"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
From the Telegraph: Ten years ago, a mother told her son she would have preferred him to be gay rather than a Tory. Times have changed: Conservatives are cool.
(RCB for Tories observation: Social secretary Ginni Barter indeed does not conjure thoughts of Margaret Thatcher.)
The oak tree is not a bad symbol for the Tories' new logo. One of the truly great Tory thinkers, Edmund Burke, compared the state to a tree. It boasted deep, firm roots, yet it also spread its branches and grew. It could abound in new life while being comfortably rooted in the past. A week is a long time in politics, and the oak, although an immigrant to these islands, has been with us at least since the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago. So, it's less foreign than, for example, the Norman families who came over with William in 1066. And, it tends, like a proper Tory prime minister, to go on and on.
Except that today's "thrusting young Tory modernisers" of "Cycling Dave" Cameron's Notting Hill set would be better served symbolically, he writes, by a potted bay tree.
Here in America, this Tory Oak in Wilkesboro, N.C. was named for the Loyalists hanged from its branches.
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