Author: Gary

This is just brilliant.

Some people never learn.

We tend to treat the president as royalty. Not having a king ourselves, we bestow upon the president many of the honors a monarchy would bestow upon a king.

The president is the head of state in addition to being the head of government. Its a subtle distinction and one we don’t normally make in the US, but it is a distinction. For example, in the UK, the Prime Minister is the head of government, but the Queen is the head of state. In some countries, they have an elected President who is the head of state, and a prime minister who is the head of government.

So Reagan is getting a state funeral, which in most countries would be reserved for royalty. Nixon didn’t get a state funeral when he died, but he could have if the family wanted to. LBJ was the last person to have a state funeral, and other than Nixon, the last president to die.

Intellectually, I’m lothe to treat the president like a king. Personally, I really want to watch the funeral. I do enjoy watching the pomp and circumstance. I’ve always said that I’d like to go to Rome when the Pope dies. They is a 70mm movie from the 60s that has some great scenes of the papal succession ceremonies “The Shoes of the Fisherman” starring Anthony Quinn.

Trivia: Here is a list of presidents going backwards in the order they died:

• Living: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Carter, Ford
• Ronald Reagan – 2004
• Richard Nixon – 1994
• Lyndon Johnson – 1973
• Harry Truman – 1972
• Dwight Eisenhower – 1969
• Herbert Hoover – 1964
• John Kennedy – 1963*
• Franklin Roosevelt – 1945*
• Calvin Coolidge – 1933
• William Taft – 1930
• Woodrow Wilson – 1924
• Warren Harding – 1923*
• Theodore Roosevelt – 1919
• Grover Cleveland – 1908
• William McKinley – 1901*
• Benjamin Harrison – 1901
• Rutheford Hayes – 1893
• Chester Arthur – 1886
• Ulysses Grant – 1885
• James Garfield – 1881*
• Andrew Johnson – 1875
• Millard Fillmore – 1874
• Franklin Pierce – 1869
• James Buchanan – 1868
• Abraham Lincoln – 1865*
• Martin Van Buren – 1862
• John Tyler – 1862
• Zackary Taylor – 1850*
• James Polk – 1849
• John Quincy Adams – 1848
• Andrew Jackson – 1845
• William Henry Harrison – 1841*
• James Madison – 1836
• James Monroe – 1831
• Thomas Jefferson – 1826
• John Adams – 1826
• George Washington – 1799

• The transit of Venus was this morning. I got up to go to Hopkins to see it, saw the cloud cover, and went back to bed. Only an hour was visible in MN anyhow. Thanks to the internet, lots of live webcasts were available from around the world.
• Tampa won the Stanley Cup. This is wrong. There should be no NHL teams in cities where it doesn’t snow. Phoenix, LA, Tampa, San Jose, etc. should all get the boot.
• I like physics, but the labs are pretty stupid. When they say things fall at a certain rate, I’ll take their word for it. I took some exams from the MIT Open Course site and did well on them.
• I’m starting biology and differential equations/linear algebra in a week. I’m taking the math class pass/fail because I already have credit for it because I took them at Macalester.

Here is another thing I found which is interesting. In 1947, Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, testified before the House Un-American Affairs Committee. This was before (Appleton, WI native) Joseph McCarthy was elected to the Senate.

Here is his testimony.

Here’s a fun fact for you. I was born on August 24, 1969. If I had a gestation period of exactly nine months, that means I was conceived on December 24, 1968….Christmas Eve. 12/24/68 wasn’t just Christmas Eve however, it was a pretty memorable day for humanity, which I think can explain my current path through academia.

That fun fact aside, with the passing of Reagan, it made me realize how many of the current crop of kids in high school are about as familiar with him as I was with LBJ. Love him or hate him, Reagan was president from the time I was 11 till my freshman year in college. I can still remember watching all the election results for both elections, watching the conventions (yeah, I did that stuff even at that age), him, John Lennon and the Pope all getting shot (I didn’t know who John Lennon was at the time. I knew who the Beatles were, but not that he was in the group. My mom had to tell me.) I was between classes my junior year in high school when the space shuttle blew up.

I had about $600 in a savings account that my parents had kept for me from when I was born. I spent the whole thing on an Apple IIc in high school. Not a bad investment actually. I had no modem, and only later did I even get a printer. No hard drive, one floppy drive (the 5.25″ ones), and a tiny monochrome green screen.

My parents and their siblings were borne right after WWII. They didn’t experience the depression or the war. The thing they remember is Kennedy being shot and man landing on the moon. My grandparents had the stories of the depression and the war. My great-grandfather, who died when I was 14, served in WWI, having been sent to France. I’m sure his parents were all worked up over the gold standard.

My dad purchased a calculator sometime in the 1970s. The display had red LCD’s. He still has it in fact. I had a solar power calculator that I got in high school that did basic arithmetic and some trig functions. I still have it. Kids today all have graphing calculators.

This isn’t some lament for the past. Just an acknowledgment that some events and things during your formative years serve as reference points for you, and if your younger or older, your going to have different reference points. Reagan was a reference point, as I’m sure Clinton or Bush is to the ones who came after, in a way they just aren’t to people who are older.