Nancy Reagan's death leads me to wonder about what she really thought of the 2015-2016 Republican presidential race.  The candidates, though they invoke the spirit of Mrs. Reagan's late husband, dead since 2004, another election year, as if Ronald Reagan would've approved of their faux Conservatism, will doubtless extol the virtues of the former first lady who brought, after the relative plainness of the Carter administration, aristocratic trappings to the White House.
     Nancy and Ronald Reagan's aristocracy, of course, was the ersatz American variety: Hollywood royalty.  Anne Robbins, originally, she acted in films in the 1940s and 1950s under the name Nancy Davis.  I've seen her in only one film, East Side, West Side, an excellent melodrama starring James Mason, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ava Gardner.  She plays Stanwyck's friend, has one good scene sitting opposite Stanwyck listening to her problems.  I noted how elegantly dressed and coiffed Davis was, with white gloves, a trim hat, and perfectly styled dark hair.  This image translated later to the nation's regard of President Reagan's wife, both of them actual movie stars, if a tad minor-scale compared to performers like Errol Flynn, Robert Taylor, Bette Davis, and Joan Fontaine.  Even so, the White House had never held such occupants.  If Trump and his Slovenian ex-model wife ever occupy the White House, a similar kind of glamor, the type that attaches itself barnacle-like to famous people, will probably reign again in Washington, D.C.
     All of this is, from a substance standpoint, on the illusory end of things.  We see presidents and their wives at fancy functions.  Barack Obama had Paul McCartney serenade Michelle Obama with the Beatles song, "Michelle."  Who gets to do such a thing for his wife?  You have to have significant clout to ask a Beatle to further your chance of getting laid good and right by your wife of many years on the night of the soiree.  Obama has been criticized by grumps on Fox News as being too friendly to Hollywood and also to music industry powerhouses like Jay Z and his wife Beyoncé Knowles.  Obama's reaching out to glamor is aided by the fact that most movie actors and actresses are liberals. The Right, pathetically, can boast of such luminaries as Stacey Dash and Chuck Norris, Ted Nugent and the Duck Dynasty family.
     Complaints from the Right about Nancy and Ronald Reagan's Hollywood connections are non-existent, even though, created in the stew of American moviemaking in the classical studio period, they had an abundance of friends and colleagues of multiple political perspectives.  Nancy Reagan's dear friend, Frank Sinatra, was a major John Kennedy supporter.
     It's often said that the Reagans brought class to the White House; a renewed spirit of pro-Americanism as well.  His accelerated nuclear weapons program stoked America's arms industry, helped cripple the Soviet Union financially.  His feel-good invasion of Grenada in 1983 renewed the hopes of militaristic nutjobs in the ability of American might to conquer undermanned and outgunned third world armies.
     Nancy Reagan's own crusade, "Just Say No," was an attempt to prevent kids from trying illegal drugs.  Promoting this, she appeared in an episode of the sitcom, Diff'rent Strokes, in 1983, the year before crack use in Los Angeles expanded to epidemic proportions.  Under her husband, the CIA during that time, heavily involved with Nicaraguan Contras and their cocaine trafficking, contributed to the overall problem of cocaine and cocaine-derivative use in the United States.  Was Nancy aware of this?  Was Ronald?  Did they live in a dream world, inhabiting a dream castle of power wedded to the nation's entertainment complex?
     I don't suggest that Nancy Reagan was a bad person.  In many ways, I liked her.  I'm fond of first ladies (except Barbara Bush).  They tend to come off much better than their husbands.  Even Laura Bush, whose husband I resented during his presidency and still despise for the harm he did to the Constitution, to his own country, to the people of the Middle East and South Asia, strikes me as a decent enough person in her own right.  Will I like Trump's wife if she becomes first lady?  Some "controversy" surrounding her thus far deals with her modeling career, and allegedly risqué work-related photos.  Can America handle a first lady who has shown off her body?  This question, asked on TV news programs, misses the main point: if this woman becomes first lady it means Donald Trump will be president, a far more frightening prospect than his wife having bared herself to photographers when she had a job that logically called for her to do so.
     I fantasize that Nancy Reagan, though ninety-four, really died of despair as she contemplated the bleak possibilities in her husband's party as the Republicans seek to reoccupy the White House.  Maybe she didn't want to find out the results of the November election.

                                                                                 Vic Neptune