Diary Entry (2-23-2025)

Ronald Reagan, O.C.D., Flying Cats and Rain

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Portland, Ore

8:07am

~

Five days left of February. The older I get, the faster the days blur by. It’s like some demonic, existential race to Death. But: It’s The Grand Inevitability for every single one of us, which feels both terrifying but also wildly calming. (Do you really want to live forever? Don’t you want this absurd human experience to end at some point?)

Britney is out of town for five days. I dropped her off at the airport yesterday. Then I met up with my oldest friend in Portland who I am trying to convince to start a Substack. (She focuses on spiritual healing, women’s issues and recovery topics. I think she’d be a hit on Substack.)

Once home—ready to relax after a busy week of writing and dog-walking—I laid down on the couch and, eventually, fell asleep. When I awoke I drank some black non-caffeinated tea, watched the rain outside, cleaned up the kitchen a little, and then went on a fairly windy, slightly rainy walk for an hour all over my neighborhood ending up where I always do: Reed College campus, which is beautiful, especially when the rain is falling.

There’s something romantic to me about the rain. I feel similar to the lead character in Woody Allen’s 2012 film, Midnight in Paris, where an aspiring author wanders around Paris in the rain and enters a wormhole at midnight into 1920s Paris, befriending Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Earnest Hemingway. (Fun movie.)

For a while I walked in silence, but after some time I put my ear buds in and continued listening to the new Max Boot Ronald Reagan biography via Audible. I’ve always wanted to know more about Reagan, especially compared to contemporary times and Donald Trump. Reagan—at the time, in the 80s, seen as a far-right politician—has been said, by some, to now, by today’s standards, seem pretty rational and even “liberal.”

I trust the Boot biography because at the end of his introduction Boot spends a few paragraphs explaining that he is not trying to persuade anyone of anything; he is neither pro- nor anti-Reagan; he has no political agenda; he is a former Conservative who claims he is now an Independent. On Audible the many reviews were generally very good and the book is charged as “balanced and fair.” And indeed, now about 1/3^rd of the way through the behemoth, he always gives the pros and cons of Reagan in equal measure.

The above reality makes me miss old-school serious, more or less “objective” books and journalism. I say “objective” in quotes because, of course, we all being human, we all, even the most honest and balanced of us, have some bias. But leaning into balance and showing your bias cards up front is much more honest than both sides today claiming total objectivity and then spewing their biased ideological bullshit on every page.

In the Reagan biography I am up to about 1964, when Reagan campaigned for the vile, extremist Barry Goldwater and did the famous “Time for Choosing” speech. Reagan had morphed from staunch New Deal FDR Democrat all his life to slowly phasing out of that in the 1950s and into Conservative hard-right anticommunism during the Cold War.

Generally speaking, from what I have read so far, here are some basic points to consider.

1. Reagan was truly a good man personally (kind, thoughtful, giving, compassionate) but conveniently forgot human suffering when it came to many of his ideas and policies. He was also a terrible father, a well-intention, toxically-positive, emotionally superficial and detached man who could not connect with his kids and who favored his wife over his own spawn.

2. Reagan, unlike Trump, grew up in a very poor family. The only reason he made it to college (not a fancy one) was via a partial scholarship and working various jobs throughout college.

3. Much of Reagan’s success in Hollywood stemmed not so much from raw talent (of which he had some but not a lot) but from his good looks, ambition, luck and connections.

4. Reagan became first a sports radio announcer after college, then an actor in films, then a president of SAG (Screen Actors’ Guild) negotiating with unions in the film industry, then a TV guy, then a speaker for General Electric Theatre where he traveled the country giving passionate, fiery speeches about labor unions and communism, and then a solo political speaker, which led him to Goldwater, the far-right Conservative Party (which stole racist Southern Democrats and switched the parties in 1964 over Civil Rights), and then a politician running for governor of California in 1966 (ironically).

*(The Republican Party had historically been the Party of Lincoln: Pro-civil rights, etc. That started to change during the Great Depression when Black Americans started moving to the Democrats under FDR. In 1964, when Goldwater and Republicans opposed Black Civil Rights, they joined with racist Southern Dixiecrats and formed the New Right, whereas the Democrats gained northern Republicans and moderates and became, for the first time, the Party of Civil Rights. Though LBJ (during his Great Society period) passed the Voting Rights Act of 1964/65 with bipartisan support in congress. But before 1964 historically the Democratic Party had not been the party supporting Blacks and other minorities.)

5. Though Reagan did have a past which included a few friendships with Black people, and though his parents were rock-ribbed New Deal Northern Democrats, and though he never overtly said anything negative in public about Black people, he was terrible on Civil Rights. He, along with Goldwater, believed that Black Civil Rights in the South impinged on white property rights and white rights in general. Now that is insane.) *(In recent times a White House recording was released with Reagan referring to Africans as “monkeys.”)

6. Reagan lied, exaggerated, misquoted, worried not about facts and generally bullshitted his way through many speeches. He had a strong imagination and a tentative, sometimes squirrely grasp on reality. He had some belief in conspiracy theory, John Birch Society racist tropes, and even astrology. When he entered politics in 1966 as a governor he knew next to nothing about politics. He could be paranoid, thinking Democrats were on the hunt to make America communist. He made up whole cloth quotes he misattributed to Lenin, Marx, etc. He was, I realized, an actor first and foremost; an artist. In this and some other ways he is very similar to Trump.

7. And yet by all accounts on a personal level he was always kind to all, men and women, white, Black or any other race. His political views often sliced against his personal views. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance. He called himself a family man and espoused “family values” but he had been divorced to a suicidal woman, partially rejected his two kids from the first marriage, and ignored all his kids when three out of four of them got into serious trouble including alcoholism, suicidal tendencies, mafia connections, you name it. He kept this under wraps and acted the family man. But in truth he cared much more about his wife Nancy than about his own kids. He was kind but dispassionate with people; polite but superficial; nice but not genuinely empathetic. He rarely admitted when he was wrong.

8. *Update 2-24-25: I am now up to 1976. As two-term governor of California he made many rookie mistakes. (Bordered by Pat Brown before him and Brown’s son Jerry after.) He lied and made things up, as before. He regretted some of the choices he made. That said, in generally he was, ironically, a pretty “progressive” governor, minus the hardcore treatment of Berkeley student radicals and protestors. He: Did more to legalize and expand abortion rights to women than any politician prior. He went back on his previous rejection of the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 which banned housing discrimination based on race, etc. (Meaning he had originally rejected it but then supported it and helped it pass.) He was pro-environment and EPA. He increased the state budget. He even provided a California Supreme Court Justice who dissolved the death penalty in the state in 1972. He supported gun control, including background checks! Most of his legislation was highly bipartisan. And of course later, when be became president in the 1980s, he’d shifted much farther to the right.

~

I enjoyed the house to myself while already missing my wife. Our routines. I’d woken up this morning at 5:30 am to see our massive Siamese cat, Kitty Bear, literally in midair, floating above me like some demented, ludicrous dream. He was hungry, of course. As was Klaus, his “brother,” and already I heard my boy, Lucius, the elder of the clan, a Tuxedo, crying.

I thought right away of the strange fact that, at the very end of March, we’re finally moving to Spain. Madrid. After almost two years of thinking about it, discussing it, planning it, theorizing about it, doing all the mad Kafkian paperwork, etc etc. Now we’re about to actually go in five short weeks. We have a lot to do between now and then. I can actually picture us there. What was once a mysterious foggy idea has morphed into a real life fuzzy picture of reality. I yearn to be outside the United States. Not because of Trump—if anything I think leaving when your fellows need you is cowardly—but because it’s Our Dream. I want to know what it’s like to live as an ex-pat, to see American outside of America. Sure, I’ve done plenty of international travel, but living outside the country is a different beast. I want to feel foreign. I want to look back over my shoulder at The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave and understand it from a new perspective. From outside of it rather than inside.

So I ripped the covers off, jumped out of bed, yawned, stretched, threw clothes on, peed, made my usual Irish Breakfast tea, opened some of the blinds, and sat for fifteen minutes in silence before starting in on the Boot biography again. (I am obsessed with this book. When I obsess over a book this way it means I have to read it all the way through and fast. I don’t make the rules; this is dictated by my nature.)

My “harm O.C.D.”—the cognitive, recursive, tautological Insane Machine in my head—has been hit or miss lately. Sometimes it’s not too bad. Lately it’s been easier, generally speaking, to “turn down the volume” on it, which more or less means not listening to it as often and, when crazy, intrusive thoughts do arise (as they always inevitably do), of noting that the thoughts are there and then gently letting them go and returning to the present moment. Sometimes I have to do this dozens, even hundreds of times. Other days it’s easier. Listening to an engaging book I genuinely enjoy helps; it distracts me. (Really what I need is probably Cognitive Behavioral Therapy but I can’t get my ass in gear to just do it.) *(Yes, I take medication, Prozac, and yes, it helps.)

I have learned something obvious over time: When my anxiety is up—when my wife and I are fighting; when we were going through the Spain immigration process, etc—the O.C.D. is worse. This was made extra clear to me lately around contemporary Trumpian-focused politics. When I post a lot about current politics, especially in any specific kind of way (which I admit I do too often), or when I even listen to political news podcasts (which I do often, usually) my anxiety goes up…which means my O.C.D., which is all mental, not physical) goes up alongside it.

So the last few days I haven’t listened to any political news podcasts or any podcasts at all. I’ve posted about politics but criticizing both sides and only on Notes and not paying that much attention to it. (And I lock the comments for paid only subscribers.) Meanwhile I’ve been plowing through this Reagan biography. And guess what: My anxiety and O.C.D. have significantly lessened. I feel much calmer. It’s a superior way to live, no doubt about it. We tend to hold on to the illusion that, if we obsess and focus exclusively on politics—especially now—and yell at people online, that somehow means we have control over what happens, or that we’re somehow making a difference. But of course we’re not. That’s all fantasy. In truth we’re just spending way too much time online falling into the dumb trap of tribal outrage. If anything, this makes us all dumber, less connected, more divided and more anxious.

Anyway, I switched from the Boot biography last night to the Kafka biography I’ve been reading, also new, by Reiner Stach. (Excellent so far.) I needed a physical book to read while in bed before sleep. I read for a while and then turned the lights off and passed out. Klaus did not sleep on me which made me sad. But he did force me to spread my legs into an uncomfortable V-shape so he could rest between them. Kitty Bear slept at the foot of the bed, as always. Lucius slept in the other room, his usual routine.

At 5:30, as you know, I was awakened by a flying Siamese cat.