By requests: Noonan and Me

Reposted by request. First a link to a prescient piece by Peggy Noonan, written in 2005:

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

Not all of course. There are a lot of people–I know them and so do you–trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They’re trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on the tracks.

That’s what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don’t even express it to themselves, wonder if they’ll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

Go back and read the whole thing. It is spot-on.

Here is Noonan a few days ago:

Lots of signs of the new darkness. Mr. Obama’s army is swarming, blocking lines when Obama critics show up for radio interviews. A study out Thursday said the Obama campaign has become more negative than the McCain campaign. There is the hacking—no one at this point knows by whom—of Sarah Palin’s personal email account. From Mr. Obama himself, a new edge. He tells an audience in Elko, Nev., to “argue” with McCain supporters and “get in their face.” Bambi is playing Chicago style. No doubt everyone around him has been saying, and for some weeks now, “Get tough.” But this is not how to get tough, and it does not reflect a shrewd reading of what the moment demands. People want depth, not ferocity. We’ve got nerves that jingle-jangle-jingle.

I wonder if we are beyond depth – incapable of it – at this point. Here’s what I wrote, in 2005, in response to Noonan’s piece:

Some might argue that what is coming “off the tracks” are the easy illusions of 20th century America: The perhaps naive notions that our elected leaders actually seek office to serve the public good. That the press is interested only in presenting the truth, no matter what. That our courts are peopled with lofty higher beings and geniuses who know better than the rest of us. That our churches are both safe havens and by-ways to heaven.

There was a time in America when all of those statements would have been accepted at face value. In our nation’s babyhood we believed and we trusted all the parent figures – the governments, the courts, the press, the churches.

Now, past infancy, we have come to look upon those institutions with the glare of adolescent angst. We’ve observed enough to understand that those in authority over us are not the paragons of perfection we’d so looked up to as toddlers. We see them flawed, weak, seducable, wholly human and fallible, and like good adolescents who have caught Mom and Dad lying or stumbling drunk, we at first sneered about it and gave some voice to our sense of betrayal. Now, we’re merely numb. Since our “parents” in these authoritative roles have proven themselves to be mere creatures, and not heroes, well, we’ve turned up the volume on our ipods, buried ourselves in our trendy lambskin coats and shut our doors to them.

There’s more but I have an answer – a simple one, and maybe simplistic, too – toward the end.

We must repeat, over and over, that Liberty is the means by which we created creatures are meant to live and to grow and be. That Liberty lives in the Truth. That Liberty lives where people can speak freely, without fear of injury or reprisals. That Liberty lives only when the press is free and unencumbered – when it is detached from events instead of entwined in them. That Liberty lives when people refuse to be intimidated into silence or acquiescence, whether in the workplace or within the community. That Liberty is the fragile thing that diminishes whenever one refuses to acclaim it for oneself.

In between all of those repetitions, we must do something else, if we are to stave off the Painless Coup. We are going to have to turn away from our distractions – the television, the radio, the magazines, the talkshows, the films, the fashions, the escapist entertainment, even the internet. We will have to turn away from these empty things – to make them smaller in our lives, where they and the popular culture now loom so large – and we are going to have to get quiet.

A good musician knows that music is not created only by playing notes, but by understanding the spaces between the notes, and their value. Just so, it will not be enough to simply repeat what is true – if that is all we do, it will only add to the din – there must also be silence, in which to do our other, more powerful work.

Also, do not miss this piece at Protein Wisdom. Like me, they’ve been saying for a while, now, that if our press is enthralled to an ideology, it is not free. It’s a must-read.

Victor Davis Hanson: Elitism, the Culture Wars and the Campaign.

I’m heading out to sit before the Blessed Sacrament.