I sketched an appreciation of the Gipper meant to inform and provoke a general audience . It did generate numerous indignant responses from a NYC centrist Democratic talk-radio guy. Had I wanted to provoke our porcher friends I would said more about Carter’s malaise, “crisis of confidence” speech, and I would have compared FDR and Reagan on their appreciation of the military-industrial complex, which led to the defeat of the two worst ideological regimes ever and never was the cause of a “garrison state” in our country. Had I wanted to provoke a Solzhenitsyn fan, I would have said Reagan disproved the dire prediction of the Harvard Address. Had I wanted to agree with the Porchers, I would have said that Reagan’s whipping of inflation and disinclination to ask the American people to sacrifice in any way might have been a cause of an irresponsible meritocracy’s generation of increasingly reckless addiction to endless, virtually painless growth. I have to write a more serious appreciation of Reagan sometime soon, and I do value your “input.”
