bring the noyz

After putting The Boy to bed last night, The Wife and I finally had a chance to sit down and pay our respects to the Dead President.

Yes, that's right, we played a drinking game.

We watched the "private family service at the the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley" and we drank vodka tonics (with diet tonic water, as like the rest of the country we are trying to cut down on our carbs).

Sweet merciful crap. What a helluva way to get a good buzz on in a hurry.

"Private family service"??? With The Terminator, his wife Skeletor, and Chachi? Yes, Chachi. Scott Baio was at the damn funeral. I read this morning that Wayne Newton was even there. Wow! The oft shown shot of Schwarzenegger next to Margaret Thatcher was politically and pop culturally priceless and a little surreal.

Also in attendence was the media with their cameras. Lots of freaking cameras. It harldy seemed "private".

Maybe it's because the disgusting wave of so-called "reality" television that currently is crashing through the public airwaves has so blurred the boundries of private and public. . .

Maybe it's because at heart Nancy Reagan is an actress who dreamed she was The Queen of America and this was her final triumpant dramatic role. . .

Whatever the reason, why was Reagan's "private family funeral" on television for all the world to see?

Why was Chris Matthews there like he was doing the color commentary at a damn football game? I never imagined in a milllion years I'd be writing this, but I gained some respect for FOX News because their talking heads had the decency to shut the fuck up during the service and let the images and attendees speak for themselves.

Which they did. In great detail. More detail than was necessary.

Does the world need to know that President Reagan had an earlobe fetish?

The Wife kept saying, "I feel so dirty, we shouldn't be watching this, this should be private."

I kept replying, "Yes, I agree, this should be private, we shouldn't be watching this. . . There's Nancy, drink. There she is again. Drink."

So we sat and we drank and we watched the "private family service" with a 21-gun cannon salute and a military jet flyover.

I'm sure the vodka helped soften our emotions, but we both got teary-eyed when Nancy Reagan leaned over the casket, embraced it, kissed it, and began to cry. Think what you will about the man and his legacy, this was an image of a wife saying her last goodbye to her husband of fifty plus years. It was an intensely personal and private moment. And we were watching and listening along with the rest of the world.

We should not have seen that moment. The world should not have been part of that moment. It felt nauseatingly voyeuristic and wrong. But it was compelling television, and we could not change the channel (not that that would have mattered since it was on so many different channels).

"Look, she's crying. Drink twice."

And none of it would be on television if Nancy Reagan had not agreed to it in the first place.

When it was all said and done, The Wife and I had a brief discussion about politics, which I generally enjoy because it is the only game that truly matters, and she generally finds disgusting because it is a game in which lots of people are typically hurt while a handful of people make bank based on the decisions of a few pompous typically self-serving bastards.

She quite astutely summed up the entire American political scene:

"Republicans are idiots. Democrats are pussies. The world is going to Hell and that's the bottom line. So let's drink up."
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