Reagan the comedian

Christopher Hitchens

Washington In the memoirs of Ignazio Silone, which describe his mounting alienation from the communism of his youth, there is an

anecdote of a visit he paid to Moscow. A British trade unionist, who was in the city at the same time, had objected to some Proposed tactic of the Comintern. It

Would, he was alleged to have said, be 'dishonest'. At this, there was a roaring, Would, he was alleged to have said, be 'dishonest'. At this, there was a roaring,

boiling gale of laughter. It spread from the

eornmittee room, through the successive echelons of the Party, all across the Krem-

lin. Stalin himself was said to have heard ,,and savoured the story by suppertime. Shone wrote that, 'in judging a regime, said Togliatti who was with me, it is very

lrnPortant to know what it finds amusing'. In the last fortnight, the editorial and cartoon sections of the American press

have been behaving as though they en- IoYed Silone's moral authority. You might think, from reading the pompous and

reighteous comments, that Ronald Reagan's ieebie microphone-testing gag about bombing Russia was a revelation of the

real intentions of his regime. It was Obviously, as any careful Reagan-watcher Would admit, nothing of the kind. A man

‘%:_ho can say to the surgeons, on the day hat he cops a slug in the chest, 'I hope Y°11're all Republicans', and who can re-

peat the joke in his party's election cam-

Paign film, is quite capable of an innocuous crack about genocide and extinction. The shalnctintonY of the editorialists is mis- r_ aced. But Reagan's sense of humour, and his free and easy way with facts and i t aims, may still be symptomatic and in- 'erestiog. ifle's got away with gallows humour 'efore now, as when he told his radio et audience, concerning Vietnam, that 'we Aild pave the whole country and put Perking stripes on it and still be home by ristmas'. When the kidnappers of Patty f earst demanded the distribution of free 1(1)W surpluses to the poor of California, neagan as Governor announced that he rs,rs°„riallY hoped for an outbreak of botul-

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ut he invests these utterances with thitch an 'my shucks, just kidding' flavour let it takes a heart of stone to condemn Gib: The same things, if said by, say, n:t3rge Wallace, would sound ugly and es4tY. Somehow, Reagan manages to 1:ie this judgment. ge eape artistry is, in a sense, his political erillus.Congresswoman Patricia Schroed- d re,eently dubbed him 'the teflon Presi- Join because ,-,ecause he seemed to be made of fairstiek material. Here is a man who can

hol asleep during an audience with his iness the Pope, and get away with it. Here is a man who can say, in 1982, that he didn't know there were still segregated schools in the United States. Here is a man who, in the same year, told a press conference that submarine-based missiles, such as Trident, were 'conventional type' weapons which, once launched, could be 'recalled'. Any one of these would have been enough to ruin Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford. This President just rises above them.

In fact, like the legendary Antaeus, he is somehow strengthened by each defeat. He opposed the attempt by Congress to add a cost-of-living index to the social security system. He lost. Republican television ads in the 1982 mid-term elections then showed a folksy white-haired postman delivering the new improved social security cheques to America's beloved senior citizens. 'Pres- ident Reagan kept his promise to the American people,' the ad intoned. This is wizardry of a high order, which leaves the Democrats with their mouths opening and shutting like so many winded carp.

It is probably Reagan's gift for the anecdotal that gets him the benefit of the doubt. Like most people, he generalises from personal experience, including the personal experience of rumour. Thus the story about Medicare paying for sex- change operations (`This one I'm, sure will

wish more people wanted to get into o

touch your heart'). Thus the tales about unemployed workers buying vodka with their food stamps. Thus his announced conviction, reminiscent of saloon bar phi- losophers everywhere, that 'if you are a slum dweller, you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a 20-foot bal- cony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and play room, and the rent begins at 113 and that includes utilities.' I choose just three of the many Reagan assertions which have been checked out in detail and found to be quite baseless. From the habit of half-humorous exaggeration comes the more reprehensible practice of falsification and slander. A fair example is his sly assertion, two years ago, that the nuclear freeze was first proposed by Leonid Brezhnev. The President had every reason to know that the nuclear freeze had first been proposed by Mark Hatfield, a Republican Senator. In 1980, Reagan pointlessly accused Jimmy Carter of 'open- ing his campaign down in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan', an accusation that would have been meaningless even if it were true.

The President's few lapses from bonho- mie have occurred when he is challenged on points like this. Concerning the 'bomb Russia' gaffe, he stupidly replied: 'Isn't it funny? If the press had kept their mouth shut no one would have known I said it.' This from the 'great communicator', who owes so much to the indulgence of the mass media even if he doesn't know a tautology when he sees one. In February 1982, asked by journalist Bruce Drake to account for some earlier statements, he became agi- tated. 'You don't really want to get into those mistakes you said that I made the last time, do you? I'd like you to know that the documentation proves that the score was five to one in my favour. I was right on five of them and I have the documentation with me.' Patient scribes later asked the White House for the 'documentation', but were met with a refusal. Even his famous line, 'There you go again', which is supposed to have lost Jimmy Carter the 1980 election, was made in response to Carter's factually correct assertion that Reagan had opposed Medicare in 1965..

So it goes. 'Governor, do you think homosexuals should be barred from public office in the United States?' Certainly they should be barred from the department of beaches and parks.' Just kidding. 'We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.' Whatsamatter, cantcha take a joke?

As one watched the orgiastic jingoism of the Republican Convention, one go the queasy feeling that many of Ronald Reagan's audience don't even think he is joking. They agree, quite literally, with every word he says. Tip O'Neill is mistaken when he says that Reagan finds nuclear war funny. The problem is not that he finds it humorous (after all, Stanley Kubrick milked it for laughs and became a liberal hero) but that he doesn't take it seriously.