Posted on 12/05/2003 10:18:51 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
To: Tom DeLay From: A Concerned Conservative Dear Tom, This week I read that you have abandoned plans to house Republicans safely on a cruise ship off the island of Manhattan during the G.O.P. convention in New York this summer. Have you paused to consider what this will mean? It will mean that instead of spending time in a secure environment offshore, kind, decent Republicans will be wandering innocently among packs of inflamed New York liberals. They'll be subjected to long harangues that rely heavily on the words "multilateral," "Kyoto" and "John Ashcroft." They'll get condescending looks when they go into a deli and order a strawberry and chocolate chip bagel with pineapple cream cheese — a perfectly acceptable bagel option in most suburbs. They will naïvely pick up The Village Voice, thinking it contains small-town news. When the Utah delegation pauses to say grace before dinner at Elaine's, the cultural dissonance will be so great it will be measurable on the Richter scale. Tom, New York is not a place where Republicans can feel at home. New York has Central Park, which is a large pastoral area without a single putting green. It is a city with nearly eight million people, none of whom own riding mowers. New Yorkers suffer from liberal anhedonia, which is the inability to derive pleasure from grossly oversized pieces of machinery. So when a Republican starts a perfectly normal conversation about the glories of his powerboat, snowmobile, combine or hemi, the liberal is likely to screech out something about the ozone layer. New York is a city of strange rituals. The people live in these vertical gated communities they call apartment buildings, but they don't seem to have normal family structures. If a Martian landed in a Manhattan playground, he would conclude that human beings start out small and white, and grow up to become middle-aged Jamaican women. In Manhattan, when an oldest child turns 12, entire families disappear overnight. If we are really going to abandon the idea of having a secure cruise ship offshore, we've got to reduce Republican delegates' vulnerability by giving them the information and tools they will need to camouflage themselves as New York liberals. I am willing to work up an instructional video — "How to Be Ruth Messinger in 12 Easy Steps" — but in the meantime we need to send out a fact sheet. We need to tell prospective G.O.P. delegates what sort of clothing they cannot wear in New York: pastels, pleated pants, khakis, Docksiders and tassels. If a Republican was seen walking down Riverside Drive wearing his normal outfit — tasseled loafers, no socks, green pants, a festive plaid sports jacket and a faded Hawaiian Tommy Bahama shirt — some New Yorker would come up and ask him if he could bring Paris Hilton out to his home for a reality series. We also need to tell them what they will need to blend in: dark, rumpled clothing, frayed shopping bags from the Strand, logo-less sweatshirts, Yasir Arafat-style facial hair and those black rectangular glasses that make everybody look like a Dutch architect. We're going to have to give them phrases they can use in case they are called upon to make elevator small talk. We have to give them examples of sentiments they should avoid ("You're Jewish? Oh, I love your Ariel Sharon!"), and examples of phrases they should use ("Nice weather we're having. Too bad about the climate of McCarthyism settling over the land.") I don't like thinking about Orrin Hatch in a do-rag any more than you do, but this problem is going to require creative thinking. Liberalism doesn't just happen. It is a product of a certain environment. I'm afraid if our stouthearted Republicans find themselves in New York, with its insufficient closet space and inadequate kitchen counters, they may start turning liberal themselves. They may start caring about what happens inside Condé Nast, taking Quentin Tarantino seriously, practicing therapeutic yoga and fantasizing about having Al Franken's baby. What will you do then, when you call up your major donors and they ask you to phone back after "West Wing" is over? Then you'll rue the day you canceled that cruise ship idea. But then it'll be too late. By the summer of 2008 we'll be holding the G.O.P. convention in Bridgehampton.
Has this guy been outside Manhattan at any time in the past 20 years? Humor has to have some connection to reality.
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