SHADES OF GRAY
By Cori Dauber
In the midst of all the eulogizing for the late President, the media and the various and sundry notables, eager to be seen on television lauding the great man, have managed to make it sound as if he said the words "Evil Empire" and the free world stood up and cheered.
This is nothing short of the rewriting of history.
Certainly some cheered. (And apparently those we couldn't hear were cheering very, very softly.)
But the truth is that the sophisticates, the Soviet experts, the elite, the academics -- were absolutely and completely horrified.
To call the Soviets "evil" was not just undiplomatic it was out and out dangerous. It was a function of the simplistic foolishness of seeing a world best understood in shades of gray in black and white.
But you know what they say -- the problem with seeing the world in shades of gray is that you can sometimes mistake dawn for dusk.
Reagan was right, we were wrong, and now, it seems to me, is an appropriate time to cop to that. No one seems willing to do that, so everyone's making it out as if they were all with him all along when nothing could be further from the truth. Andrew Sullivan has done an important service by digging up a fine series of examples of the rhetoric of the day. (Maybe some it will sound familiar to you.) But we should have learned something from that -- evil is evil, and there are times when you just have to stand up and call it by its rightful name.
rantingprofs.typepad.com |
