Wanted to share a pretty funny letter with you. It responds to an item I have in Impromptus today, which deals with my dear hometown, Ann Arbor, Mich. — “a small citadel of the Left,” I frequently call it. Well, apparently, there will be a tea party in Ann Arbor — not an affair with crumpets, but the real Palin-esque McCoy. According to my informant, it will take place on April 15, Tax Day. And it will unfold on the “Diag,” which is in the middle of the University of Michigan, and which is — as I say in Impromptus — my town’s equivalent of Red Square. A friend once said to me, “Jay, let’s sit on the Diag and watch the Left go by.” There are worse ways to kill an hour, incidentally.
I cannot overemphasize the incongruity — the sheer weirdness — of a tea party on that spot. I say in my column that it’s like a Passover Seder in PLO headquarters, but I think it’s even weirder, and more wonderful, than that.
Anyway, that letter I mentioned? A reader writes, “As an alumna of the University of Michigan, I hope there will be pictures of that tea party on the Diag — because I’d like to see what hell looks like, frozen over.”
Which reminds me: You know what a brilliant rhetorician Pat Buchanan is, whatever you think of his post–Cold War political persona (and his pre–Cold War persona, for that matter)? I remember when he was running for president: “We’re gonna fight till hell freezes over. Then we’re gonna fight on the ice.”
If you can’t grin at that, you’re a tough nut indeed.