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It’s a safe bet there weren’t many buses of Reagan mourners leaving Berkeley for Simi Valley or Washington the other week. We understand that behind the soaring rhetoric was a cruel reality, an indifference to people in need, foreign policy by death squad.  

And yet... 

Some of those who stood in line were there to worship at the coffin, traveling from redoubts where neoconservatives breed and hatch their filthy plots. But I suspect many others were there because there’s something people in this country need from their politicians (local and beyond) right now, something Reagan provided, something Bush doesn’t, something the mourners needed to relive, something John Kerry had better work on, and quick. 

People need hope and optimism; they want to hear a call to the future. We vote for candidates who make that clarion call and who like people, who can talk to them, touch them. 

We do this even though change is often no change at all, even though those who’ve already got will always get the lion’s share of any new bounty, even though we know politicians of all stripes regularly do stupid, sometimes terrible, things. 

No longer a young country, we still act as though we are. Americans don’t suffer fate very well. We fidget in history class. Lessons of illusions that led to disaster are for other nations. We believe we can keep reinventing ourselves, ever leaping forward.  

Of course, all politicians—from our own battle-weary cast of local characters to the candidates for the White House—promise a better future. But sometimes the words are actually heartfelt and the caring real.  

How do you tell what’s real in a time when every word is focus-grouped and body language is so programmed, when every official just swears he or she cares about us so damn much? It takes practice. 

A little local lesson: during the recent Adult School fight, some of us fell into a briar patch of process, promises and detail. After a while, we didn’t know whom to believe. Sometimes it seemed everyone was right, every argument was equal, none could just be crap, not here. 

This over-intellectualizing, this unnaturally strict civility (sort of public discussion by Barney or some other genial dominatrix), often led to more confusion, while of course the powers that be just went on with their schemes and their winking and nodding. Some of us had lost our instincts for people, for knowing when an official or school board member was dissembling (dissembling in Berkeley? Say it ain’t so!).  

And so a couple of us began practicing a simple mantra of “after a while, you know it (intellectual honesty, goodwill) when you see it.” We pulled back a little from the details. We listened to the tone and watched the faces and the body language. We rediscovered common sense and instinct. It helped. 

And when a person’s instincts tell him that a politician (please let it be a progressive politician) is being earnest and relatively truthful, then the talk of a better future suddenly becomes a potent political tool, as real and as effective as precinct work or walk-around money.  

Which brings us back to John Kerry (certainly not a real progressive, but just think “Supreme Court” and it gets easier to swallow).  

Kerry will never be a happy warrior. There are executioners who are more fun.  

But he apparently does care, in his gruff, fierce way. If he finds a way to let people know he understands the need to cast off our gloom, to take control of things, to look forward, if he can just understand why so many people lined up at the coffin, and learn from that understanding, then the man who offers us only a grim, dark vision (is it something in Bush’s religion, or just a really bad hangover?) will be sent back to Texas. 

And then maybe we can get out of this hellish, dangerous mess we’ve dragged everyone into. 

James Day is a local landscaper and writer. 

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