News from the Plains. All this RED can make you BLUE
Is it Noonan or is it Not
by Barry Friedman
In which Noonan opines on the government shutdown.
When parties like the Tea Party insult--like when people insult--it hurts. Person to person, party to party, memory to memory, GOP alta kocker to GOP young buck--shame, shame Johnny Mac-- it matters not. And it hurts in a way that words, which are so tough for me to write anyway, cannot explain.
The words they come, but they do not leave. They are lodged deep within where only young Peg has been.
I think of great Republicans today: Robert Taft, Ronald Reagan, Tom Kean, and JC Watts.
My breasts, alas, feel heavy with memory and loss and words and even more memory.
I feel hurt deep down--so very deep down--where my womanhood wails a clarion call and where my memories go for sustenance and nourishment and power and thrust and rebirth. You know that feeling you have when you pick up a strange younger man at an In and Out Burger with whom you frolic for a weekend half-naked in a senior staffer’s beach house and then awaken on Monday only to discover your young Thor is gone (and he has left you a grammatically-challenged note on the divan which speaks of his "intermost feelings" and it makes you giggle) and, yet, you spend the morning clutching a pink blanket you have had since you were a lass, rocking back and forth, wondering, alas, if love has fled?
Yes, that kind of hurt.
Today, because of the Tea Party, the country is that lass, a lass who wonders where her innocence is, where her paradigm has gone. It feels hurt and used and violated and in need of a bath with bubbles and vibrating, water-proof toys.
Where are the George Patakis of the world, of the party, when you need them? Where is the the Republican heart?
I weep because the party of Reagan, he who has such a heart, did this ... a party that has taken the name “Tea,” a name that suggests calm and a loosening of phlegm did this.
I weep because it is no longer the party of Reagan.
I weep because Reagan is no longer.
My blanket awaits. My womanhood yearns. My heart, breasts, soul, prose is heavy.
A country is in bed with me.