he world took a long, mournful pause, or perhaps a quiet vacation, when Ronald Reagan passed away of natural (or supernatural) causes June 5, after a long bout with Alzheimer's that apparently plagued him all his life. He was ancient.

Despite the week of funeral processions, not all machinations in America stopped, as grief-stricken politicians began the work of "tidying up" the Reagan legacy as president of the United States of America, 1981-1988, and a phantom on the political scene ever since.

A week of remembrance has reminded us frequently of Reagan's strong moral values, his deep faith, his dedication to democracy, how he made it "okay" to be a "patriot," and that charming way he had of ignoring important questions. Mostly forgotten are Reagan's fundamentalist cow-towing, his close-minded prejudices, his fascistic pursuit of global democracy, the mania of conformity he embraced, and how the poor dangled on the shit stick for the entire duration of his reign. All minor changes in the book of American history rewritten in the wake of the president's death.

A proponent of America as the Enforcer, Reagan ran up a national deficit in the trillions of dollars chasing military superiority, even though our nearest rival, Russia, had no hopes of keeping up. Conservatives point to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had begun happening long before, as proof Reagan's policy was a success, which is quite like saying taking out six mortgages on your house is worth it if your neighbor can no longer afford his house payments.

The military build-up came with a price, of course, as social programs were mauled as if by a big Libertarian bear. Welfare slashed, minimum wage ignored for years, leading to a growing body of working men and women living beneath the poverty line, and don't make anyone piss themselves laughing by asking about school funding and the arts. So important was the stealth bomber the president even slashed the runaway costs of school free lunch programs, and made ketchup a vegetable to meet national health requirements.

Blind to any problem created after communism, Reagan led a government effort to ignore the AIDS crisis until it had ravaged whole communities and helped conservatives who believed AIDS a homosexual plague carried on by promiscuity remain comfortably ignorant. A wise decision, since avoiding spending anything to save American lives allowed the purchase of the Patriot missile, which didn't work, and of course allowed him to piggy bank money for his masterpiece: Star Wars, a cheeky name for his imaginative laser defense system that would stop "just about" every nuclear missile aimed at the United States and give us real tactical superiority over Russia should a Roland Emmerich movie ever occur here. But don't worry, nostalgias—the current president hasn't given up on the fantasy.

But we shouldn't, however, forget Reagan the man. The wealth of misinformation he gave us entertained people everywhere. According to Reagan, trees were bad for the environment, homeless people preferred living on the streets, hired mercenaries fighting for right-wing causes were "freedom fighters," and important decisions betraying your own political ideological statements weren't worth remembering. Lest we forget, he also expanded presidential powers into strikebusting by firing the air traffic controllers like a $400,000 a year Pinkerton.

Even as the sorrow winds up for America, text book manufacturers are busy as we speak preparing the Reagan legacy for the next generation of leaders.

According to Shouton-Felix's Greg Ward, a history book editor: "I think we've decided to skip all the irrelevant material from 1981-1988, people only seem to remember The A-Team and New Wave music from the decade anyway. We think Reagan's presidency is best represented by a full-page headshot of the president, with the caption: 'Win one for the Gipper!'"

he death of former president Ronald Reagan was followed by a week-long awkwardness as non-conservatives, especially the left-leaning and liberal-slanted individuals across the nation, searched for something socially acceptable to say about the late Californian.

The normal mixed feelings of seeing a longtime political adversary take a dirt nap were compounded by the unrelenting, merciless coverage of sunny-side up Reagan throughout the week since his death on June 5. For liberals, who had previously been pouring on the rancor against two-dimensional Reaganite George W. Bush and his re-election campaign, the "sudden" death of the 93-year-old ex-president and conservative icon created an uncomfortable air for expressing their views of the modern political climate, and the right-wing politics inherited from Reagan’s administration.

Daniel Kirkland, a talk show on the left-wing radio network Air America, summed up the difficulty of liberal commentary in the past week.

"You hate to see anybody die, regardless of their politics," said Kirkland, "but if Muhammad Ali died, and everyone was going around pretending he won every boxing match when he stepped into the ring, you’d start to feel the urge to remind everyone about the losses. Why does someone have to all of a sudden be perfect just because they died?"

Even the usual safe-havens for liberal free speech have felt the pressure to be nice during the funeral hoopla, and the pressure has begun to show.

"You’d think God himself died," grumbled Tina Crowley, a Green Party campaign organizer in Trenton, New Jersey. "Nobody here has even wanted to talk about politics all this week. And we’re the friggin’ Green Party. Some people were even saying some nice things about Reagan here, it was enough to drive you batshit. Like ’Maybe James Watt didn’t intend to do all that environmental damage.’ Yeah, that’s possible."

Professor of Sociology Deatria Lumley experienced the same difficulties with the ex-president’s death.

"Separating a man from his work is easy outside politics, but becomes all the more impossible when that man was a president," said Lumley. "He may have been a nice guy in his private life, but as someone who works with deteriorating underclasses and witnessing first hand the cuts to social programs and the damage it does, myself and people in my profession find it difficult to conform to social expectations of funeral etiquette."

Adding her own thoughts on Reagan, Lumley complimented him, "The man didn’t blow us up, no matter how close we might have come. It keeps me up at night thinking about just how close."

Other liberal mourners included public defender Jacob Howitzer: "He always gave us a lot of laughs. Not directly, or at least I guess he didn’t realize it was funny. Phil Hartman, he did a cool Reagan impression on Saturday Night Live." Howitzer added: "I miss him, I really do. Hartman was a genius."

Another mourner, leaflet distributor Bryan Forbes: "He had nice hair."

Folk concert organizer and self-described "Earth Mother" Loretta Melbourne: "Fuck it. He was a prick. Call me a cold bitch, I just plain didn’t like him."

I received an angry reader email this week, which for the first time in my life didn't involve Viagra, my Superbowl predictions, or a time share in the Balkans, so I thought I'd grant it some precious column time here. Concerned reader Munay Dubutu of the Bronx recently moved to these friendly shores from the decidedly unfriendly shores of Namibia, and is pissed off that his toilet water is spinning the wrong way. Though he has attempted to remedy this problem by purchasing a special spinning toilet, Munay finds the fact that his water now just goes straight down to be vaguely unsatisfying. How, Munay asks, has the government managed to control his water and where can he buy a gun? After I explained to Munay that guns are readily available on most New York street corners, I realized there were probably other poor, huddled mass-like readers out there wondering why water drains counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, yet clockwise in the pagan Southern Hemisphere.

I'm glad somebody finally asked this question, because I'm sick as a dog of listening to well-meaning momos give the incorrect answer in bars and at science symposiums. The reason for the bathtub drain (or toilet, or record player for that matter) switcheroo is because the earth itself rotates counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, and clockwise in the Southern. The government has kept this mostly a secret for years, to keep people from flocking to the equator to check this shit out in person. But it is nevertheless truthy. For this reason, crossing the equator has proved a dangerous proposition for travelers since the beginning of time, challenging daring souls to leap across the equator with the hope that they timed their jump well enough to end up in the part of the Southern Hemisphere they wanted to get to.

Since the earth rotates at 1,000 miles an hour in the Northern Hemisphere, and 1,200 mph in the Southern (slightly faster due to the bottom half of the earth being lighter), crossing the equator is similar to attempting to jump onto a train going 2,200 miles an hour, a daunting task in itself that has produced more than a few hobo pancakes. To make matters worse, timing your jump is always a bit of a roulette gamble, since entire countries are only lined up for a few minutes out of the day, plus you don't want to jump into some other-hemisphere-fleeing douchebag who's trying to jump across the opposite way at the same time. Coconut-sounding skull collisions and severely bruised egos often result, much to the glee of the audiences that gather at the most-popular equator crossings.

Complex systems have developed in equatorial nations to cope with Earth's geological quirk, including the brave mailmen who hand off letters and packages across the divide, often suffering decapitative papercuts and parcel burns in the process. And a special prayer must be said for the unlucky souls who live on one side of the equator and work on the other, making the dangerous commute twice daily. Few can forget the story of the Brazilian meter reader who was late to work one day and carelessly jumped across the equator into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Thankfully, someone in Indonesia was able to throw him a life preserver and a hot dog several minutes later, and some relatives with a hook grabbed him the next day. But others are not so lucky, leading to a booming casket and wall-scraping business in most equatorial towns.

This phenomena is especially challenging for ships at sea, since the unwary sailor can easily shipwreck on a beach that wasn't there a second ago, or sometimes even into downtown Singapore. Even when they do manage to time it right and hit the fat part of the ocean, ships still have to contend with the sudden 2,200 mph change in velocity and direction, which all throughout history has led to the kind of rollover fatalities the world wouldn't see again until the Suzuki Samurai. There's a very slim margin for error in crossing the equator in a boat: either you get the timing and angle just right and hold on for the 2,200 mph ride of your life, or you die very, very suddenly.

Even in the modern era, planes have difficulty compensating for the equatorial rotation shift. Say you're late taking off from Heathrow because some tit had an expired salami in his luggage, on a flight to Ecuador. You try to make up some time by cutting in line on the runway and burning your special reserve tank of Dave's Insanity Fuel, but still, by the time you get to where Ecuador should be, it's the Democratic Republic of Congo. Shit. Then your navigator's got to figure out the best way to get to Ecuador from the Congo, if you should just turn right or if it would be faster to hop back across the equator and fly the other way until Ecuador comes back around again. Then your navigator and your copilot get in an argument over which half is spinning which way that you have to settle by drawing a diagram and twirling your hands in opposite directions, which makes you nauseous and you crash in the Congo and are eaten by bush people. Government scientists believe this to have been the fate of most of the vessels lost in the famous "Bermuda Triangle."

Law enforcement is especially difficult near the equator, since villains on the run can always leap across the equator to safety, much like screen-side warp zones in Pac-Man. Unless the felon spends the next 24 hours sitting in that very spot gloating, or comes back the next day to show a friend exactly where he outsmarted the fuzz, the police are unlikely to ever see him again.

Television ratings, employment rates, and sporting event attendance are also especially poor near the equator, since people in equatorial towns spend most of their time sitting in lawn chairs, watching the world whiz by at incredible speeds, and pointing out people they recognize. Some have even developed friendships with "other-siders" over the years, in spite of the limitation of only being able to shout one word to each other every day, usually "Hi!"

Now you know why your toilet water spins the way it does. The only question that remains is why you spend so much time staring into the toilet. For that answer, I refer you to a licensed professional.

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