "I miss him, I really do. Hartman was a genius."

Another mourner, leaflet distributor Bryan Forbes: "He had nice hair."

Folk concert organizer and self-described "Earth Mother" Loretta Melbourne: "Fuck it. He was a prick. Call me a cold bitch, I just plain didn’t like him."

That guy thought he was so smart. If you're wondering who I'm talking about, pause a second to read the title of this column, up above. You with us now? Good. Now: Who wears their hair like that? Assholes, that's who. Only an asshole could pull off the "I'm so brilliant I don't have time to comb my hair or make an appointment at SuperCuts" look. Get over yourself, buddy. You wouldn't be fooling any of us if you had a crew cut. Crew cuts are like nature's shorthand for "dipshit." Smart of Einsteen to figure out the haircut ruse, I'll give him that but little else. And what's with all that relativity mumbo-jumbo? Any loudmouth off the street can make up some kind of magic formula and get praised for it, as long as he knows how to intimidate people and doesn't ever back down. Don't believe me? Fine, Q=xW34. Not so hard, is it? Now line up to kiss my ass, I'm the new genius on the block.

And let's not forget Mother Theresa and her whole ego-trip. "Oh, look at me in my cute little hat! I'm so fucking wonderful and giving! I help the poor with no thought of my own gain!" What a bitch.

And what about that Newton? Overrated. Those fig cookies suck hard. There, I've said it, somebody had to. Those things are so dry I bet if you added a drop of water they'd blow up to the size of an air mattress. Maybe that's what they're for, I don't know. I don't claim to be on the cutting edge of these matters. That does seem to be a lot of air mattresses to sell in one package, though. At the grocery store no less. Maybe if you were shopping for a whole commune in need of temporary bedding it would make sense, but there can't be that many of those people out there. Maybe there are. The thought kind of scares me, frankly.

If it turns out I've eaten over 30 air mattresses that are just waiting to inflate the next time I take a sip of water, somebody's going to be hearing from my lawyer. You can count on that. As a matter of fact, I'm leaving a note for my lawyer now in case the mass-inflation kills me, which it likely might. I don't want him to have to guess at what my last wishes would have been. Litigate, motherfucker! I don't pay you to look good in that suit. (Nice suit, by the way.)

While I'm at it, I'm going to leave a note for my chef as well. Don't want that smarmy bastard cooking my liver or anything untoward like that after I'm gone, just because I didn't leave behind a note specifically forbidding it. That guy has a hungry look in his eyes.

Who else was an asshole?

Did I mention Mother Theresa? God, she really sets me off. Sure, most of you out there in la la land probably buy into the cult of personality that says she was the greatest thing since shit on toast. And I'm sure some of those homeless orphans thought so when she was giving them backrubs and buying them big-screen TVs and what have you. But did any of you true believers out there ever play ping-pong with this piece of work? I didn't think so. Mother Theresa had a ping-pong mean streak as wide as Cecil Fielder's ass. You didn't dare ace a serve past that big-knuckled monster unless you wanted to see what one of those paddles could do to your tender butt-flesh. All those kids at the orphanage knew the unwritten rule: you let the Mother pad out her table tennis win streak if you want your porridge tonight, bucko.

Truth be told, I'm not that fond of Aristotle either, but that's a column for another day.

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