A Sad Day for the Informed. A Happy Day for the Uninformed.

Ari L. NoonanEditor's Essays

[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]When I arrived at my favorite newsstand early this morning, a middle-aged, middle-class black man and, separately, a middle-class, middle-aged black woman, first-time visitors who did not know each other, scanned the racks. They were disappointed.

Each asked a fascinating, revelatory question:

“Do you have any Washington Posts?”

Later, they were told.

I sensed an enviable sui generis surge of cultural pride in both of them.

It is not often that a white guy will be publicly privy to this beautiful scenario.

An Honorable Motivation

Washington transplants, the gentleman and the lady hardly were avidly pursuing cerebral analyses of yesterday’s event, a carefully nurtured foreign concept to all of America’s newspapers except for the Wall Street Journal. They did not know or care about that.

Instead, they desired a written record as incontrovertible proof of Their Guy winning the White House for a second time, to prove to relatives who follow them that this actually happened.

Except for the two Obama elections – overcoming violently vulgar, rampant racism on the Left – black cultural pride, among the mainstream black population, rarely has surfaced in public since the 1960s.

For only that mercurial moment at the newsstand could I put aside the tragic events that choked America yesterday. That is tomorrow’s subject.

All day, I have not been able to put aside the imagery of the black man and black woman who well may be innocent political virgins, and how many thousands of miles apart our minds are.

They are jubilant over the results because, understandably, they only see a man who looks like them. That is all they know about him.

Blameless, but…

It reminded me of a young daughter giving a glowing assessment of her daddy, who may be visiting at home on parole for a reprehensible crime.

She is blameless, and the black man and black woman are, too.

Benghazi, to them, may as well be the name of a chewing gum for religious women only, in Qatar’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

They have no comprehension of the low grade of Their Guy’s character, of the concept that Their Guy is bewildered by the traditional duties of a President, that he is stultifyingly arrogant, angrier oftener than the meanest person they know, has divided our country perhaps worse than at any time since the Civil War, and is given to lying with the compulsiveness of the way his new BFF, Chris Christie of New Jersey, is given to inhaling anything that is stationary and smaller than an elephant.

Being blissfully uninformed and unsophisticated is not illegal, just dreadfully harmful to our country if you vote or influence those who do.

Ponder that.