President Reagan’s Farewell Address

“Gimme that ol’ time religion” with its thumping music and its sportive apostasy, kept running through my head as I watched President Reagan recite his final address lines (Part I, Jan. 12).

Again he pointed upward to the shining house, or city, on a hill, i.e. heaven. But our weary priest had recited his well-worn catechism all too often. And his tone was more querulous than convincing. He climbs no hills. Perhaps his words were designed only to catch the last of the unwary, the remaining true-blue believers. Perhaps it was just an exercise in pure nostalgia.

And perhaps he should have left us with only that--the shining city as stand-in for the sunset our hero and heroine now ride into--but he didn’t. He went querulously on to excuses, redrafted as boasts, for his performance as President. What he had done, in summary, was to propagandize a threat which didn’t exist, to build a war machine we couldn’t afford and which endangered the lives and health of Americans it was designed to “protect,” which reduced industrial America to second or third place in the world and which exacerbated the dislocations in a society increasingly run for an irresponsible elite.

But the boasts were real enough: His Administration has created 19 million jobs--”We’ve learned to service Japanese cars,” it’s said--and we are respected around the world--meaning our warships and gunships can anywhere and threaten anyone, other than one of the great powers.

Of course he is defensive. Prof. Paul Kennedy’s perceptive book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” is available somewhere in the White House, and it begs for an answer. We are dismantling our power while seeming to build it up exactly as the British, Spanish, Dutch, etc. did before us, writes Kennedy. In the face of these ineluctables Reagan’s assurance that present policies are to continue is hardly a reassurance. Our spree is over. It’s Monday morning in America.

DAVID ALAN MUNRO

Laguna Beach