When halos were in short supply

Now come witnesses for the devil’s advocate, to say uncomfortable things in the case of Ronald Reagan and the contest for how he will settle into the cultural memory.

Even as those who hold up the 40th president as a political colossus the equivalent of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt forge ahead with canonization -- there are efforts to name some piece of infrastructure for him in all of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties, and to get his picture on the dime -- art is resistant.

As two recent dramatizations of the Reagan years suggest, memories embedded in art remain raw even as the guns of partisan rancor turn to other targets.

Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” a two-part, six-hour history play about AIDS and gay life in America, is more than a decade old.

Watching it, in a starry film version on HBO currently airing, is a time warp, a return to a world where, for pockets of American society, hating Reagan was as elemental as hating August without air conditioning.

The play has become dated in some ways, but none of them particularly damning. Kushner’s language of gay life, the campy asides, has been absorbed into the American vernacular, as familiar from today’s “Will & Grace” as it was exotic to audiences unfamiliar with gay society a decade ago.

The millennial gloom of his characters, their sense that the world is falling apart, strange apparitions are in the air and nuclear holocaust is nigh, feels dated not so much because the world didn’t end on schedule, but because it has been supplanted by a new, terror-infused nervousness.

But it is the rancor against Reagan that feels strangest and most bracing in Kushner’s play. Almost 15 years after he left office, and almost 10 years after Alzheimer’s disease forced Reagan to leave public life, the ex-president is hailed by his supporters as the father of the current conservative movement.

But those who resist his canonization cite his blunders in office, his disengagement with critical affairs of state and the damage done by the Iran-Contra scandal.

It seems, for the moment, that the former are winning the argument.

Consider the fate of “The Reagans,” a miniseries originally made for CBS but consigned to the gulag of cable television’s Showtime channel after outraged conservatives cowed network executives.

It was mediocre as drama and unenlightening as history, but its quirky depiction of Reagan and his wife, Nancy, has earned it a strange affection among lovers of political camp.

It was criticized as historically inaccurate, though it hewed closely to biographical sources (which may or may not be accurate) that are there for anyone to consult.

Kushner, whose play is vastly superior to “The Reagans,” says he found the television drama enlightening, if only for its inadvertent revelations about the president’s style and public performance.

When James Brolin, as Reagan, recites language from the president’s most famous speeches, they sound ridiculous to Kushner.

“You realize that his famous public speeches were primarily a big pile of gobbledygook. You listen to them and think, who ever thought up this oratory? This is just drivel, and yet they are fairly reasonable representations” of Reagan’s rhetoric.

Factual accuracy can, to some degree, be sorted out by historians. But tonal accuracy -- for instance, does Brolin caricature or unmask the man? -- is infinitely subjective.

For conservatives, the real crime of “The Reagans” is its tone of unrelenting irreverence. In a democracy, there’s no obligation to be respectful (indeed, there may be an obligation to be anything but respectful).

But Reagan is undergoing a metamorphosis that places him outside the usual rules of democratic etiquette and criticism.

Because of his advanced age, and because it is unseemly to kick a man when he can’t defend himself, there has been a suspension of much of the usual partisan reevaluation in his case.

People who hated Reagan for his tax policies, treatment of the poor, handling of the AIDS crisis and belligerent rhetoric have moved on to new targets.

This is a natural tendency. Activists stay focused on the power at hand, and Reagan is only an active power to his political descendants who would resurrect him as a patriarch.

Which leaves the field clear for Reagan to become an almost regal figure, more symbol than politician, and protected, to some degree, by the sense that while the king may be imperfect, there is royal prerogative to keep his private life immune from unseemly dissection.

Unlike “The Reagans,” the Reagans don’t actually appear in “Angels.” They are the unseen avatars of the era, an attitude, a view of right and wrong, that is held in contempt by the characters of Kushner’s play. They are much discussed, and it’s clear that for most of the characters (some conservative Mormons excepted), Reaganism stands for selfishness, greed, indifference to suffering, philosophical vacuity and saber-rattling patriotism.

But despite the polemics of his characters, Kushner’s play is not itself a polemic. The peculiar genius of “Angels” is that it places a higher value on the capacity to hear and understand one’s political opponents than on purity of ideological commitment.

Kushner’s absent but omnipotent Reagan is also a regal figure. He is hidden in the palace, but stamping his imprint on the era, as much by the rhetoric he tolerates and the allies he indulges as by direct intervention in the cultural dialogue. Reagan, says Kushner, didn’t cause AIDS, but benefited from “an unholy alliance of fiscal conservatives and the religious right.”

Kushner argues that to maintain that alliance, any show of sympathy or concern about AIDS had to be muted. Within his own administration, people like Surgeon General C. Everett Koop fought to put it on the agenda, while people like his chief of staff, Donald Regan, were happy if it was kept off. In “Reagan: The Man and His Presidency,” a 1998 collection of recollections about Reagan, Regan summed up the administration’s discomfort succinctly: “How far do you want to go to make the world safe for immoral practices?”

As for Reagan’s own feelings, as in so many things about the man, they remain largely a mystery. But that, for people who suffered from AIDS, is precisely the problem; Reagan is guilty of a sin of symbolic omission.

The angels, in “Angels in America,” have a message for human beings: God has abandoned his creation. He will not return, they argue, until man slows down and stops his relentless efforts to reforge the world and unlock its secrets. Stasis, say these obnoxious seraphim, is how we will entice God back to his children.

For art, that was precisely the issue. Move forward, or turn back the clocks. Reaganism, many artists felt, was a return to the childhood of understanding, simple, happy and recklessly indulgent. Reaganism, other artists demonstrated, stood for a primal need to find comfort in traditionalism.

By either definition it’s clear we are locked, today, in a suspended moment of Reaganism. Because he is ill but alive, he is still with us but personally off-limits.

But because the current political leadership not only invokes him as inspiration but has embraced some of his policies, he is still an active political presence. And the basic contest between the comforts of traditionalism and the distaste for nostalgic fantasy still defines our culture. It may be a long time before we move forward.

Man rejects the angels’ message in Kushner’s play, continuing his struggle, moving forward because only in moving forward is there any consolation.

If Kushner’s play lasts, and given that it has become a basic text for many colleges and even some high school students, it shows every sign of lasting, then this prophecy (we are restless, not regressive) remains in play. The argument continues.

Hidden beneath the current political effort at canonization is the artistic memory of what it felt like, as one of the millions of Americans who didn’t vote for Reagan, to live under the mantle of Reagan. The simple-minded way of saying this is that the debunking pen of artistic criticism may yet prove mightier than the canonizing sword of political symbolism.