Walk Her Out in the Morning Dew This Morning: Peggy Noonan Looks for Signs of the Depression

The reason we started this blog is that when we read something like this ourselves, we can't think of anything to say. As Roy Edroso says:

It's like that scene in Post Office where Bukowski's finally had enough of that co-worker who's always muttering insults, and wheels on him only to realize that the guy is lost in a private fog and has no awareness of him or anything else around him. It takes a lot of the fight out of you.

But then we read Jim Newell at Wonkette and we feel better again for the cathartic distillation of rage and levity.  First he says:

Sometimes you read these columns and all you want to do is punch Ronald Reagan in the face....

Hey, we feel like that all the time!

You’ll noticed the simple Noonanization conceit in the above passage: she takes a standard news event that’s backed with empirical data — a free-falling economy, in this case — and refuses to engage with it as such .....: when Peggy Noonan leaves her Upper East Side apartment for a morning constitutional, does she see all of these “poor people” the news keeps ragging on about? Where are the hobos fighting over chunks of raw sirloin, or the street urchins giving handjobs for a penny?....

Or, to quote Jerry Garcia:  "You don't need to be worrying about those people; you never see those people anyway." 

You wonder sometimes if, when Peggy’s writing certain columns, she ever has a nanosecond or two when she realizes, “Oh heavens, my schtick in this instance is not so much enlightening as it is making me sound like an unbelievably vapid, superficial sack of vomit.” Well, Peggy, things will start to “look” much worse, soon, a year or so from now — we’re just getting started now, babe! — when the hobo hordes break into the White House and eat Barack Obama’s brain on live television.

And he concludes:

It happened after deadline so you can’t blame Peggy for not factoring it into the three seconds of prep she did for this column, but the Wal-Mart death stampede this morning is, for what it’s worth, a solid 2008 equivalent to the terrible 1930s stereotypes on which she bases economic well-being. Peggy is right when she says “the mall is still there.” But people aren’t at the mall, you see! They’re at Wal-Mart, where people shop on “Black Friday” when they’re poor. And they’re all there, all trying to buy the same limited number of cheap goods. It becomes a race, and they’re willing kill people as collateral damage. And yes, “Everyone’s still overweight,” Peggy, because the unhealthiest foods — usually corn-derived and subsidized by the government — are the cheapest and most readily available in this country, which is a Problem and something you missed in your cutesy aside about squirrels and bears storing up for the “time of great want,” we’re only getting fatter, meaning more innocents will be killed in fatter-footed bargain store stampedes, STFU, goodnight.

At Alicublog, Roy Edroso more soberly though no less witheringly muses:

That she believes the economy can't be too bad because she can't see, from her dirigible high above Fifth Avenue, its effects ("Everyone is dressed the same... The mall is still there, and people are still walking into the stores...") is highly provocative; a few minutes' research might have revealed to her, for example, that crops are bad and crop insurers are defaulting, which in the current situation might discomfort any sensible person, and that things aren't so hot in the cities, either. Also, as I've said before, in our first stages of decline Americans naturally try to keep up appearances, not giving up the outward appearance of sociable, solvent life until it's absolutely unavoidable. What do you think was fueling that great credit surge before the bust?.... (Alicublog)

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Comments

[The Heretik]

Oh my