Dick, Bush, and Trump cards

I grew up a tad too young to grasp the enormity of how bad George Bush and Dick Cheney were. I was too young to even appreciate how funny it is that Bush and Dick were the names of the guys. Bush? Dick? Really?

All I knew was that Bush was silly and stupid and that was really funny. He might have been recognized as a "lolcow".

I know now that they were the leaders of a pretty thoroughly evil mass murder spree. I think it'll be fair to celebrate their deaths, with an actual party and everything.

Trump is the big bad of my time, and while I don't trend to the retributive, I can admit some bit of satisfaction in the thought of him dying a "slow, painful death".

The universe is not a just one, and there is no god to mete out pain to those who inflict it. But... We've had about 10 years of steadily increasing certainty that Trump has the same dementia that his father had.

It's probably why he says so many stupid but funny things all the time, right? The "eating the dogs and cats", the MS13 knuckle tattoos. There's going to be a point where we're going to have to acknowledge that the "lol covfefe" and whatnot might be rooted in disability, right?

All this is to say... Dick and Bush will probably die surrounded by warmth and happiness of their families. But Trump might go out wearing a diaper, scared and confused, surrounded by the unfamiliar faces of his family.

I don't know whether to be satisfied by that or not.

Dementia is Horror

It's hard, because I've lost two extended family members in two years to Alzheimers and dementia. They gradually became a shell of their former selves, and by the time they were laid to rest, they had already been gone for years.

I'm worried that I'm dipping into dehumanizing language here, but I don't know how else to express it. Having everything that made someone a person be scooped away by a disease, day by day, really sucks.

I don't want to undersell it. It's horror. It's something from a scary movie. There is something unnerving that I can't express and don't want to.

I was not even around for the "bad moments". I wasn't around for the times when people around them realized what was happening. I was not even around for the scary moments, or the moments of unpredictability, or the moments where other people felt unsafe. I was only around for the easiest and the "best" moments. I was almost exclusively around in the role of a support network for their support network.

Even from my limited viewpoint, I don't know if I could wish that on my worst enemy.

I Hope Reagan Dies A Slow, Horrible, Painful Death

That said...

Ronald Reagan was a vile, evil, horrible man who committed atrocities that we are all still paying for today. We miss people today who died because of Reagan.

I think we're all in the "Reagan Bad" camp. The ramifications of his presidency can be quantified by millions of lives at least.

I have no space in me to judge someone who indulges in retributive sentiments against Trump, Bush, Dick, or Reagan. That "I hope they suffer" thing from before.

This goes especially so for anyone who lived during the AIDS epidemic-- that's a level of pain I have the privilege of having had never had the chance to experience. I'm a gen Z baby.

But I've read the poems, the stories, I saw the photos and home videos. I've done my homework. It sure sounded bad!

All this is to say... If I held the hand of a loved one, watching them waste away due to a mysterious new illness, disregarded as a "gay disease", allowed to spread unmitigated by Ronald Reagan, who refused to do anything to address it, wondering who might already have it and who might die from it next?

I imagine almost every gay person in the US in the 80s must have thought something like this at one point or the other:

I hope Ronald Reagan dies a slow, horrible death

The part where Ronald Reagan dies a slow, horrible death.

In 1994, after years of speculation, Reagan announced that he had Alzheimers. You can read it in full. It starts like this:

My Fellow Americans, I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Reagan's condition would decline rapidly over ten years. Reagan's soul -- which brought us Reaganomics and the War on Drugs and attacks on unions and constant racist attacks and the "Gay Related Immune Disorder" and Antonin Scalia and holy shit the Iran-Contra thing and holy shit that's a lot of bombs -- where was I?

Yeah, Reagan's putrid soul was slowly whittled away at until he was nothing. And then he died, 93 years too late.

My question: Where is the celebration? Did you celebrate when Reagan died?

Where was the celebration?!? Where was the edgy, retributive satisfaction? That looks like cosmic justice if I've ever seen it.

Reagan, whose administration laughed at dying gay men and called AIDS "nature's revenge on gay men", was eventually ravaged by nature.

I can understand the optics: Reagan was popular with half the country, he was politically irrelevant, and he was in the most sympathetic and vulnerable position possible. Celebrating an old man's slow death is not a good look, optically speaking.

But in the 20 years I've been gay online, talking to gay millennials and gen-Xers and even boomers, I've not seen the sentiments that I now think are reasonable.

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Uh,

I wanted to reiterate some things about alzheimers and dementia. I'll be honest, I have no idea how to talk about this. It's "horrible" with an emphasis in "horror". It's not knowable what the experience is like, but I can't imagine it's good at all.

I'm not here to talk about the Correct things to think or feel. I'm only here from a place of emotional curiosity, trying to rectify a contradiction I see in the emotional experience of a time I didn't exist in.

If someone takes personal pleasure in imagining Reagan in the deepest throes of Alzheimers, I want to reiterate that I have no place to judge that.

Trump probably has dementia, and he's probably going to die from it. It's hard for me to indulge in retributive sentiments, because he has dementia while he is also calling the shots in a way that impacts billions of people, but also because the act of imagining his last years also involves imagining a human horror.

But also, when Trump dies, I am probably going to celebrate with friends and do party drugs I have never done before. So I am going to be in a new and unique emotional place.

TLDR

• The world is full of evil ghouls who inflict pain without receiving any justice in response. It might be philosophically "wrong", but I can't fault anyone for wishing pain upon them.

• Dementia and alzheimers is a horrible thing. I spend a lot of time saying it's bad.

• Reagan inflicted slow, horrible deaths. The AIDS epidemic was part of that.

• Then, Reagan died a slow, horrible death from Alzheimers. I would anticipate gay celebration of cosmic justice, but I see none. Why?

• Trump might die from dementia too. I don't know if I will find satisfaction in that, but I don't currently. I don't tend towards retributive sentiments but I've felt them before.

TLDR TLDR:

• Reagan was a horrible ghoul who died a slow, painful death. I'm having difficulty squaring the history of the AIDS epidemic with no apparent satisfaction that "Reagan got what he deserved."

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TLDR TLDR TLDR:

Especially to people born before 1990, and especially so to people born before 1970: Did you celebrate when Reagan died of Alzheimers? Did anyone you knew celebrate?