I missed the Reagan hagiographic moment

Well, I missed it. Ronald Reagan's death, embalming, lying in state, feet-first parade up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, arsenal of salutes, all happened while I was away from town. My wife and I were in North Carolina visiting a friend whose terminally ill condition hits far closer to home.

The precision, the planning, the speed (with a pregnant moment or two for casket touching), the well-mediated solmenity had all the depth of a Miss America Pageant. Hard to believe that a nation can get a revered president in the ground, so to speak, with so much pomp and so much alacrity and not miss a beat, stub a toe, make a wrong turn, overlook a plaudit, expose a wart.

The televised media made hay with the Reagan hagiography. CNN and Fox had great days recounting how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War (Gorbachev, of course, was the outwitted, outgunned, out-charmed other half of the terminating equation). What a narrative those news execs weave! The Great Communicator. The Smiling Pragmatist. The Savvy Somnabulator.

By the time we returned last weekend to the Capital area, the whole thing had blown out of town, westward ho. The t-shirt vendors' racks of Reagan-wear already were looking wilted. The covers of Time and Newsweek already bore whiskers. Now it's Bill Clinton's official portrait, and George Bush squirming, having to praise the guy in a White House installation ceremony.

How to connect this stuff to poetry? Oh, I know. I recall Anne Sexton once describing a finished poem as "last season's bad cold." So with the "news" in Washington, D.C.