Public Viewing to Last 34 Hours
By Caryle Murphy and Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A01
The three-day ceremonial farewell that Washington is hosting this week for the late Ronald Reagan will include a 34-hour period for public viewing of the former president's coffin, bring at least 20 foreign heads of state to the capital and likely cause major traffic tie-ups in parts of the region, officials said yesterday.
In addition to current political leaders, the list of dignitaries expected at Friday's funeral at Washington National Cathedral includes former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone.
The outpouring of warm, sticky sentimentality over the passing of Reagan - one observer (me) called it a "Tidal Wave of Treacle" - was seen by some as the most fitting possible tribute to the late President. "Reagan delighted in telling stories of past times that were suffused with the warm glow of nostalgia and untainted by any nasty facts or links to reality," noted Officially-Not-Bitter-At-All Ex-Rival Jimmy Carter. "Everything from recycled Reader's Digest fiction to 'they haven't been to Nicaragua; I have' and of course 'I'm paying for this microphone' all had that essential element of being, well, fake. So it's only appropriate that we remember him by in fact not remembering the extraordinary divisiveness of his support for Central American Death Squads, his role in the Iran-Contra Scandal, or his disastrous fiscal policies. He eschewed facts in favor of comfortable lies, so it's only fitting that we honor him by lying about how great he was."
It is in fact so fitting that some people have begun to wonder at the near-perfect symmetry of the moment. "If I didn't know better, I'd say it was some kind of deeply ironic, nastily sarcastic piece of performance art by one of those lesbian kooks at the NEA," wondered moral watchdog and casino hound Bill Bennet. "But how could they get 260 Million people to go along? It'd never happen. Karl Rove wouldn't allow it… unless they slipped it past him disguised as an un-ironic Republican love-in and secular beatification… uh-oh…"
NEA Director Lipgloss von Androgyne demurred when asked whether the arts organization had in fact stage-managed the saccharine tsunami. "We would never dream of co-opting the shallowest and most bathetic instincts of the irony-deprived masses in order to secretly mock the shallowest and most bathetic inhabitant of the White House of the last century," asserted the spike-heeled, cassock-wearing artiste. "Of course, since we started sniffing that new batch of Paraguayan Bat Powder, we can't dream at all, and we lost the ability to speak in the first person, so who knows?"
Asked whether it was possible for an event on a national scale to be both sincere an d ironic, both hagiographic and scornful, professor of Quantum Politics C.Q. Barely replied "In theory, the two states can be superimposed, but only the liberals would notice, understand, or appreciate it."
Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product.
The rest is the fakey part.
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