Peggy Noonan and I actually agree about something:

This in itself is quite something, as I usually have little to nothing to do with Conservative mouthpieces.

“And they did things like this: The day before hurricane Rita hit Texas, last Friday, I saw on TV something that disturbed me. It was not the usual scene of crashing waves and hardy reporters being blown sideways by wind gusts. It was a fat Texas guy swimming in the waves off Galveston. He’d apparently decided the high surf was a good thing to jump into, so he went for a prehurricane swim. Two cops saw him, waded into the surf and arrested him. When I saw it the guy was standing there in orange trunks being astonished as the cops put handcuffs on him and hauled him away.

I thought: Oh no, this is isn’t good. This is authority, not responsibility.

You’d have to be crazy, in my judgment, to decide you were going to go swim in the ocean as a hurricane comes. But in the America where I grew up, you were allowed to be crazy. You had the right. Sometimes you were crazy and survived whatever you did. Sometimes you didn’t, and afterwards everyone said, ‘He was crazy.'”

I remember the America Peggy speaks of. This is a rather new phenomenon where you’re likely to get arrested for “your own safety” rather than do something (as Peggy says) crazy. In today’s America, you’re only as free as the cops say you are.

Of course there will be the wholly expected and regular chorus of “Hey, you always obey a cop or you deserve what you get”. These people just aren’t made of true grit. They would have never survived in a truly free and crazy America. I have no use for them.

Rotters, every one of them.

Crossposted at my Myspace blog.