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But government as accountability is the government Reagan hates -- the need for policy to connect the anecdotes he thinks in, to trace consequences, to lay legal groundwork, to account for funds, to consider precedent. Routine, procedure, bureaucracy -- all these offend the dramatic instincts of Reagan, which call for the single interposition that turns the tide.
The civil service mind is at the antipodes of the heroic individual. Americans share this scorn for bureaucracy, which George Wallace had capitalized on in the elections preceding Reagan's. There is something depressing to the American spirit about having to keep the accounts of a world empire. We would have the empire without the sophisticated, compromising, accommodating mentality that it takes to administer vast responsibilities. We would keep the mores of a small village -- indeed of Reagan's own youth -- in a time of great technological change and manipulation. Individual heroes were produced at State of the Union addresses to represent the "real America" in our complex age of interdependence.
Having to pretend with Reagan that ordinary government is a deadening imposition on the citizens, not their forum or their court of appeals, officials in the Reagan Administration could only move him with stirring tales or magic weapons -- with SDI, with an economic program that promised to eliminate government interference, with secret raids of punishment or rescue. The ordinary work of government had to go on under the claim that it was being phased out -- a dream of the absurd that reached its peak in David Stockman's strenuous exercise in omnidirectional pretense. Reagan called Stockman into his office to assure him that the press accounts of what was going on at the Office of Management and Budget were false. Stockman knew they were not false but had to pretend they were, because that pleased the President. Pretending to believe the pretended things the President actually believed became a governmental duty. Irresponsibility was institutionalized in its root sense -- nonresponsiveness to reality. One can give no account of a reality one has been compelled, often enough, to deny.
The nonresponsiveness of the President to his own crisis came not only from his own instincts to deny unpleasant realities but from the long-standing adjustments of the machinery of government around him to humor him in his beliefs, however bizarre -- to use those beliefs to feign agreement, even to play with the temptation of believing when that was profitable. It was a happy Nuremberg, after all. Since the people wanted to be fooled, and enjoyed it so, why should one resist the fooling? "Keep lying to us" was the implicit plea of the electorate. No wonder many people around Reagan learned so well to respond to that plea. At Reykjavik, the glow began to go off -- the jolliers- along of Reagan's SDI fantasies saw him about to give up the Western arsenal! With Iran, it dimmed more: the great charmer of Gorbachev was going to woo hostages out of Khomeini's regime!
The man who had done so many impossible things in his own mind was now trying to do undesirable things in the real world. So bits and pieces of the real world began to reappear, looking as improbable as the pretense they must compete with. The process is not like refuting an argument. It is more like breaking a spell.