Dissing Peggy

I generally love what Peggy Noonan has to say. Her column in the WSJ is one of the things I look forward to every Thursday, partially because she writes well, but mostly because I generally find her ideas well thought out. I read her book “What I Saw At the Revolution” about her years in the Reagan WH, and while I thought the perspective to be a bit “female” (I guess a woman can be forgiven for that), I enjoyed it a lot and learned the key point that she wrote the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech. So it is with some thought that I disagree with here.

In her column today Link to Column she takes a tack that I completely understand emotionally, but expect that even she would turn away from if she thought about it at a deeper level. Her thesis is that “the wheels have come off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks, and things are broken at a fundamental level that can’t or won’t be fixed for some time”. She goes on to lament the unpaid entitlements, the elite deciding to get theirs and ignore everyone else, the technology, and complexity … and oh, why don’t we just eat worms and die.

Which is I think where she misses the point. There is ALWAYS malaise around. Carter talked of it in the ‘70s, but it was very real emotionally to a lot of Americans. I was young then and I felt it strongly. I’m thankful for it, it made me turn to conservatism, religion, self-reliance, hard work and a lot of other good things. I suspect that while she likely wouldn’t admit it, the Harriet Miers nomination (still on when she wrote the piece) was a big part of what was weighing her soul. She took time away from her job to help Bush, she believed in him, seeing a mistake like Miers would have to be a disappointment.

I see the “despondent factor” in a lot of folks, usually those my age and older, and Peggy is in that group. No matter how much we may want to understand the world in a “bigger picture”, or keep our hope alive for a world beyond the grave, age and decline are part of all our lives. It has a very real tendency to make us want to believe that things are getting worse, the future is scary, uncertain, and fragile and the way things are going we are really better off to have less time ahead of us than behind us. Tell that malarkey to an 18year old or even a 20 or 30 year old. All those negative things are true for **US**, OUR FUTURE is “getting worse”, “scary”, “uncertain”, etc … but THEIR future is “bright, unlimited, full of possibility, exciting, wonderful, etc”.

There is an even bigger problem though. More than any other, the Boomers are a generation where even the “elite” chose to ignore thousands of years of western civilization with 100s of very intelligent men that lived lives that at the fundamental level were not really so different from ours … birth, youth, bodies, limited brains, love, families, pain, pleasure, age, infirmity, infinite souls, death. Plato, Descartes, Bacon, Hume, Hegel, Hobbes, Shakesphere, Kant, Locke, Russle … and on for a lot of different and wonderful lists.

Other than the Bible, my favorite book, “The Closing of the American Mind”, a book that I have read twice and still don’t claim to fully understand, at least opens the door to the fact that there is a HUGE reservoir of culture and thought that has an immense amount of perspective and meaning to add to our lives if we would only avail ourselves of it. Bloom (and Buckley for that matter) realized that starting in the 50’s American Universities turned their backs on that cultural heritage because the effect of understanding it, and to some degree even being exposed to it is “conservative”. Conservative to the extent that there exists a culture with ideas and patterns that have stood the test of time and are “worthy” at a level that this afternoon’s whim or pop song can never duplicate. In their haste to be “free” of morality, convention and restraint, the generation that came of age in the 50’s and 60’s abandoned the greater meaning of the life of western man, and along with it religion. Their version of “liberalism” ended up being a “flight from the worthy to the worthless”, and the left elite, the media and the Democratic party still lives there.

The very tiny exposure that I have had to that storehouse has much the same effect on the soul as worship or a starry night away from city lights. It shows our smallness, but also positions us as “a part”. Man not being “the measure of all things”, but being a part of the big picture if we are willing to accept that standing of “having a place” rather than trying to kill both God and Culture so it can be “all about me”. The Republican party is home to most of the religious people that are connected to the best part of that storehouse, but the human part of that cultural storehouse is also of great value. Sadly, even those of us that call ourselves “conservative” did not receive the proper exposure to that storehouse in our youth, so now a few of us muddle around the edges as we plunge on in years hoping to grasp some small pieces.

It is a worthy endeavor. At the very least it humbles us and inoculates against the smugness of the left, and the pessimism of the paleocons. So tonight I’ll say a little prayer for Peggy, and think that maybe with the withdrawal of Miers the worst spot in the Bush years is over and the wind is at our back.