News from the Plains: All this RED can make you BLUE
Peggy <3s Bob
by Barry Friedman
When I think of sitting here next to greatness, next to Bob Woodward, well, wow. It’s not like sitting near Reagan--his feet, I remember most. And, oh, what feet they were: strong, firm, their sinews visible, pulsating, proud, up on the desk--who would usually be doodling or eating jelly beans or napping.
Still, here, with Bob, it’s darned exciting. I gush. As we all know, he has that deep voice (you know important he is by how he winds up, if you will, to make a point) and it makes me think of the books he has written, the books I have, which are pillars of anyone’s journalistic library, and how beautifully they capsulize where we are as a country, as a nation, as an entity, as a commonwealth, as a republic--and I strain to find yet another way to say what I just said--as a place.
Bob is so darned good. Heck, if I could write like that, I would.
Tears, smiles, exhales.
But the point.
When I listen to tales of the Kennedy assassination, I wonder--wonder--if it would be better if we didn’t know how gullible, how stupid, how in the dark we were. It would like being in a room with no light--sometimes it’s calm in there. I know when I pull the covers over my head at night, alone in my abode, I feel a warmth, an envelope of freedom, and the memories of being an 80’s girl overwhelm me.
I smile at that.
Ahem.
Look Democrats have enemies, true enemies, bad people with beards. Republicans have detractors, rock-throwers, bad people who feel entitled, which is--how to say this?--different.
Reagan was shot by a man who loved Jodie Foster. Kennedy was shot by a man who didn’t love actors
The moral is clear.
America.
And I think of that Reagan Administration.
And I think of how it handled the truth, how it massaged it, how it--and, yes, forgive me--revolutionized it. I saw it, I was there.
And Jodie Foster, it should be noted, had a career afterwards.
Marina Oswald did not.
America.
Again the moral is clear.
I listen to my good friend Bob Woodward and I am stopped in my tracks because what he says is so Woodward-esque, so airy, so circuitous, so deep--so, so Bob. Who cannot help but marvel at the man and all he’s done both for the country and for the Bush Administration. Had Bob been around to cover the Kennedy assassination, who knows what we would know?
As for the events of November 1963, again, I say, it is a wound that hasn’t healed, hasn’t scabbed over. It provokes a deep, deep--oh, so deep--state of angst. You can feel it deep within you. There were humans involved and when you get human beings involved, which are living things, they respond to stimulus, stimulus like sex and the sight of sinews and the sounds of Lee Greenwood.
And sometimes these humans get it, alas, wrong, sometimes right. It’s a marvel, we humans. I wonder sometimes if people are just that … people. Humans.
Sigh.
Maybe that’s the lesson here.
I weep at that thought. I cry tears of joy at that thought.
I think of nights under blankie.
-P. Noonan