Reagan is gone, of course. Has the America that elected him gone, too?
By John Derbyshire, contributing editor of National Review
Who called you?
The guy who called me was a friend, an old colleague from my Wall Street days. Not a journalist, not a Cuban-American, not even a political person; the only thing I could say in that regard about Wally is that, after several years' acquaintance, I feel fairly sure he votes Republican most of the
time. Wally called about nine, while I was sleeping in after a late night. "They took the little kid," he said. "Five o'clock in the expletive morning. Check it out. The TV's showing pictures of them taking him, a SWAT team with expletive automatic weapons. There are pictures. Check
it out. Those bastards."
I threw some clothes on, went downstairs and put on the TV. Almost the first thing I saw was The Picture — you know the one. I couldn't believe it. I stared at it. It went away. There were some talking heads, some shots of street scenes — a crowd waving flags, an angry man shouting. I
waited and channel-surfed, knowing that The Picture would soon come back. When it did I hit the digital memo button on my remote, to freeze the screen at it. The fisherman; the child; the G-man, the gun. I stared and stared at it, thinking the same thing you thought: This is America?
The rest of my family — it had been a late night for all of us — began to appear. Little Nellie, seven years old: "What's the matter, Daddy? Why are you watching TV?" I told her something important was happening in the world. Watching with me, she soon picked up the idea. "Oh,
they took the little boy! Is he happy?" I said I thought he was probably not very happy right now. My wife came down. I showed her The Picture from the TV's digital memory. See what they did? Nellie: "Oh! Are they going to shoot him?" I said that, no, they were not going to shoot him;
they just wanted to make everybody afraid so they could take the little boy away without anyone trying to stop them. It clarifies the thoughts wonderfully, having to explain things to small children.
Later, Administration officials began to appear in between the street scenes and the talking heads. They were all legality: the Law, the Law. Janet Reno explained to us, speaking very slowly as if we ourselves were all six years old, that the G-man's gun in The Picture was not actually pointing
at the child, and that the G-man did not have his finger on the trigger. I suppose we were meant to think: ah, that's all right, then. Eventually the President, doing his very lifelike simulation of a serious person. The Law, The Law, proper process, The Law. The same Law, presumably, he is about to
be debarred from practicing, for having brazenly lied in a duly constituted court of . . . The Law. Watching him, I reflected that no single emotion can be maintained for very long. Grief becomes quiet sadness; hate becomes pity; anger becomes regret. And what happens to disgust, when you can feel
disgust no longer? It becomes despair, cold despair. Will he get away with this, too? Will they, those very clever people he surrounds himself with, all those graduates from tony law schools, will they find a way to spin even this into good poll numbers? Why does fortune smile on people like them?
Is God mocked, after all?
The talking heads got more heavyweight as the morning went on. There was Newt Gingrich, who I would have been happy to see tarred and feathered a couple of years ago for his incompetence as a politician, but who has now found his true vocation as a TV interviewer. There was Morton Kondracke, a
man who cannot open his mouth without saying something sensible. Much discussion about the underlying politics and diplomacy. General agreement that Castro must have threatened another Mariel boatlift of lunatics and criminals if Clinton & Co. didn't do things the Castro way.
The notion that the U.S. might be in a position to do a little threatening of our own seems not to cross anybody's mind nowadays — or at least, crosses minds only in relation to Iraq and Yugoslavia — far away places that have not taken the trouble to flatter left-wing congresspersons
with carefully-orchestrated visits, sumptuous banquets, bogus statistics (100 per cent literacy! universal health care!) and Potemkin villages.
Sr. Castro, any action on your part to embarrass or inconvenience the U.S.A. will be met with an open-ended campaign of aerial attack — the relentless day-by-day annihilation of all your military and industrial assets, the flattening of your barracks, the mining of your harbors ...
What on earth is the point of being a great power if you are going to allow a piece of vermin like Castro to poke his finger in your eye? For 40 years!? One of the talking heads pointed out — surely correctly — that Ronald Reagan would have said loud and plain: "This child is not
going back to Cuba, and that's that."
Ronald Reagan is gone, of course. Has the America that elected him gone, too? Let it not be said! The antidote to despair is, of course, hope. We can hope — we cannot be sure, in these soft and distracted times, when the nation is stupefied, tranquilized, by wealth and frivolity, but we can
hope — that the American public's threshold of tolerance for gross abuses of power by the federal government might finally have been passed.
Looking again at The Picture, I cannot believe that this will be a nine-day wonder. As torpid, as glutted and blubbery as we are with the fruits of prosperity and freedom, surely we cannot fail to be stirred by that? Yes: this is America. And the first principle of American governance is the
separation of powers. Our Executive has had its say, has done what it has done. Now let us hear from our legislators and our judges. And, by God, let them hear from US.
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