Peggy Noonan Went to Brooklyn Four Years Ago and She's Still Talking About It
Peggy Noonan’s body may be in Manhattan, and her soul may be in Ronald Reagan’s coffin—but her mind, now and forever, is in Brooklyn, at a street fair she went to a few years back.
In 2012, Peggy Noonan went to Brooklyn. An American place. Specifically, she want to a street fair in Bay Ridge, and was so moved by the profusion of “Young Asian kids with I phones” and “a really loud kind of rap group” that she was moved to write a rather patriotic blog post about it, winning plaudits from fellow Americans, white and non-white alike.
What matters is what is within. A rainbow of souls.
That was 2012. Here we are now, today, in 2016, in the midst of another presidential election. And what does Peggy return to in her column today?
What Republicans especially fail to appreciate is that New York more than ever is full of legal immigrants. If you sit on the side of a street fair in non-hipster Brooklyn—in Bay Ridge, for instance—you’ll see all the world passing by: people from China, Ireland, Lebanon, Poland, South and Central America, Asia, Africa, Arabia. They are young. They’re expending all their energy doing what people do to establish themselves—finding the job, keeping it, paying the rent, finding someone to love, making a family, making it all work.
A street fair in... let’s just say, for example... Bay Ridge. What of that? It simply cannot begone from the mind of Peggy. There, she saw America. There, she saw the people of the world. There, she saw the rap. The rapping rappers— rapping tales of America.
Never has been back since. But still talks about it.