It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, ‘Oh, much good will come of that.’ Sometimes in life you want to keep walking… Some of life has to be mysterious.(via Andrew Sullivan)
Keep walking. Let's put that on her headstone.
Noonan's column today is less poisonous than her comments about ignoring torture, though disgusting and misinformed in their own way. She writes about what will happen to our fragile little democracy when "the Elders of journalism and the argumentative arts" die off. She speaks of those like William Safire, Bob Novak, Irving Kristol and Walter Cronkite. I'll give her Cronkite, but that's irrelevant.
Noonan today worshiping at the altar of the dying old guard:
Who are The Elders? They set the standards. They hand down the lore. They're the oldest and wisest. By proceeding through the world each day with dignity and humanity, they show the young what it is that should be emulated. They're the tribal chieftains. This role has probably existed since caveman days, because people need guidance and encouragement, they need to be heartened by examples of endurance. They need to be inspired.
We are in a generational shift in the media, and new Elders are rising. They're running the networks and newspapers, they own the Web sites, they anchor the shows. What is their job?
It's to do what the Elders have always done, but now more than ever.
Please. These men, staunchly fixed in the DC establishment, protected the affluent, called for war and more war and peddled disdain for anything or anyone that threatened their death grip on political dissemination and interpretation in America.
Noonan goes on to contradict her April statements:
Democracy cannot healthily endure without free and unfettered debate. It's our job to watch, critique and question, and, being us, to do it in colorful terms.
And to really top the rest of her amnesia-riddled column, Noonan pleads with the "new Elders" to act with the dignity and class the dying media figures supposedly exemplified. Someday, she says, they'll have obits too, and won't they want to be remembered favorably?
Someone's going to sum you up one day. You want to live your professional life in a way that they can write good things.
If I write a Noonan obit someday, hopefully no time in the near future, I think I have my title:
Peggy Noonan: 'Keep Walking'
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