News from the Plains: All this RED can make you BLUE
Is it Noonan or is it Not?
by Barry Friedman
Oh, the horror
And, too, came a book this week, COLLISION 2012 (but, ah, not a revolution, not seen)... of a victory, of a man she, this female Clinton, hopes to replace.
When I read books—and, oh, how I love the words in them. So many, so, so many of them. Four-letter ones, five, sometimes more—I think not so much about what they’re saying, but what they’re saying to me.
I am joyous.
A great book, like a great president, though, strokes your soul.
And, oh, how I feel when I think of the great ones. Washington, Jefferson, Reagan, GONE WITH THE WIND, JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL, the POTTER books, anything by L'Amour.
Men. Books.
Breathe. Must breathe.
Hillary Clinton? Non.
Yes, let me tell you about this book... I embraced it, held it close to my breast, both of them … between them, really—about the campaign that this Obama won, this Obama who won before, this Obama who would—how it hurts to say this—win again. This Obama who reads—and I spit out those words—from a teleprompter. This Obama does not embrace his words the way you would a lover, but uses them, like a prostitute. He wants them to perform, “do” things for him. He abuses words, touches them where they shouldn’t be touched, dirties them, and then tosses a few bucks, a few phrases at us when he’s done, waves, smiles, and then leaves.
I hurt, I grieve, thinking about that.
To wash, to bathe.
This was no Bill Clinton. That Clinton, the male, her husband—the man before the man before--hit on words, took them out, wined and dined them, made love to them passionately, masterfully. And the words, like the nation, like so many, if we are to believe the sordid tales, succumbed.
It was an embrace.
He called the next morning.
I felt it, even if I didn’t fall for it.
But now with this Obama, we get—I don’t know.
It’s tough—so tough to talk about. I am here, straining to make sense—but it’s economic, sexual, positional.
The top get love, the bottom get love. But what of us in the middle?
When he bedded us, this president, first with his speeches and then with his policies, he didn’t call the next morning, he didn’t buy croissants and pastries or a place a single solitary rose in the champagne flute. He simply left us, wrapped up in sheet, bemused, troubled. What happened, we ask, as we pushed back the hair from our faces and clutched the pillow?
He squeezes the middle class and then asks them—all of us, really—how it felt to have been squoze.
What kind of lover would Hillary be?
What kind will this miniseries tell us she will be?
Will Bill reveal?
It makes me sick.
It makes me grieve.
(It makes me, frankly, curious.)
I long for monogamy.
I long to be squeezed again.
I long to be called.
I long to find a president who knows me.
I long for long-stem roses.
I long to date again.