Ronald Reagan is a false and deadly Republican God

The current crop of Republican presidential candidates has countless times invoked the name of Ronald Reagan as the standard to which they would like to return the party. “As the glorious party of Ronald Reagan” has become the obligatory mantra by which candidates hope to enter the hearts and minds of the Republican electorate by evoking a mythical, grand bygone era of hope and prosperity, a “morning in America.”

The reality of Ronald Reagan is not, however, as the model politician and leader that most Republicans worship today. The real Ronald Reagan forwarded policies that enormously increased the wealth gap between the very rich and the remainder of the population. He expanded the rate of people living in poverty with his doublespeak “trickle down” economics.

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He illegally and surreptitiously sold arms to Iran and furtively redirected the profits to fascist Central American dictators to fund and equip their death gangs. And contrary to Republican pundits, Reagan did not bring down the Soviet Union, which had been in decline for many decades by the time Reagan took over the Oval Office.

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And most of all, the ungodly Ronald Reagan functioned as the Coconspirator-In-Chief in the deaths of people infected with HIV during the early years of what became a pandemic under his so-called “watch.” Ronald Reagan should have been charged, convicted, and incarcerated for genocidal murder, rather than seen as the much-venerated pseudo-saint the Republican Party has anointed.

Evidently, Donald Trump took Reagan’s deplorable lead in Trump’s feckless and deadly response to Covid. With the four current indictments including 91 criminal charges, the Department of Justice has yet to indict Trump on what is arguably his biggest crime against the very lives of the people: his denial and failure to take appropriate action in the early days of the Covid-19 crisis.    

Whenever I hear tributes to Ronald Reagan – this mythological figure – coming from Republican stalwarts, what comes to my mind instead is a stunningly poignant quote from Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, a stage play covering the early years of AIDS in the United States: “We’re living through war, but where they’re living it’s peace time, and we’re all in the same country.”

As I hear these words reverberating in my mind, images escape from my stored memory into my consciousness of the excruciatingly long seven years into his presidency until Ronald Reagan, under whose presidency the AIDS pandemic first came to light, finally and officially publicly acknowledged the existence of the crisis.

The one and only time he publicly spoke of AIDS before 1987, except to address a few reporters’ questions, was in his first year in office when he inferred that “maybe the Lord brought down the plague [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”

I recall the vicious characterization by Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s Chief of “Communications,” who spoke for many conservatives by calling AIDS nature’s “awful retribution” that did not deserve a thorough and compassionate response, and later said: “With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.”

Uninformed and prejudicial statements coming from the White House and the halls of Congress, from the State Houses, and yes, from some houses of worship during those trying times only encouraged the ceaseless bigotry and discriminatory actions against people with HIV, including against Ryan White, a young HIV-positive boy with hemophilia who posed virtually no risk to his classmates, but his middle school administrators expelled him from school nonetheless; all of this while the AIDS Project patchwork quilt expanded exponentially day-by-day. Mourning in America and around the world, indeed.

I recall the day a close friend of mine, a young man of 23, disclosed to me that he tested HIV-positive and that early signs of disease had already begun to appear. I was extremely upset. Soon after he told me, I needed to clear my head, and I took a walk around my neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As I traveled around Harvard Square, the shoppers dashing in and out of the stores and the students carrying books through Harvard Yard, I felt as though I were venturing through an absurdist dream where out-of-sync parallel realities collided. Yes, indeed, Larry Kramer, you nailed it! We were at war, and for many reasons, we still are.

Since in those early years, HIV/AIDS affected most visibly what some called the “4H Club” – Homosexuals, Haitians, Intravenous Heroin Drug Users, and People with Hemophilia – all but the latter considered as “disposables” at that time, governmental and many social institutions refused to take wide-scale action.

One can reasonably argue that if the majority of people with HIV/AIDS initially had been middle-class, white, suburban heterosexual males, rather than gay and bisexual males, trans people, people of color, working-class people, sex workers, and drug users, we would have immediately seen massive mobilizations to defeat the virus.

During those awful years, my pain eventually rose to anger and then to rage, a rage finally given expression by a grassroots peoples’ empowerment movement. The direct-action group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) formed in New York City in 1986 largely by young activists. A network of local chapters quickly grew in over 120 cities throughout the world.

I contributed my efforts to the Boston chapter. Though independently developed and run, the network connected efforts under the theme “Silence = Death” beneath an inverted pink triangle (turning upside down the insignia the Nazis forced men accused of homosexuality to wear in German concentration camps). We reclaimed the pink triangle, signifying the ultimate stigmata of oppression, and turned it into a symbol of empowerment to lift people out of lethargy and denial and as a call to action to counter the crisis.

We in ACT UP conducted highly visible demonstrations, often involving acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in which we on occasion placed ourselves at risk for arrest and even injury. ACT UP/New York, for example, staged a “sit-in” on Wall Street in 1987 during rush hour to protest price gouging by pharmaceutical companies, particularly Burroughs Wellcome’s high cost of AZT (an antiviral drug).

Other actions included a national protest in 1988, which effectively closed down the Food and Drug Administration offices in Bethesda, Maryland; a 1990 action in which over 1000 people stormed the National Institutes of Health (NIH), also in Bethesda, Maryland, demanding wide-scale improvements that included extended access to government-sponsored HIV clinical trials.

In 1991, demonstrators staged a disruption of CBS and PBS evening news broadcasts to protest coverage of the Persian Gulf War and negligence in covering the AIDS pandemic. This was followed closely by a “Day of Desperation” demonstration at Grand Central Station, as well as visible actions at most of the annual International Conferences on AIDS, including, most notably, the 6th Conference held in San Francisco in 1990.

We not only challenged traditional means of scientific knowledge dissemination, but more importantly, questioned the very mechanisms by which scientists conducted research, and, therefore, we helped redefine the very meanings of “science.”

AIDS activists — including members of direct-action groups like ACT UP, people with AIDS, AIDS educators, journalists and writers, workers in AIDS service organizations, and others — won important victories on a number of fronts, including assisting people in becoming active participants in their own medical treatments, having greater input in drug trial protocols, expanding access to drug trials, and expediting approval for drug therapies. In addition, Community Advisory Boards now hold pharmaceutical companies more accountable for the prices they charge.

I am so very grateful to my comrades in ACT UP for the endless lessons they taught me during our times together. They showed me by example that anger, no matter how righteous, when unrestrained often turns into mistakes and deep regrets when acted out (Oh, how I learned that one!). On the other hand, they proved that anger coupled with reason and a network of like-minded individuals giving expression to that anger sets the stage for unbounded possibilities.

I have heard some people refer to our current era as one in which HIV/AIDS and the discrimination surrounding it no longer pose major physical and social barriers. Unfortunately, nothing can be further from the truth, even though much has improved since those terrible early years. Infection rates throughout the world still continue to rise, millions still can’t afford the constellation of drug therapies needed to keep them alive, and ignorance and prejudice remain major impediments.

Though he could have been a major force in leading the efforts to contain a crisis, Ronald Reagan failed miserably, and for that he must be held accountable for the deaths of thousands of people during his years as Derelict and Criminal Commander-In-Chief in the war on HIV.

On the other hand, joining together with the remarkable, dedicated, steadfast comrades of ACT UP made real for me Margaret Mead’s insightful and stirring statement: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”