A Republican Comes to Brooklyn and Learns About America
- Is this the rap group Peggy Noonan saw? I mean, she DID say it included a “middle-aged white woman.”
I know. I know! Many, many Republicans already live in Brooklyn. Not everyone here is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal hipster like Bay Ridge’s own Henry C. Stewart. But not every Brooklyn Republican, or Brooklyn-visiting Republican, is as high-profile as Peggy Noonan. Noonan, of course, is a Republican of the Reagan Republican mold, which means that she likes jelly beans and maybe will fall prey to dementia? Not sure, exactly. But it does mean that she hates Mitt Romney, who is a Republican of the cyborg talk show host mold. Two sides of the same coin? Sure. And, let me just say, that’s a dark, dark coin.
Anyway! Noonan came to Brooklyn last weekend—Bay Ridge to be precise—and made some very interesting observations, which she then blogged about for the Wall Street Journal, which is awesome for me because I get to write about her trip, and also for America. Peggy Noonan really cares about America.
And not just the America that she’s always known—a homogenous America where people all look alike and speak the same language (English, obviously) and eat jellybeans. No, Noonan cares about the new America that she experienced at the Bay Ridge street fair. This America is made up of “young Arab women in headscarves and abayas, Italian kids from the old Bay Ridge, elderly Irish women who go to the local evangelical church, young Latinos, tall blond Nordic-looking girls in black suede leather boots, Filipino families.” And presumably, since it’s a NYC street fair, a lot of people selling socks.
