When trying to put my thoughts together regarding the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I used to always refer people to the Lord of the Rings. In Lord of the Rings, there are clearly delineated ages. If you also read The Silmarillion, Monocrat’s Middle-Earth reading of choice, then you can read about the First and Second Ages in detail, while Lord of the Rings describes the most important events of the Third. Every age roughly coincides with the death of one generation and the rise of another. At the end of Lord of the Rings, a substantial contingent of the Fellowship of the Ring departs for the Grey Havens. Frodo, Bilbo, and Gandalf leaving signaled the end of an era and much of the light that went with it. The Third Age was over and the reign of men began.
Like the Fellowship of the Ring, Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II, (Deng?), (Gorbachev?), (Zhao?), changed the world in which they lived for the better. Also like the Fellowship, they challenged people who held too much power, and banished enemies forever. As people, they were normal, humble persons. As leaders, they were titans.
Former UES member Matthew McCluskey, at one point having listened to my bloviating on the subject for at least five minutes (and all in one spell!), came up with a better analogy. He said that I was right: it seemed to him that History had taken a bat to the landscape. He meant that History had taken out the giants, leaving all of us behind to sort it out for ourselves, rather like men at the dawn of the Fourth Age in Lord of the Rings.
So ever since, I say, “History has taken a bat to the landscape.” Margaret Thatcher brought this home in her extraordinary eulogy for Ronald Reagan. I watch it often. So should you. Doctors told her that her health precluded her doing that long of a speech in public — and it’s true, she has not been able to do so reliably for some years — but she was insistent that she make the flights for the funeral, and doubly insistent that she fulfill her obligation to Reagan by giving a eulogy:
In his lifetime Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself. He sought to mend America’s wounded spirit, to restore the strength of the free world, and to free the slaves of communism. [...]
We live today in the world that Ronald Reagan began to reshape with those words. It is a very different world with different challenges and new dangers. All in all, however, it is one of greater freedom and prosperity, one more hopeful than the world he inherited on becoming president. [...]
With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today the world — in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw, in Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself — the world mourns the passing of the Great Liberator and echoes his prayer “God Bless America”. [...]
And as the last journey of this faithful pilgrim took him beyond the sunset, and as heaven’s morning broke, I like to think — in the words of Bunyan — that ‘all the trumpets sounded on the other side’. We here still move in twilight. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. We have his example.
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