Found! Lost Dispatch from Occupied New York!

A friend and I were discussing a piece we’d read a long time ago, “A Dispatch from Occupied New York,” written by we-couldn’t-remember-who, during Hillary Clinton’s first race for the Senate in 2000.

We googled “Dispatch from Occupied New York” and couldn’t find it. Weird, right? Then we put the same words into Ask.com and lo and behold, immediate gratification, which is what we all like, isn’t it?

Even in 2000, the piece struck me as extreme, and it still does, but what had intrigued me about it 7 years ago, I still find just breathtaking – it’s the ditty, the Hymn to Hillary.

Re-reading it, it still creates jarring images and raises the hair on my arms. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m no admirer of societies given to dancing in the streets – not since we watched the West Bank do it after 9/11 – and I’m instinctively leery of anyone who inspires this sort of hymn-singing, or who conjures up images of “the masses” engaging in joyous or obedient political pageantry. Historically, mindless mobbery has never been a good thing.

Just something to file away in the synapses.