THE PLANK AUGUST 15, 2008
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Confession: When it comes to highly exposed women columnists (if it must come to that), I prefer the woman of the Journal to those of the Times. While Gail Collins has been heroic ballast for the ship Maureen Dowd has waterlogged of late, Peggy Noonan's political commentary has been a rare beacon of sanity amongst the right-leaning pundits in this election season. As easy on camera as she is in print, she owns even the shortest sentences ("And yet."), and paragraphs on end absent of snark, and indeed at times containing something sublime. (I wish not to lowball women writers generally--I just find it refreshing and wish to give credit where due.) And, during the primary, she more than any other pundit of her stature, had Hillary Clinton's number--assessing her person and politics not in malice but clear-eyed understanding.
In today's column, Noonan--of Ronald Reagan's Pointe du Hoc oration, and Bush 41's 1988 convention speech--laments the loss of "placeness," the notion that people (especially politicians) are rooted in geography rather than imaginary. Of course, her despair, over what's essentially a feature of modern globalization, won't soon be relieved. The instantaneity of technology turns walls on their sides to become bridges--or better, windows--through which disparate individuals peer at one another in amusement and often imitation. She deftly observes that despite their age difference, both Barack Obama and John McCain are creatures of this untethered public culture.
Where is Barack Obama from?
He's from Young. He's from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He's from TV.
John McCain? He's from Military. He's from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state.
Chicago? That's where Mr. Obama wound up. Modern but
Midwestern: a perfect place to begin what might become a national
career. Arizona? That's where Mr. McCain settled, a perfect place from
which to launch a more or less conservative career in the 1980s.Neither man has or gives a strong sense of place in
the sense that American politicians almost always have, since Mr.
Jefferson of Virginia, and Abe Lincoln of Illinois, and FDR of New
York, and JFK of Massachusetts. Even Bill Clinton was from a town
called Hope, in Arkansas, even if Hope was really Hot Springs. And in
spite of his New England pedigree, George W. Bush was a Texan, as was,
vividly, LBJ.
Sure. But I think Noonan's desire for "placeness" is dated, unfortunately. Electoral votes are the last, least sexy gasp of state-based identity politics. In 2008, there are just too many ways to free associate and affiliate with these two candidates for president--a fact Obama has acknowledged as "projection" and McCain has embraced via a Janus-faced Republicanism. Noonan, however, sees a resurgence on the horizon:
I end with a thought on the upcoming announcements of
vice presidential picks. Major props to both campaigns for keeping it
tight, who it's going to be, for by now they should know and have,
please God, fully vetted him or her. On the Democrats, who are up
first, I firmly announce I like every name floated so far, for
different reasons (Joe Biden offers experience and growth; Evan Bayh
seems by nature moderate; Sam Nunn is that rare thing, a serious man
whom all see as a serious man.) But part of me tugs for Tim Kaine of
Virginia, because he has a wonderful American Man haircut, not the cut
of the man in first but the guy in coach who may be the air marshal. He
looks like he goes once every 10 days to Jimmy Hoffa's barber and says,
"Gimme a full Detroit."Detroit: that's a place.
I don't want to rehash the middling hackery of the WSJ's editorial page. I don't want to endorse all of Noonan's oeuvre (the magic dolphin stuff, and the W-love rankle a bit). I don't even want to set off another round of speculation in the already hyperventilated Veepstates. I just want to remark that this column, especially the last notes, is funny, thoughtful stuff.
--Dayo Olopade
18 comments
Capital and corporations and their employees are so mobile that "placeness" doesn't really exist for most Americans anymore. Suburban Atlanta looks like suburban Cleveland looks like suburban Seattle or Boston. A Starbucks is a Starbucks, a McMansion a McMansion. The urban scene's pretty much the same in Chicago or San Francisco-- a few more latinos in the latter, afr-amers in the former, but the same mix of bohemians, gazillionaires, gays, empty-nesters, penniless underclass and striving immigrant families.
This really hits home to a European or anyone who's spent significant time in Europe. One part of America looks and feels just like another. The slang's the same, the accents are hardly distinguishable anymore. We have only national candidates now.
- teplukhin2you
August 15, 2008 at 4:31pm
Don't know about "full Detroit" but "full Cleveland" used to mean a cheap plaid sportscoat paired with striped cheap slacks. Maybe a mullet?
- teplukhin2you
August 15, 2008 at 4:32pm
I think you're both wrong, and that Obama is very much a product of Hawaii.
- psantillana
August 15, 2008 at 4:33pm
but tep is also right, to a certain degree, and certainly as far as the trend goes. James Brown lamented the increasing sameness of everywhere back in the 80s, and it's only going in that one direction, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. But always for boringer. Me, I can feel the difference between Seattle and Minneapolis, never mind between Seattle and St. Louis, which is slap-in-the-face stark. But I'm sensitive.
- psantillana
August 15, 2008 at 4:37pm
I have another take on Peggy Noonan. She's a complete idiot. No person who is not an idiot could write the following:
<i>Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men's Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over ... the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history.
John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977-92.
Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That's why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country - any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all?</i>
mediamatters.org/.../200804250004
- chrismealy
August 15, 2008 at 4:47pm
"Suburban Atlanta looks like suburban Cleveland looks like suburban Seattle or Boston."
I wonder how new this all is. Certainly there are more franchises homogenizing America, but how different were the small towns of yesteryear. Was Mayberry really that much different than Hooterville or Pleasantville? You had the same white people going to the same Protestant churches , joining the same Raccoon Lodges, eating at the same diners, and bitterly clinging to the same guns and gods.
- propositionjoe
August 15, 2008 at 4:55pm
Peggy Noonan has been easily the sharpest and liveliest commentator on this campaign. She's must-read.
- teplukhin2you
August 15, 2008 at 5:08pm
Agreed about Noonan, and this is a nice riff of hers. (I much prefer the riffers, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.) Allow me to tack for a moment at a skew.
I learned to my great alarm recently that AAA will in the near future cease supplying its customers, or anyone, with paper maps. MapQuest and the various retail GPS devices stand triumphant upon the decomposing treeware with its legends and its colored lines and little tic marks between which mileage in 2-point type may be discerned.
That is too bad, because now we are left with nothing *but* place--or, more accurately, places--and no journey between them. The map, like the clock, has abandoned analog for digital. Just as our clocks can tell us what time it is but not what time it was or will be, our location devices tell us where we are or are about to be but not where we're going or where we're from. We can take the most direct route, but how can we follow Supertramp's advice to "take the long way home"?
Without a map, we are only where we are, and unless we have reason to go somewhere (a sibling's wedding, maybe; an IKEA couch we saw on Craigslist), nowhere else is real. It is all about the here and now. Arizona? Chicago? It's not so much that the candidates don't come from there. It's that those places don't exist.
- williamyard
August 15, 2008 at 5:11pm
williamyard:
"Just as our clocks can tell us what time it is but not what time it was or will be, our location devices tell us where we are or are about to be but not where we're going or where we're from."
Just how much glue do you sniff everyday? Or is it rubber cement? I'm asking out of concern.
- propositionjoe
August 15, 2008 at 5:23pm
We need to revive TNR's "what's your problem?"-- only with Wieseltier and Yard discussing search, browsing, destinations and maps etc instead of Goldberg's Beef With Pamela Anderson.
I mean, they could discuss beef and Pamela, even Goldberg's beef with Pamela, just don't give Goldberg or Beinart a seat at the table.
- teplukhin2you
August 15, 2008 at 5:41pm
"But I think Noonan's desire for "placeness" is dated, unfortunately." Unfortunately? Hell, fortunately.
As Buckaroo Banzai said "Whereever you go, there you are." The day I can take a vacation from myself, be Williamyard for a week (hopefully a very randy one) then we can talk.
As to being so rooted to a "place" that it becomes your whole identity, man that is just pathetic. Everyone who can should live abroad for at least a year, more is better, and learn the language and the customs of that foreign country. Let's see, foreign languages spoken fluently by Noonan, none. Foreign countries lived in, none.
Check this "wisdom" But there's something odd about the English question. It feels old-fashioned. Because we all know America has an official language, and a national language, and that it is English. In France they speak French, and in China they speak Chinese. In Canada they have two national languages, but that's one reason Canada often seems silly. They don't even know what language they dream in.
Um...to channel Dan Akroyd, Peggy you ignorant slut.
In Canada people surely know what language they dream in. In China they don't speak Chinese, the official language in Mandarin, but most people speak their own language primarily. My wife speaks Wu (which is spoken by 75 million people) Surely Peggy also heard of Hong Kong, where few people speak Mandarin well, but everyone speaks Cantonese.
Must read? Hell, must refrain from laughing uncontrollably when reading her.
- blackton
August 15, 2008 at 5:42pm
To a degree, we've been homogenizing for years. But only to a degree. I for one know I am in a different part of the world when in Minneapolis (where if you ask if some will lend a hand with a bag, they say "you bet.") than when in Memphis ("sure hon."), and I wouldn't mistake the silicon valley for either. Granted, we no longer have a Norwegian language newspaper in my town (we did within living memory of people still some years from retirement), but Spanish and Yiddish and German are spoken on the streets, courtesy, respectively, of recent Latin American immigrants, Orthodox Jews (of course), and Old Order Amish. You might confuse us for WIsconsin, but you wouldn't confuse us with, say, North Mississippi, which would have only the Spanish, if any of the the three.
Place, and it's human corollary, culture, are not dead, nor hopeless homogeneous yet.
- sdemuth
August 15, 2008 at 5:45pm
oh, here is another classic brainless comment by Peggy. "It is late afternoon in Manhattan on the Fourth of July, and I'm walking along on Lexington and 59th, in front of Bloomingdale's. Suddenly in my sight there's a young woman standing on a street grate. She is short, about 5 feet tall, and stocky, with a broad brown face. She is, I think, Latin American, maybe of Indian blood. " Handing out advertisements. If she can't tell the difference between a Spanish person and a Latin American she is pretty stupid. And "Indian" blood. You mean like Bobby Jindal, no wait, it is too hard for you to learn a word like indigenous, isn't it. Let us mix up India with Native Americans, way to make English clear and concise.
And of course, Peggy was horrified that this minimum wage worker working in miserable conditions can't converse with Peggy while she is out being rich and this woman is being poor. We all know that this kind of worker has loads of time to study English, why they can give up sleeping.
- blackton
August 15, 2008 at 5:49pm
Actually, joe, I don't need clocks telling to get up in the morning because I have a cat who when she wants breakfast vaunts over me repeatedly like she's Nastia Liukin along with a rooster a few feet outside my bedroom door who hits the "Cock-a-doodle-do!" at about 4:30 a.m., plus two parrots that have decided to imitate the rooster (I am not making this up) at random moments of the day and night, and thus I may sit bolt upright in bed at, say, 2:45 a.m. thinking it's time to go to work, when it's just a goddamn bird.
I recently bought an analog "Spoilsbury Toast Boy" clock from CafePress that has instead of the usual 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. no 11 or 7 but two 4's, the Greek letter mu, and something that looks like a Swiss army knife. Plus lots of splattered blood. I didn't notice until my GF pointed it out that the battery was dead and the time was 11:15 (i.e., 4:15) for, like, forever.
Meanwhile my wall calendar still says "June." I like it this way because it forces me to do some math to figure out what day it is. This I presume is good for my brain, like eating fish or reading something with "Journal" in the title.
My satellite internet service crashed and burned so I can't look at a Google map, let alone print one out, so on our recent roadtrip from San Francisco to San Diego and back, my GF and I used an old stained AAA map she found in her car which worked fine, especially when she misread it at midnight and we ended up at the ocean south of Long Beach by accident. A clear night, the moon twinkling in the waves decreasing to a vanishing point in the middle of the Pacific's great humbling vastness. Bless the confusing, stained, out of date map. GPS, on the other hand, is serendipitous interruptus.
Glue? I wish.
- williamyard
August 15, 2008 at 5:54pm
I second Tep's call for YardTV, whatever the context.
Am I to understand, master william, that you have a cat, a rooster, and two parrots in your house?How many feathers and bones do you collect daily? My friends have chickens in Seattle, and they tell me (these are reliable people, believe me--one of them is even from Wyoming) that it is illegal to have a rooster within the city limits because of all the crowing (roostering?) that they do. Are you in violation of a civil statute? Perish the thought.
Listen, if you can manage a household of that complexity, then you should be SACEUR or something of equivalent rank and prestige. I already suspected as much anyway, but if you need a letter of rec, let me know.
Glad to a person of your stature,
pj
- propositionjoe
August 15, 2008 at 6:23pm
Joe,
First, I'm on five acres of unincorporated land in East Arid Armpit, CA--zoned agricutural, which means I can get away with just about anything short of turning children into meth-smoking porn stars. I have about 44 critters, all rescued from assorted dire circumstances: two dogs, two rabbits, eight cats, one rooster, one parakeet, and roughly thirty parrots in a 1000-square-foot aviary (blue and golds, severes, a sun conyer, six cockatiels, one giant red thing of indeterminate breeding who beats up all the others, a bunch of Amazons, one of those white guys like Baretta had, a couple other ones whose strain I forget, and a toucan named Candy who lives in our kitchen and likes nothing better than to steal steak or ice cream from guests' plates when she's not chasing the cats (she hates cats). There are also our neighbors' horses and cows currently grazing on our overgrown weeds, along with a zillion snakes, lizards, wild birds, rats, mice, voles, ground squirrels, and the occasional coyote. We hear frogs but don't see 'em. Our neighbor to the north claims a puma was roaring at his dogs the other night but I have yet to see/hear one of these big fellas. Also a couple of tarantulas have wandered through--they really piss me off. They just truck right along like they own the place. My GF killed a beetle the size of Dennis Kucinich the other night after I'd gone to bed and left it for me to find in the a.m. Sweet girl.
- williamyard
August 15, 2008 at 7:05pm
All the more reason to get Yard and his retinue on the small screen. Better than Ozzy and Co.
- teplukhin2you
August 15, 2008 at 8:43pm
Clearly Peggy's spending too much time on television, confusing the sameness of the anchors and reporters with the rest of the country. And where exactly is she from? what sense of "placeness" does she emit? I can't tell from watching her appearances on MSNBC. I couldn't place her as Boston Irish, metro New York Irish or DC transplant. Wikipedia lists her birthplace as Brookline and she attended high school and college in northern New Jersey. Now she sounds more like Martha Stewart than a girl from Brooklyn. She could contribute something substantial to the discussion of "placeness" by examining how she sanded off the edges of her own background, including any accent changes.
- jjridge
August 16, 2008 at 1:18am