News from the Plains: All this RED can make you Blue
Is it Nooner or Is it Not?
by Barry Friedman
"In the vast vastness of these unraveling, unkempt, unseemly, unrelated stories about the IRS and Egypt, yes, Benghazi, and that black man-child in the Sunshine State (and how it still shines), you wonder if this Obama—this man of a white woman and ne’er-do-well black prince with the terrorist name and the Kansas plains and an Indonesian school system where dashikis and falafel and curry were allowed—understands that the vast (that word again—it’s so big) majority of good and decent Americans (and, yes, many were white and, so what, many are) who work, who save, who pay taxes, who yearn to visit pyramids never knew what it was like to spend afternoons on an upper Manhattan grassy quad, on student loans, in a place called Columbia, talking about black nationalism and Marshall and Coltrane and thinking of a day when they would autograph pictures for a crying John Lewis. Perhaps, if this Barry (I kind of like the name—he is approachable when I used it. I think him silly and I laugh, for he, too, is a black man-child. But our BM-C, even Zimmerman's) understood that we weren’t all so—and, yes, I, a white woman, will say this to, yes, a BM-C—entitled.
I, for one, went to college, too, but far, far, far away from New York … New Jersey, its ugly sister, its cousin, its runt—Fairleigh Dickinson University to be exact—and I sat in the lunchroom and ate off plastic trays and dreamed of an America and a man with broad shoulders and pecs and a sad smile who would take me riding and to the beach. I cried, too, but not for photos, per se, but for a picture of an America, a place for which RR, the man known simply as 'The Gipper,' lived and died (and let the critics say RR would have died anyway—I scoff at their scoffing). That America, firmly on a hill—in the morning I see it best—after the revolution, which I don’t know if I mentioned, but I witnessed. I weep even now, even as I—yes, liberals, yes—file my quarterly estimates and think, through my tears, of pharaohs, of (at least) quasi-hooded boys who can defend themselves, and ghostly, ghastly Libyan port cities."--P. Noonan