true confessions

The blogosphere is running over with tributes to our fortieth president, many of which are penned (pixelated?) by ex-liberals who, back in the day, saw Reagan as bent on bringing about the end of the world, whether by intent or by inattention. (Lileks was one.)

Well: I was not of that ilk. I voted for the Gipper back in 1984, the year that I graduated from high school.

But I do have my own shame. I don't pay much heed to special events here at Indiana University, but once back in the late 90s I went to see a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev. The love rolling off the crowd was of the same order as that extended by liberals to non-Western religious figures like the Dalai Lama. The speech itself wasn't very memorable. What little I do recall seems, in retrospect, to have been feel-good bloviating about what is now called transnational progressivism: international socialism with a big happy face.

Yet going to see Gorbachev wasn't my sin. That came a year or so later, when I consciously decided not to attend an address by Lech Walesa, who among many other things is the father of modern democratic Poland.

Any good karma from my 1984 vote is just gone.