Peggy Noonan, Herschel Walker, And The Queen, Because F*ck It, It's Friday!

Peggy was almost reasonable today, we're surprised too!

Welladay! The summer had been one to remember, to the extent her blighted memory was capable, for Sister Peggy Noonan of the Order of the Midazolam Languor. She was fairly sure she had written some columns. She was somewhat sure she had eaten solid food at some point or another. Peering through the shrouded mists that had descended on her brain sometime around 1984, she thought she even detected hearing that the Mets had a good season.

Chaos! Topsy-turvy! What a time to be functionally alive!

Above all, there was her summer vacation to England, from whence she returned with all sorts of thoughts about that insouciant mop-head Boris Johnson , and then a week later about Queen Elizabeth being dead , and then, a week after that, another column about Queen Elizabeth being dead. Queen Elizabeth being dead might have been sad for monarchists and stuffy Oxford deans and middle-aged women in sweatshirts bedazzled with likenesses of cats, but was for Peggy a source of much material.

And now here she was, back home in America, in New York City, thinking in surprisingly reasonable ways about nuclear war and Herschel Walker. It was the latter who was on her mind as she made her way down Third Avenue in search of a pub where she might refresh herself with a frothy pint and some crackers. When, out of nowhere—

“Well hullo!” cried a voice with a chipper English accent. A woman had appeared at her side, a small, wizened gnome of an elderly New York dame, bent under the city’s hustle and bustle, leaning on a cane as she shuffled along. In her left hand she held an old Zabar’s bag that appeared to be stuffed full of ketchup packets. An old corgi shuffled along beside her, sniffing at the bevy of scents that made Manhattan a madness-inducing space for dogs.

“Hullo, Ms. Noonan!” the elderly dame cried again, and could it be ... were Peggy’s ears and eyes in need of a checkup ...

“No, your ears and eyes are fine,” the old woman said. “It really is I, Queen Elizabeth the Second, former ruler of the United Kingdom and all its realms. You see, I faked my own death so I could spend the last of my years living anonymously as one of those fallen New York society ladies now downgraded to an SRO stuffed with some of the faded wonders of my wealth and stacks of newspapers, childless, my fortune gone, my only relative a niece in Westchester that calls once a year, my British accent mistaken as the last vestige of a life of attending Park Avenue cocktail parties and putting on airs for the likes of George Balanchine and Truman Capote. Speaking of dead queens.” She guffawed heartily.

“It had all gotten so dreadfully dull,” the queen continued. “Everyone was always ‘Harry and Meghan this” and ‘Prince Andrew banging teenagers’ that and ‘when will you croak so your donkey-faced heir can squeeze in at least a few years presiding over your dying empire, you crone.’ That Camilla could be so unkind.

"So I faked my death and came to New York. And then when I saw the nice things you wrote about me when you thought I was dead, I thought I could lend a hand with your next column !”

 Why Herschel Walker Shouldn’t Have Run 

“Timely, but do you need 800 words on this, or could you perhaps just play literally any thirty seconds of video of him trying to answer a question?” The queen had produced a tiny silver flask and unscrewed the lid. “Sherry?” she offered Peggy before taking a giant swig herself.

 I’d add that voters don’t expect much. They’ve had their own imperfect lives, and they long ago lost any assumption that political leaders were more upstanding than they. 

“Been there, sister!” The queen guffawed so loudly that a nearby falafel-cart vendor dropped a pita on the sidewalk. Queen Elizabeth cackled again and sipped her sherry.

 Conservatives especially see America’s deep cultural sickness and wonder if the country is cratering before our eyes. 

“Seems a touch melodramatic, doesn’t it,” the queen said. “You’ll pardon me for saying so, but lecturing others in such apocalyptic terms about a nation’s evolving mores contributes to the problem. And it seems a touch weird to say such a thing when your Supreme Court is rolling back the entire New Deal with little trouble. Allister, stop that!” The corgi was growling at a large rat dragging one of the penguins from the Central Park Zoo into the sewer. “Bloody awful creatures, those rats. The French of the animal kingdom.”

 I think Republican strategists misunderstand the scandal, or miss the heart of it. It isn’t really about abortion or hypocrisy. It is about children born and the father says to the mother: You can raise it by yourself or you can abort it but I won’t help you raise it and act as a father.   That   is the story…Voters who would easily forgive abortion or running around or bad breakups or divorce are less likely to give a pass on that, on four children left alone by their father, the rich handsome former football star and candidate for Senate. 

“Perhaps.” Queen Elizabeth wobbled to a nearby stoop and plunked herself down on it. The Zabar’s bag tilted and a few ketchup packets spilled out. “Plenty of conservatives are just as likely to blame the women for being screeching, ungrateful harridans who seduced the blameless and loving father away from his family. Or blame his wife for forcing him to stray. He could probably salvage his race with more coherent and heartfelt begging. Think of your president Nixon and the Checkers speech.

“Ah, Nixon! Such a strange little man. The cleaning staff at Buckingham Palace told me he showered while fully dressed in a suit. No wonder he always looked miserable.”

 Maybe Mr. Walker could become the candidate who can seal the deal with minority voters, a guy who says by his very presence, “You have a home in this party.” 

“You never met Jackie Robinson, did you?” Queen Elizabeth’s voice had slurred. “Now there was a Black Republican who nonetheless was not a token presence, but had serious criticisms and asks of his party even as it descended into alliances with people who thought the South got a raw deal. Of course he played baseball, so likely had fewer concussions.”

 It was political malfeasance all the way down. I understand why Republicans want to win back the Senate, and I hope they do. But they need to learn, again, that you need to be more serious than this, you can’t be so lacking in gravity when it comes to someone who may help decide Ukraine policy. You can’t be so frivolous and lacking in weight.

My hunch is they’re about to learn a lesson. Maybe it’s ultimately better that they learn it, again, and unmistakably.
 

“I say!” The queen was barely audible. Her head bobbed on her bony neck like a dying helium balloon on a slow descent to the ground. “Miss Noonan, this party elected Donald Trump and will quite possibly nominate him again in two years despite his crushing re-election loss. Look at all the Republicans are doing to pretend that loss did not happen! If you are waiting for the GOP to learn a lesson, you will wait far longer than the Prince of Wales did to ascend to the throne. Ah Charles, my lovely son. How I loved you despite your unshapely head that looked like a half-deflated volleyball …”

And then she was asleep, her snores mingling with the roar of traffic on Third. Peggy wanted to sit on the stoop and awaken her, to listen to all of her wisdom, to ask her how the British ever lost all their colonies to tribes of savages and communists. But she had a deadline.

[ WSJ ]

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