E-Mail This Article to a Friend FEAR FACTORS: REAL AND IMAGINED My run-ins with Reagan BY CHRIS WRIGHT

On this day 22 years ago — June 8, 1982 — Ronald Reagan stood before the British Parliament and delivered a speech that left many Britons, myself included, scared shitless.

This was Reagan’s first trip to England, and his most memorable. The president started his address sedately enough, talking of the "severe economic strain" that gripped the UK at the time — a topic with which I was intimately familiar. I was 19, unemployed, and had little to do with my days but sit around smoking weed and pondering the end of the world. It was this, the end of the world, that President Reagan had really come to England to talk about.

There are parts of Reagan’s speech that seem relevant to our own age. He spoke of "the scourge of terrorism" in the Middle East, the need to foster freedom around the world. "It would be cultural condescension, or worse," he intoned, "to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy." Reagan went on to quote a Winston Churchill line that seems particularly germane right now: "[America] is the only case I know of a bull who carries his china shop with him." Odd words, perhaps, for a president already encumbered with a reputation for bull-headedness. Like George W. today, Reagan was regarded as a bit of a cowboy.

But 1982 was a different time. For all the talk of the scary world we live in now, the early ’80s were, for me at least, scarier. The Soviet Union was packing much more firepower than Al Qaeda — enough to incinerate us all, we were told, many times over. As Reagan put it, "There are threats ... to our very existence." Our very existence. Clearly, that pre-speech joint was a mistake. Phrases like "totalitarian evil" and "predictions of doomsday" had physical presence; I could feel the End Times closing in around me. "Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms?" the president asked, and I wasn’t sure I had an answer.

A week or so after Reagan’s visit, I saw him.

It was a hot, sticky June afternoon. I’m not sure why, but I’d decided to go sit in the Public Gallery at the Houses of Parliament and watch the pols do their thing. In line outside, it occurred to me that I had a ball of hashish in my pocket. No problem — I’d stick it in my mouth, then retrieve it when I got through security. Except when I got to security, I panicked: I chewed; I swallowed. An indeterminate time later — an hour, a year — I became dementedly high. I needed out.

The seats in the gallery were steep, cramped, and when I stood, I kneed the head of the guy in front. He swiveled and gave me a look that made me yelp. The wattled neck, the crest of oily hair, the floppy frown. The Gipper! In front of me! Annoyed! I stumbled and clawed my way from that room as if I’d looked into the face of Death, and in a way I had. Though I knew a huge and sudden infusion of THC had fueled my vision, I couldn’t rid myself of the fear it stirred. "We see around us today the marks of our terrible dilemma," the president had said before a hushed audience, back in 1982. And we still do. We still see the marks of what Reagan and his generation left behind.

Ronald Reagan is gone now, but I cannot mourn him. He’s there when I close my eyes.