Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin

From Noonan's Wall Street Journal column today ("A Farewell to Harms"):

Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

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To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class."

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What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

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"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

Noonan's mostly on-target here, I think, but it would be interesting to see some introspection from her on why so many in the Republican base might have embraced a candidate who hunts, fishes, lives in a rural area, etc. I'd expect a little more thought on this from a former Reagan speechwriter. The GOP has spent the last few decades mythologizing blue collar Americans in an attempt to woo them, going back at least as far as Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign, and continuing through the second Bush administration. We went from a plaid-shirted Reagan clearing brush on his ranch in California, to a plaid-shirted Bush clearing brush on his ranch in Texas. Noonan, of all people, shouldn't be surprised that when a candidate fits this image as well as Palin does, she will be popular among the base.

Noonan claims that Palin isn't working class because her father was a teacher and her mother was a school secretary, but this seems like splitting hairs. Okay, Palin's father didn't work in a coal mine. But neither was he the commander of the Pacific Fleet (as McCain's father was), or the CEO of an auto company (as Romney's father was), or the President of the United States (as Bush's father was). Palin may have her limitations, but she is savvy enough to run with her blue collar authenticity, such as it is, given how GOP image crafters such as Peggy Noonan have long made a fetish of it.

A.O. Scott on Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes (of "American Beauty" fame) apparently has a new movie out (one I have no intention of seeing), based on a story by Dave Eggers, about an expectant hipster couple's search for a place to raise their child: "Away We Go". In his review of "Away We Go" in Friday's New York Times, A.O. Scott calls Mendes out ("Practicing Virtue, and Proud of It").

Of Sam Mendes's protagonists, the hipster expectant parents Burt and Verona (played by Jon Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, pictured above) Scott writes,

Their conversation is carefully poised on the boundary between facetiousness and sincerity, and they do things like turn unlikely words into adjectives by adding the letter Y (Burt wants a “Huck Finn-y” life for their baby) and pretend to argue about the difference between cobbling and whittling.

To observe that they inhabit no recognizable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road” are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.

Or something. Really, “Away We Go” is about the flight from adulthood, from engagement, from responsibility, even as it cleverly disguises itself as a search for all those things. But the dream of being left alone in a world of your own making, far from anything sad or icky or difficult, is a child’s fantasy. Not an unattractive or uncommon one, it must be said, and for that reason it is tempting to follow Burt and Verona into the precious, hermetic paradise that awaits them at the end of the road. You know they will be happy there. But you should also understand that you are not welcome. Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don’t be silly. But don’t be fooled. This movie does not like you.

The comment thread on the version of this article on the New York Times website even includes some comments backing up Scott on his review. Below are two of them.

Eggers doesn't work on the screen

The story is the same kind of innocents-in-the-storm tale that a much-younger Eggers became famous on back those many years ago. But this is a variation on a now-tired Eggers theme and Scott gets that completely - to use the language of the film, a hipstery, politically correcty, don't-want-to-grow-uppy couple who can too easily see the faults in everyone else and prescribes a cure that has an icy condescension within its professed simplicity. The story, like Eggers, is getting too old.

— Ed, Rhode Island

Watch an Apple-vs.-PC ad instead

You'll be watching the same plot: Young, hip, cool-o and pretentious triumphs over old, dysfunctional and clownish. And it won't cost you anything in cash or nearly as much in time.

A.O. Scott's review totally nailed it. In addition to the smugness and condescension I'd add affectation and treacle. Another example of filmmakers who seem to assume that all they have to do is anoint certain characters as "hip" or "offbeat," and use "edgy" colors and graphics in the posters, and the Angelika Film Center crowd will start lining up with open wallets.

But if you ask me, Eggers never worked on the page, either. Always makes me think of Tevye belting out a Mad magazine version of his Fiddler showstopper: "Pre-ten-tion!!"

— TMJ, Kent, CT

If only Peggy Noonan read this blog. She could take Scott's rejection of the Mendes/Eggers weltenschauung, combine it with some personal observations about Americans wading through the Great Recession, and throw in an anecdote from her Reagan years for contrast. Then she could let it all marinate for a few days, and microwave it just before the deadline for her weekly Wall Street Journal column.

The publicity photo of Jon Krasinski and Maya Rudolph accompanied Scott's review and is credited to François Duhamel/Focus Features.

"More Suley than Sully"

From Peggy Noonan's last column in the Wall Street Journal, Is 'Octomom' America's Future? (Hat tip: Doug Kass¹):

It's Sully and Suleman, the pilot and "Octomom," the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He's the only one who doesn't applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

This is why people are so moved: We're still making Sullys. We're still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: "Come on and light this candle."

But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy '73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

What we fear we're making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. "Suley" doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don't approve are limited, which must be sad for them.

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Any great nation would worry at closed-up shops and a professional governing class that doesn't have a clue what to do. But a great nation that fears, deep down, that it may be becoming more Suley than Sully—that nation will enter a true depression.

The image above, by Martin Kozlowski, accompanies Noonan's column on the WSJ website.

¹I hadn't read one of Noonan's columns in a while, but was prompted to do so by Doug Kass's quote from the one above in his new post, "Fear and Loathing on Wall Street". Kass quoted the first part of Noonan's column, which described a shuttering of shops in upscale Manhattan neighborhoods. Kass included it as a sort of contrarian indicator of sentiment in his tentatively bullish post.