Earliest Political Memory

That despicable Tory, Caroline Hunt, has apparently tagged me in a blog meme. Being relatively new to the blogosphere, I have not heard of this practice before, but it seems quite straightforward - a bit like a chain letter. So, assuming that if I don't do this I will die a prompt and horrible death, I will now describe my Earliest Political Memory.

Such a task allows for a certain amount of self-mythologisation, a projection onto one's tiny past self of a formative instance that describes who one is today, or a version of what one would like to be. I could re-imagine my responses to the Gulf War, or the fall of the Berlin Wall which were, in truth, half-hearted and, well, childlike. I could invent a serious-minded five-year-old me who followed the catastrophes of the Sudanese Civil War with insight and mature world-weariness. All I really knew though, was that there was a War. What I will do, unsurprisingly, is bring it all back to Reagan.

Unfortunately, even here I have no clear memory of a single incident which set me on the course to where I am today, no recollection of any pithy insight or revelation. I do remember Reagan being The President, and that simple conflation could perhaps be the root of the fascination with which I regard him now. Scratching my head, the earliest memory of any specific reaction to Reagan involves a cartoon in Mad magazine from, I guess, 1987 or '88. I read this issue several times on that summer trip to the States, and it included comical take-offs of the movies Splash, and Big, I think. The cartoon in question was part of a series with the theme "It's cute when../It's not cute when..", and in this case went "It's cute when your children play at Cowboys. It's not cute when the President of the USA plays at cowboys." The images showed a delightful scamp in hat and bandana running around with a toy gun, juxtaposed with a caricature of the Gipper himself dressed in buckskins, grinning goofily and saddling up on a nuclear missile, to the alarm of some worried looking aides. I remember being informed enough at the time to understand why this was funny, and quite enjoying the idea of a happy man riding around on the back of a missile.

So that's it, I'll now pass on the burden and demand that dcat recount for us his memory of Strom Thurmond entering the Senate, or whatever.