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Sunday, April 06, 2003
My loss is journalism's gain
Peggy Noonan, the whirly-twirly Stevie Nicks of conservative journalism, is going to take some time off to work on her dementia opus on Pope John Paul II, giving her editor, James Taranto, time to recuperate and rebuild his shattered career. But she has left us, and generations to follow, a parting column to ponder, parse, dissect, and marvel at in the dark Noonan-less days to come. (Journalism grad students will cry to the heavens "Why?", but God, as usual, won't want to get involved.)
Because there is so much Peggy-ness here ( much more than one man can handle), I thought I would just share my favorite mangled syntax, gibbering theo-patriotic babble, and post-sanity daddy worship. Enjoy it...or not.
Our young troops love their country. That is why they are where they are. It has had me thinking a happy thought, about the success with which our country, for all its troubles the past few decades, has continued to communicate to new generations the simple idea of the goodness of loving America. They have picked up the sheer exuberant joy of understanding a thing and, because one understands it and because it is good, loving it, and then acting on that love to the extent that you would fight for it, you would even die for it.
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Twenty five years ago at CBS News a major network star said to a newsroom friend of mine, who still wore his pin, "I wish I could wear one of those." But, he explained, it might be "misinterpreted." My friend thought, but did not say: Yes, it would be interpreted in a way that suggested you love your country. How terrible.
The network star feared he would be considered biased in favor of America. My friend thought, as he later told me privately, that the star damn well ought to be biased in favor of it. America had given him everything he had, all his riches and fame, because America gave him the liberty to use to the utmost all the gifts he'd been born with. America guaranteed the freedoms he now and then referred to so blithely in his elegant reports. America was a more just and kind place, and an infinitely more humane one, than any of the dictatorships, communist governments or banana republics that network stars spoke of in those days with such delicate understanding and consideration.
American journalists still fear that, being called biased in favor of America. So do intellectuals, academics, local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants, and leftist mandarins of Washington, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities. For all cities have them.
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But there was always another America, and boy has it endured. It just won a war. Its newest generation is rising, and its members are impressive. They came from a bigger America and a realer one--a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality. It was full of ambition, of the desire to start here at point Z and jump there to point A, and all within one generation. It was populated by an utterly practical and yet romantic and highly spiritual people.
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Is this corny? Too bad. It's beautiful to see Americans stand up and embrace their patrimony and go forth into the world with faith. And none of this is unconnected to our president. George W. Bush has given our soldiers something to be proud of, something they can understand and respect. He is, now, after all he's been through the past two years, Mr. Backbone. He has demonstrated to a seething and skeptical world that America can and will stand and fight for a cause, see it through, help the tormented and emerge victorious.
It is important who he is. George W. Bush is an American of the big and real America. He believes in it all--in the vision of the founders, in the meaning of freedom, in the founding and enduring ideas of our country. He believes in America's historic insistence on humanity and not inhumanity in war, and he appears to have internalized the old saying that "one man with courage is a majority."
I used to wonder if George W. Bush's biography didn't suggest a kind of reverse Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was born in low circumstances and rose with superior gifts. Mr. Bush was born in superior circumstances and rose with average gifts. And yet when you look at Mr. Bush now I think you have to admit--I think even clever people who talk loudly in restaurants have to admit--that he has shown himself not to be a man of average gifts. Backbone is not an average gift. Guts are not an average gift. The willingness to take pain and give pain to make progress in human life is not an average gift.
All in all these are amazing qualities in a political figure, and in a president. There's a headline for you: America appears to have a president worthy of its people.
...and you thought only Hunter Thompson wrote while on acid.
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