CORRESPONDENCE
Correspondence SOLVING THE REAGAN RIDDLE Norman Podhoretz should forget his quibbles with the policies of Ronald Reagan and remember the things that made him the most successful president in...
...And, contrary to Wattenberg, the movie does have some good things to say about its pseudo-1950s world...
...As a politician, Reagan knew that the goal of politics is to win...
...ED HAEFELE ALLIANCE, NE I wholeheartedly agree with the core of Norman Podhoretz's analysis that Ronald Reagan was primarily a gifted politician...
...The slutty '90s girl (Reese Witherspoon) learns that her trampiness was a way of conforming, of denying her human dignity...
...Second, as Podhoretz notes, before Reagan, the United States was on the strategic defensive and American power was in steep decline...
...It will probably come as a shock to the eastern peoples that we of the Midwest do not really give a fig about their intellectual, pretentious, and overly nice rationalizations...
...Pleasantville says we are better off living with freedom and its discontents, and learning how to act to redeem the suffering it brings about, rather than longing futilely for a perfect world that never can be...
...So was Reagan...
...Correspondence SOLVING THE REAGAN RIDDLE Norman Podhoretz should forget his quibbles with the policies of Ronald Reagan and remember the things that made him the most successful president in recent memory ("The Riddle of Ronald Reagan," Nov...
...No other "electable" politician could have done it, and there is no way we can thank him enough...
...Before Reagan took office, the economy was locked in stagflation...
...This boom continues even today—interrupted only briefly by one small recession...
...However, the great politicians always have a larger purpose than winning and they realize that politics is nothing if not the art of compromise followed by the selling of the compromise...
...As I recall, so did Abraham Lincoln, another Illinois politician...
...ROD DREHER NEW YORK, NY...
...Reagan put America on the strategic offensive, rebuilt our military power, and within a decade won the Cold War...
...This is why he smiled a lot and told stories...
...LION MCLEAN, VA As a native of Illinois (Ronald Reagan's home state) and a fourth-generation Republican, I would like to gently suggest that Norman Podhoretz may not be the best of all guides to understanding Reagan...
...I wonder how someone who grew up under Communist totalitarianism would interpret the film...
...I never met our former president, but he is surely no mystery...
...She concludes she can't live in the '90s, that she requires the strong social structure still present in postlapsarian Pleasantville to stay on the straight and narrow...
...The film brings to mind Milan Kundera's comments on kitsch, which the novelist says "excludes everything from its purview that is essentially unacceptable in human existence...
...Both were guided by the Founding Fathers and both were scorned and ridiculed by the East Coast elites of their day, both met roadblocks and setbacks, and both were marked by their great reverence for, and fear of, God...
...Reagan provided the leadership America needed, withstood the heat from a badly misguided political establishment, and changed the course of history...
...While the East is enthralled by government and policy alternatives, we midwesterners are bored with them...
...Some day in the future, historians will rank Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt as the most significant politicians of the twentieth century...
...A dunce, no...
...Amiable, yes...
...however, among past presidents Reagan is most comparable to Abraham Lincoln...
...Kundera indicates that the kind of Edenic world the troubled teenager seeks is possible only in a kitschy society like Pleasantville's, one without individualism, without knowledge, without desire, without the freedom to act...
...Rather than figure out how to live rightly under these conditions, Tobey Maguire's character reacts passively, retreating into the escapism offered by a cheesy 1950s-era TV show...
...The film is not a rah-rah brief for the '90s: Writer-director Gary Ross acknowledges in the first reel that kids today live in a rotten world of AIDS, broken families, and moral chaos...
...Of course both the economic transition and the restoration of military power contributed to the much-bemoaned deficits of the 1980s, but as it turns out, they were well worth it— today, trading a large national debt for a bloodless end to the Cold War seems like a bargain...
...It is this combination of skills—winning and selling— that makes Reagan one of the best presidents...
...His tax cuts in 1983 were an essential part of the booming economy that followed...
...SCOTT SIRK FISHERS, IN NOT SO UNPLEASANT My friend Daniel Wattenberg's notion that Pleasantville is a sociological critique of the 1950s is true on a certain level, but he misses the film's deeper, more subtle, metaphysical point ("Unpleasantville," Nov...
...P.M...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 11
