That'll do, Ron. Ron.

I've been surprised by the amount of praise Ronald Reagan's received over the last couple of days. Even when he was still in power it was clear that he didn't know what day it was, which perhaps explains why he seemed to get on so well with Thatcher, who moved seamlessly from malevolence to baying at the moon during her period in office. Nobody seemed to mind that the man with control of The Button had to be told "first your socks, then your shoes". I suppose they figured that if he got a little playful the hardware would just whoosh off and land on Communists and brown people.

One of the things Reagan is credited with is that he somehow helped to bring about the collapse of Communism and / or the Soviet Union, which apparently is a Good Thing. I'm not entirely sure how he's supposed to have influenced that chain of events, unless there's some secret link between chin-dribble and the economic aspirations of the Eastern Bloc that I'm unaware of, but apparently Ron was instrumental in helping the peoples of Eastern Europe to achieve their desperately awaited social, economic, political and spiritual destiny. Which was being able to own a colour T.V. and buy cars that weren't made out of waterproofed cardboard. On the downside, of course, they now also have rising unemployment, street violence, street beggars, organised crime, and all the other things we've always had in The West but we somehow neglected to tell them about. They wanted to be like us, and they are. They're like very very poor Americans.

That's their downside in all this, but how does it affect us? Well, we have a large market into which we can sell all the dodgy old crap that we can't get rid of anywhere else except Africa, and we can lend them money at exciting rates of interest. Our downside is that, should our interests ever diverge to the extent that somebody might get killed, instead of one state run by experienced politicians, we'll have to contend with about two dozen little states run by lunatics. And still with nukes.

So on balance I'm not sure about Ron's legacy. And I've never seen it, but I'm told the film with the monkey is really quite bad.