One of my favorite books is John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. The narrator tells the story of Owen, his tiny childhood friend who speaks in a raspy but booming voice, but he does so in retrospect, while living in Canada as an expatriot. The plotline of the childhood friend is interspersed with real newspaper headlines about the Reagan administration. The narrator's response to each of the headlines about Reagan pretty well captions what has been going through my head since Tuesday.