Ceremony swamps the republic.

Over the weekend, Ronald Reagan reached out from the haze of his living dementia to wipe out the contentious world of American politics. Conservatives, according to one reporter, are in the habit of saying that “Bush is serving Reagan’s third term,” so not surprisingly, standing at Normandy on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, George W. Bush backed into the luminous halo of his illustrious predecessor. The Bush website is now fronted by a photo of Reagan, twinkly but jut-jawed (or is it the other way round?), posing in front of four American flags. As of this writing, neither Bill Clinton nor Jimmy Carter, two of America’s surviving four ex-presidents, has been asked to speak at the state funeral in Washington. Never mind that Democrats in public have been nothing if not gracious. L’état, c’est il.

For John Kerry, this is accordingly the week that wasn’t. He decided to lie low, postponing two giant fundraising events. The glow of a forced consensus would have scorched to a crisp anything substantial he might have chosen to say. “I think it is sad that on the day when the nation is mourning the loss of one of its presidents, some of John Kerry’s supporters are out there campaigning and spreading this angry message,” said an official from the Republican National Committee in the Columbus Dispatch about a Jesse Jackson rally in the capital of Ohio.

Promptly, the American news media picked up the consensus signal with a round-up of the usual empty phrases and headlines: “A NATION REMEMBERS,” “NATION MOURNS.” Californians, it was reported, streamed to behold his body in state in a Los Angeles suburb, but as best I could judge, Manhattan was actually full of people going about their business, as cheerful, distracted, mellow, blunt, aggressive, apprehensive, and otherwise normal as you would expect on a sunny day. But Manhattan, as Susan Sontag once said, is an island anchored offshore the American mainland. What would you expect?

Journalists who should know better lapsed into their old habit of presuming that Reagan was extraordinarily popular during his presidency. Typical was Marilyn Berger’s New York Times obituary: “Until the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Reagan enjoyed tremendous popularity.” This legend was long ago pierced full of holes by Michael Schudson and Elliot King in the Columbia Journalism Review, but hey, no matter. In unvarnishable, hard-edged statistical truth, as any journalist could tell with a few well-chosen keystrokes, Reagan’s approval ratings were average for postwar American presidents – and generally below Bill Clinton’s. But try standing in the way of a gauzy bulldozer.

Some op-ed columnists pierced the consensus, but television news predictably lapsed into all Reagan hagiography, all the time. The right-wing demagogue Dinesh D’Souza surfaced as an official CNN analyst, which was more than Reagan’s most serious biographers could claim. The most stirring, least brittle moments from Reagan’s canonical speeches were rebroadcast, fondly reminisced over, and rerebroadcast. On the three days after his death, CNN in all of its hours included all of three mentions of Reagan’s 1985 speech at the German military cemetery at Bitburg, where Waffen SS men are buried. No clips. On the other networks, neither mention nor clips.

In the meantime, it was as if the rest of the world had stopped. Was there a war still on in Iraq? A new government there evidently at risk of losing its Kurdish support? A political campaign to decide who will steer the military colossus of all time, and where? Newly released tapes of Enron traders punishing California during its 2000 energy crunch? It would be unseemly to insist on such trifles. Television was back to its bread-and-butter: the nonstop orchestration of feeling.

In print, after several days dominated by rapt indulgence in ritual, journalism aroused itself, noting (lo, on the front page of the Washington Post, for example) that Reagan was far from beloved by African-Americans, that he punished the poor and disobedient labor, that his foreign policy was less than brilliant.

Outside this excellent article by Eric Pianin and Thomas B. Edsall, scarcely a word was to be found about the affable, moral anti-relativist Ronald Reagan’s support for that onetime free-world asset, Saddam Hussein.

What’s that, again?

For who was president of the United States on March 16, 1988, when Saddam famously “used weapons of mass destruction against his own people” – i.e. poison gas that killed some five thousand civilians in Halabja? Hint: It wasn’t Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. It wasn’t George Herbert Walker Bush. It was indeed liberty’s partisan, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

This is a good week to make robust use of the many hours that can be spared from the evening news’ nonstop stroll down selective memory lane. The longer-term effect? Likely, the Reagan mist will burn off before another week has passed. But the Bush people must be considering a new round of commercials in which Ronald Reagan speaks from the grave about his satisfaction with the present incumbent and self-declared heir.