God, Peggy Noonan is an odd bird. She really seems to have come unhinged over the last year. Her ramblings in the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages are like the diary of a psychiatric patient. I can’t believe they keep publishing the stuff…an intervention would be more appropriate. I have a visceral dislike for Noonan in any case. When I was married, my wife had one iron-clad rule…if Noonan’s face appeared on television, the station must be changed. It was a rule I gladly acceded to. But now I am actually beginning to feel sorry for her. It’s like her whole world has crumbled around her and she is calling out for help.
This week, Noonan is making an urgent plea for grace. It took me a little while to catch on that she wasn’t using the word ‘grace’ to mean a ‘state of grace’ but rather was just calling for goodwill and seemliness.
We’re going to need grace. We are going to need a great outbreak of grace to navigate the next difficult months.
What she really means is that “we are going to need a great outbreak of civility and seemliness to navigate the next difficult months.”
I know a lot of you might be thinking that it is quite rich for a Republican operative like Noonan to call for seemliness and civility the moment the Democrats take power. It’s not like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have been great adherents of those virtues. But Noonan knows that the average American wants civility and seemliness because, well…we are exceptionalists.
It is not true that Americans are historical romantics. They are patriots who, once committed, commit on all levels, including emotionally. But they don’t wake up in the morning looking for new flags to follow over old cliffs. They want to pay the mortgage, protect their children, and try to be better parents in a jittery time. They are not isolationist. They want to help where they can, and feel called to support the poor and the sick wherever they are. They are also, still, American exceptionalists, meaning they believe the creation of America–the long journey across the sea, the genius cluster that invented the republic, the historic codifying of freedom–was providential, and good news not only for us but the world. “And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”
I thank Peggy Noonan for kindly speaking for all of us. I know that I certainly do not share her view of America’s history as ‘providential’. I do not believe that America has been endowed by our Creator with an inalienable right to invade countries in Asia based on fixed facts and faked incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin. I’m sorry, but I do not, and never have, bought into that garbage. And if people listened to me there would be a lot more living Americans with a lot more money (not to speak of the Vietnamese and Iraqis).
Noonan continues, growing in incoherence:
When history runs hot, bitterness bubbles. Democrats who should be feeling happy are, from what I’ve observed in New York and Washington, not. The closest they come to joy is a more energetic smugness. Republicans are fighting among themselves–or, rather, grumbling. They haven’t, amazingly, broken out in war, and if they did, no one would be debating if it were a civil war. It would be like Iraq, like a dropped pane of glass that is jagged, shattered, dangerous.
We will need grace to get through this time: through the discussion of the Baker-Hamilton report, through debate on the war, through a harmonious transfer of legislative power in January, through the beginning of the post-Bush era.
I wonder whether Noonan ever observes anything that does not occur in New York or Washington. I also wonder when she lost her ability to write. This is some of the most stilted prose I’ve read in a long time. And it doesn’t make much sense. What does she mean that Democrats are simultaneously unhappy and energetically smug? I don’t know. I didn’t know that you could be unhappy and smug at the same time. My sense is that Democrats are unhappy because the country is in such terrible straights and we seem to be stuck with a failed Presidency for two more years. Maybe that is what she is sensing. I might have felt smug the day after the election. I don’t have the luxury of feeling smug now. And I gotta admit, I’m not feeling all that civil. And I don’t know if I can fake it.
What is needed is grace–sensitivity, mercy, generosity of spirit, a courtesy so deep it amounts to beauty. We will have to summon it. And the dreadful thing is you can’t really fake it.
She really wants Democrats to attempt a ‘courtesy so deep it amounts to beauty’? Where does she get the gall? Noonan seems to be losing her grip on sanity. Just look at the following:
A very small theory, but my latest, is that many politicians and journalists lack a certain public grace because they spent their formative years in the American institution most likely to encourage base assumptions and coldness toward the foe. Yes, boarding school, and tony private schools in general. The last people with grace in America are poor Christians and religiously educated people of the middle class. The rich gave it up as an affectation long ago. Too bad, since they stayed in power.
Let me get this straight, people that went to boarding schools and Ivy League schools, places where they teach you which forks to use and etiquette and grammar, are the least likely to act civilly. But people like Tom Tancredo and Tom DeLay and other religiously educated people of the middle class are ‘the last people with grace in America’? Noonan is living in a fantasy land where no one ever waves a ‘God Hates Fags’ banner but Harvard graduates act like boors.
To be fair to Noonan, she does go on to criticize Bush for his lack of grace in his exchange with Senator-elect Jim Webb (it must have been his elitist schooling). And then she closes by criticizing cable news hosts for interrupting their guests (I thought she and Chris Matthews were best friends forever).
Noonan recognizes that something is desperately wrong. But if she can’t diagnose the real root of the problem is not in the Democrats’ lack of grace, nor in the culture of elite boarding schools, but in the nature and attitude of the executive branch and the conservative movement generally, then she has not been paying attention for the last six years.
I’ll close with a bit from Woody Allen’s Manhattan:
Woody Allen: “Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Ya know? I read it in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, ya know, get some bricks and baseball bats, and really explain things to ’em.”
Victor Truro: “There was this devastating satirical piece on that on the op-ed page of the Times – devastating.”
Allen: “Whoa, whoa. A satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point of it.”
Helen Hanft: “Oh, but really biting satire is always better than physical force.”
Allen: “No, physical force is always better with Nazis.”
I can’t fake civility…especially when civility is not called for.
