A Tea Party I Missed

So, had I known about this beforehand I wd have been tempted to arrange my recent trip to Arkansas to cover one more evening.  As it was, I missed something interesting by a day: the evening of the day I left Magnolia to fly back here, my alma mater, Southern Arkansas University (which I still think of by its old name, Southern State College), was hosting a speech by Tom Cotton, the junior senator from Arkansas (and I think the youngest person currently serving in the Senate).  I disagree with Cotton on just about everything, but was sorry to pass up the chance to see him in person and hear him present his ideas himself, rather than catch bits and pieces of them filtered through news reports and headlines. After all, I went to see Orville Faubus give a speech on the town square in front of the courthouse back when he was trying to stage a comeback long after his time had passed. And howevermuch I disagree with Cotton it'd be interesting to hear how he frames his ideas: what the world looks like from such a radically different position -- after all, he's an anti-tax radical who opposed disaster relief because it hadn't previously budgeted and is most notorious for trying to sabotage the president and State Department's negotiations to de-escalate our long-running standoff with a foreign power.

On the other hand, checking things out more closely I've learned that this wasn't a free event but fundraising for the Arkansas Republican Party, presumably to be used to try to re-elect or shore up support for the sorry lot they currently have in office (Boozman, Hutchison, and esp. Cotton). And I'd have had a hard time giving money to any cause with Ronald Reagan's name attached to it.

Still, wd have been interesting.

--John R.
current reading: THE FLOATING BODY by Kel Richards (2015/2016), the third in the C. S. Lewis-as-detective mysteries, and the best so far, though that's a low bar to limbo under.