U.S.:Today is ...

Wictory Wednesday, but I didn't run the Wictory Wednesday support GWB spot, in part of which I riff on Kerry. Why not? Well, today is for President Ronald Reagan. Today was his State Funeral. I didn't want to waste my time riffing on Kerry.

I think that I was always positively predisposed to Ronald Reagan because of my mother and my aunts. My mother was big on movies. She used to have an old bookbag that was chock full of movie magazines, and I used to prowl through them regularly. One of my aunts, in particular, used to talk about him. She liked Ronald Reagan; she liked his movies, and she said his name with a note in her voice that signified approval and respect. So, before he appeared on the global stage, I was already inclined towards him. That's how you are when you're young.

When he was governor of California, I was new to this country and still mourning the loss of sun, greenery,a house with its own yard, and being able to lime without freezing my arse off. You don't know what a shock America is for us Carib types until you go spend some time in the Caribbean living with the natives. In those days, the only politics I bothered with was the Watergate hearings. I found getting along with the natives difficult enough without worrying about who to vote for. When Ronald Reagan became president, I was happy because he wasn't Jimmy Carter, who, I thought, was a sanctimonious wimp. More importantly, Reagan had ideas, good ones. So, when he bounced Carter from office, joy reigned in Brooklyn.

In those days, when President Reagan was dominating the global stage, the media was busy telling me that he was stupid; that he was a dolt who slept through meetings, I took all that with a grain of salt because, by nature, I don't like people telling me what to think. I was in TT during much of his presidency, but I knew that Margaret Thatcher was a particular buddy of his. I had a healthy respect for the Iron Lady, as she was called, because she did not suffer fools and folly gladly. Thatcher knew what she believed, and she was willing to fight for it. The Argentinians discovered that the hard way. I saw the same admirable qualities in Reagan. Then I heard his "tear down this wall" speech. What a man! Here was everybody saying Reagan was a dolt; here was Reagan pounding a nail in the coffin of communism. Then the wall came down. What a man! The media never apologized; the soi-disant intellectuals didn't either. Instead, the litterati and the punditratti insisted that Reagan was an amiable dunce and that Gorbachev was a hero. Yeah, right.

When I returned to the U.S., the natives seemed more friendly, and I had acquired an interest in American politics. So I followed the career of Bush 41. I figured it was time to become a citizen, so, with the help of Senator Alphone D'Amato (thank you Senator D'Amato), I did. By then, I knew that I wasn't a liberal, because I was pretty fed up of the liberals at Columbia. At some point, I bought a book by Reagan, started listening to Limbaugh, and grew into a greater respect for and appreciation of President Reagan than I'd had before.

So, today is his day. Heck, this is his week. I love GWB partly because I see the same qualities that I saw in Reagan back then. The optimism, the love for America, the love for his wife, the irrepressible sense of humor -- though in GWB it has a harder edge, the ability to outwit the media and political opponents because neither man is as the litterati, glitterati, or punditratti want us to believe. So, I figure that GWB won't mind if I ignore a plug for him out of respect for the man in whose footsteps he treads.