Well, the results are in. According to Matt Lauer, the number one Greatest American, by a margin of less than one-half of one percent, or .444 %, of the votes cast, is Ronald Reagan!?!?
Yes, I lost my lunch. I told you to have a barf bag at the ready. I know I did.
Abraham Lincoln finished second; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was third; George Washington was fourth; and Benjamin Franklin was fifth.
In an interview done during the live broadcast revealing the Number One, even Reagan's son Ron said his dad would have voted for Lincoln. Get a clue, all you people who voted for Reagan. In fact, take two. They're small.
Let's reprise "One of These Things is Not Like the Others," shall we?
Reagan does most emphatically NOT belong anywhere in the top 5, let alone at Number 1.
Why? Well, there's Iran-Contra, for starters. There's also my argument that he didn't really end the Cold War. Besides, even if he did, the consequences for us have not been universally good, now, have they? Remember, there had not been any 9/11s while the USSR kept the lid on the fanatics in the Middle East. We should have let the USSR keep doing the dirty work. It would have saved us several thousand young American lives, among other things.
There's also the simple fact that Reagan was a Grade B actor delivering his lines, and not really a leader. He didn't want to move the country forward. He wanted to go backwards, and boy, have we been paying for it ever since. He dreamed of a WWII-era America, where no one could question that we were the good guys, and battleships ruled the waves, and Norman Rockwell was a realist, not an idealist. That world vanished a long time ago (if it ever really existed at all), and there is no bringing it back.
Now JFK was a leader. "Ask not . . .," the Peace Corps, and the space program are ample examples. Reagan was everybody's easygoing grandpa. I, for one, was energized by Kennedy's vision for the country. But I wanted to curl up into a ball and hide when forced to contemplate Reagan's. "Government is the problem, but we're making it even bigger at the same time we complain about it, so we are going in hock past our eyeballs. But isn't it good to be an American?" The hypocrisy and sheer stupidity of it still stun me.
Finally, and most telling of all: it's just too soon after Reagan's presidency to judge. As recently as the 1940s, American History courses stopped at the year 1877. Anything more recent was considered not history, but political science (if that). History needs time to render its final judgments. I would say we are just now getting far enough away from JFK's 1000 days to be able to evaluate his presidency properly. Reagan's administration is much too near in time to get more than the forementioned political-science-type treatment.
Reagan's selection as the Number One "Greatest American" actually proves the point. Americans have notoriously short attention spans. Enough of them remembered Reagan to vote for him based on his having been around during their lifetimes. In the broadcast that announced the top 5 candidates, at least one woman complained that the top 5 were all dead. ("Now there's someone with a keen grasp of history," she said, sarcastically.) The woman eventually threw her support to Reagan, illustrating my point: he was alive in her lifetime, and that is what mattered to her, so she voted for him.
Besides, the whole thing most probably was rigged to begin with. One allegedly could vote up to 3 times per mechanism PER WEEK for one's choice. By the Discovery Channel's own terms, I should have been able to vote again ON the 26th . . . but every time I tried, I was locked out; this at the very moment Matt Lauer was saying that the polls were still open. I smell a big rat.
But it doesn't really matter anyway. No one is taking this for any kind of scientific, or rational, or even reasonable, evaluation of the nominees. I mean, c'mon. We're talking about the same people who voted Elvis the # 8 all-time greatest American, and who wouldn't even list Duke Ellington in the top 100. It's disappointing to me because I always thought better of Americans in general than that. I should have listened to P.T. Barnum: no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. (By the way, which way to the egress?)
But the exercise does say a lot, and nothing good, about the state of education in America today. Apparently as long as all the children are limited to the same degree, no child is considered left behind. Scary.
It's also a very useful warning to anyone who expects to get the neocons out of office come the next election. They aren't going to be able to beat the neocons by saying "we're correct and you know it." About half the populace does NOT know it. The pols are going to have to come up with other tactics.
What those tactics might be, I have no idea.
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