Nothing was left to chance in the scripting of the funeral rites of Ronald Reagan, writes Azmi Bishara Reagan was the subject of many amusing, and not so amusing, stories simply because his presidency seemed so unreal. One commentator described his term in office as the long American daydream. No wonder; reality was so close to fiction. One of those stories has it that upon his return from his historic visit to Moscow a journalist asked him, "Mr President, did you happen to notice that the Russians are human beings with feelings, who weep and laugh just like us?" The journalist was making a veiled reference to Reagan's famous branding of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire". Reagan was quick on the mark. He answered, "that's right. I did notice that. They must have changed." President Reagan died recently after a long struggle with Alzheimer's. He was further away from reality than ever, but Washington acted as though he had remained an active statesman until the eve of his death; as though his passing were an unexpected shock. Such feigned bewilderment is not so much hypocrisy as it is part of the familiar trappings of state funerals everywhere. Hypocrisy in these instances is when the death of a former statesman is used by still living and active politicians to rewrite history towards their own personal ends. This was how Reagan -- a simple man who looked at reality as though it were fantasy and turned illusion into truth, who reduced the Cold War to a showdown between good and evil in a cowboy film -- was transformed into George Bush's personal electoral campaign manager. Suddenly Reagan had stopped being an Alzheimer's patient and had immersed himself in the history writing business, especially to pull Bush's campaign wagon out of the mud of his disastrous foreign policy. Nothing is more shameful than a politician making an unctuous show of grief for his own self-serving ends. Washington has never seen so many rites and rituals in the history of its last farewells to former heads of state. It was as though they had to pile on the ceremonies in order to keep the cameras rolling. Nancy Reagan looked as though she, too, had a long association with Alzheimer's, although some say she has always looked that way. At any rate, there was nothing particularly odd about that; no odder at least than that curious admixture of religious rites, staged as though explicitly to remind us that these are human inventions. I find it difficult to understand this form of plurality of religious and extra-religious rituals in the funerary ceremonies for an American president. It is hard to believe that it was a manifestation of tolerance because it kept people locked into their separate sectarian affiliations. The most that can be said of that display was that there were a lot of religions on hand. The current US president and a large portion of his administration regard the late president as a mentor who had paved the way to power for a formerly fringe movement within the American right. They see Reagan as a rebel against the status quo, as a man with the courage to defy the international equilibrium that had prevailed since the Yalta agreement and, in particular, since the détente ushered in under Nixon. Reagan believed in American superiority. He believed in the arms race and in pushing the Soviets to compete until their economy caved in. In their opinion, Reagan freed the US from the Vietnam complex. He invaded and occupied Granada. He refused to rest as long as the Soviets remained in Afghanistan. He reconciled his nation with itself, with its military might and with the historical mission suggested by it. After the humiliating period, under Carter, of post- Vietnam self-recrimination and of the degradation of American prestige as epitomised by the hostage crisis at the US Embassy in Tehran, Reagan made America feel powerful again. One could have imagined a subtle and sustained Alzheimer's effect on the American elections. But instead of the wretched image of that disease we had the sombre dignity of the coffin wrapped in the flag. Karl Rove could not pass up the opportunity. The ensuing production set against the backdrop of the American capital seemed more obsessed with the observance of ritual than even "Old Europe". Such rituals are a part of the aesthetics of politics and reflect political substance. Indeed, here, form is substance. The prevailing ideology in Washington these days has more in common with the ideologies of "ancient Europe" than it does with the philosophical and political pragmatism that Washington had once been so proud of. Under Reagan and the rise of the conservative right he represented a resurgent self-confidence and hard line aggressiveness converged with the technological revolution that his administration harnessed and channelled into the arms race. However, it is over-simplistic to suggest that Reagan's armaments programme alone was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet economy. The transformation of the prevalent relations of production and ownership in the Soviet Union into an impediment to the development of the forces of production (as Marxist jargon might put it) was a long process, the resounding results of which happened to have been felt in the Reagan era. Such realities, however, would not shake the absolute faith of neo-conservatives that their reductionist rhetoric, which pits the power of the free market against the impotence of state interventionism, the champions of good against disseminators of evil, should get the credit for bringing about the demise of communism. Certainly reality would not prevent them from transforming the sacraments of mourning into a display of solidarity with Bush and his clique of Cheney, Rumsfeld and others in the White House and Pentagon, as though they were the mere standard bearers for the phase of global victory that had been inaugurated by Reagan. Unfortunately, even if the US media image of Reagan was correct, the comparison between him and Bush could never hold. This is not because Reagan was a genius and Bush is an idiot. When has the relative intelligence or erudition of politicians ever been a matter of surprise, let alone academic inquiry? Rather, Reagan was a conventional Republican conservative in the sense that he believed in restricting the power of the state to intervene in the economy. Bush's coterie, which has turned American foreign policy into an experimental lab, sees the state as their instrument for imposing their ultra right agenda at home and abroad, and for promoting this agenda through the entrenchment of a certain ideology and the curtailment of civil liberties in the US. In a country in which the majority of the electorate will not tolerate a radical secularist as a nominee for president -- or as governor or mayor -- in spite of the stipulated division between church and state, a president has to show respect for religion. A recent poll that drew the attention of The Times in London and The Economist indicated that a US presidential candidate's faith was a prime determinant of the behaviour of the American voter. Open atheism is unforgivable. Ronald Reagan may have paid a lot of lip service to the church and family values. However, he had divorced his first wife and never took an interest in the children from his first marriage. Nor was he particularly religious and he certainly had no religiously inspired political agenda. Indeed, restrictions on abortion were eased during his term and he was the first president to receive a partner from a homosexual couple in the White House. George Bush, on the other hand, is a religious fanatic and "new born" Christian fundamentalists have an enormous impact on his domestic and foreign policies -- about 33 per cent of his support comes from this segment of the population. The study indicates that it is not so much the candidate's denominational affiliation that is important but rather his degree of religiosity. This trend may not necessarily work against Kerry who, although a member of the Catholic "minority" in the US, is currently displaying a reverence for religion. Indeed, it may work in his favour, in view of the fact that most Americans prefer their religion "light" as opposed to Bush's demagogic "heavy" version.
