Cowboys Riding High

We're hearing more each day from disenchanted liberals and others that Ronald Reagan, in death, supercedes the President he was in life. Listening to C-SPAN earlier this morning, I heard a man who, I'd guess, was in his 40s call to excoriate Reagan, going so far as to state: "Without Michael Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan was less than nothing." Brian Lamb's guest, the ubiquitous Grover Norquist, defended Reagan's legacy ably, as have so many others this week.

But some voices carry more moral authority than those of even the best activists, and among them is Lech Walesa. In an op-ed in today's WSJ, Walesa, a key figure in the demise of the Soviet empire, sends a post-mortem thank you note of sorts to President Reagan. He begins: "When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our freedom."

Ponder that last sentence: We owe him our freedom. Beyond owing another our life, as we do our parents or anyone who sacrifices his life for ours, what greater compliment can be paid to another than to say, publicly, that we owe him our freedom? Walesa, an electrician by training who, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, rose to become free Poland's president from 1990 to 1995, writes that Reagan's vision of a liberated Eastern Europe was backed by action -- by tackling problems rather than hoping they would fade away.

I wrote yesterday about greatness. Walesa easily bests me:

"I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit. They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They're convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for. Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians and Ronald Reagan was one of them."

He closes by recalling the potency of a poster printed for the first "almost-free" parliamentary elections in Poland in 1989. It featured Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane in "High Noon" with the headline "At High Noon" and the red Solidarity banner with the date of the elections, June 4, 1989. Walesa says the Communists derided the freedom movement in Poland as "an invention of the 'Wild' West, especially the U.S."

But, he says, "[T]he poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland."

Westerns were of course a staple of Hollywood for decades. More often than not, they were "honest and true," fighting the good fight against the forces of chaos and evil. Deriding them became easy sport among the cognoscenti from the 1960s on, not so much for any artistic merit they lacked as for the virtues they imbued. Their unforgivable sin was to operate in a world in which their characters knew the difference in right and wrong; producers and directors took for granted that their audiences would do the same.

When Reagan or George Bush are derided as cowboys, think of what those men stood for among the masses imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain. And remember that they were attacked by elites who ran things back then, just as their virtues are ridiculed today by those who'd love to run things again back here.