Noonan expresses contempt for particularity, then cries, “What have we lost?”

In 2002, Peggy Noonan attacked the word “Homeland,” writing:

[T]he essence of American patriotism is a felt and spoken love for and fidelity to the ideas and ideals our country represents and was invented to advance—freedom, equality, pluralism. “We hold these truths…” The word Homeland suggests another kind of patriotism—a vaguely European sort. “We have the best Alps, the most elegant language; we make the best cheese, had the bravest generals.”…

When you say you love America, you’re not saying our mud is better than the other guy’s mud.

Yet in her Wall Street Journal article this past week (“The End of Placeness”) she criticizes McCain and Obama for not having roots anywhere in particular. Obama, she says, seems to come, not from Chicago, but from “Young. He’s from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He’s from TV.” McCain seems to come, not from Arizona, but from “Military. He’s from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state.” Both men had lived all over the country before settling in their current respective states, which, she says, are not real places to them, but just launching pads for their political careers. “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.”

She continues to expand on the theme:

I was at a gathering a few weeks ago for an aged Southern sage, a politico with an accent so thick you have to lean close and concentrate to understand every word, so thick, as they used to say, you could pour it on pancakes. Most of the people there were from the South, different ages and generations but Southerners—the men grounded and courteous in a certain way, the women sleeveless and sexy in a certain way. There was a lot of singing and toasting and drinking, and this was the thing: Even as an outsider, you knew them. They were Mississippi Delta people—Mizz-izz-DEHLT people—and the sense of placeness they brought into the room with them was sweet to me. It allowed you to know them, in the same way that at a gathering of, say, Irish Catholics from the suburbs of Boston, you would be able to know them, pick up who they are, with your American antennae. You grow up, move on, and bring the Delta with you, but as each generation passes, the Delta disappears, as in time the ward and the parish disappear.

I miss the old geographical vividness. But we are national now, and in a world so global that at the Olympics, when someone wins, wherever he is from, whatever nation or culture, he makes the same movements with his arms and face to mark his victory. South Korea’s Park Tae-hwan moves just like Michael Phelps, with the “Yes!” and the arms shooting upward and the fists. This must be good. Why does it feel like a leveling? Like a squashing and squeezing down of the particular, local and authentic.

So, six year ago, Noonan denigrated the normal human identification with a particular place and country, a particular homeland, as a love of “mud,” because we’re only supposed to love universal ideals, not an actual place. And now she complains about modern, rootless Americans—and rootless humans generally in the ever-spreading globalized culture in which we live—who lack any sense of place!

Has it ever once occurred to Noonan that she herself through her neoconservative universalism has promoted that same rootlessness? Yes, she has recoiled from the most extreme expressions of that universalism, such as President Bush’s 2005 inaugural address. But she has never criticized the neoconservative ideology as such.

I am reminded again of my exchange with Norman Podhoretz, at a small luncheon/discussion group in the mid 1990s where he was the speaker. He spoke sadly of the fact that Americans “have lost their voice,” meaning their will and ability to defend their culture from multiculturalism. I said to him, how do you expect people to have any voice, to be able to defend their culture, when they are continually being told that the only truth is a universal truth, and that to believe in and seek to preserve one’s particular culture is evil?

As neocons walk down the street, buildings keep falling down behind them. Then they turn around, see all the ruin, and say innocently, “How terrible! Look at what the left has done now!”

* * *

Here’s a further irony that symbolically completes Noonan’s self-contradiction (though I doubt she will ever realize it). In 2002, Noonan spoke disdainfully of any particular place or country—if not subsumed under the universal democratic ideology—as nothing but “mud.” But now that she’s suddenly regretting the loss of particularity of place and culture in America, what does she give as an example of a special region with its own historical way of being that is valuable in itself and worth keeping? The Mississippi Delta. Which immediately made me think of … Mississippi Delta mud.

A Google search for “mississippi delta mud” yielded a bunch of interesting results, including:

A colorful, exciting article by Bob Parker about setting traps for big alligators by driving stakes into the deep mud underneath the Mississippi Delta swamps.

An article, “Significance of Mississippi River Delta “Mud Lumps,”

which are an amazing phenomenon, giant clumps of mud, sometimes several acres in size, that rise up to the surface of the Mississippi.

An article about fishing for monster-sized speckled trout in the Mississippi Delta mud lumps

A web discussion about an album by the blues group Terraplane, about which a commenter says:

Picture three guys and a buddy sittin’ on the front porch pickin’ and singin’ real Delta Blues. You can almost close your eyes and smell the Mississippi Delta mud. Clean, really clean.

- end of initial entry -

Ralph P. writes:

What else is to be expected from Noonan and here social set? Of course she doesn’t mention that the Mississippi Deltan or Boston Southie culture that she found so charming is being driven to extinction by her muddled and elitist philosophy.

“You grow up, move on, and bring the Delta with you, but as each generation passes, the Delta disappears, as in time the ward and the parish disappear”

I’d be willing to bet she wouldn’t be describing the disappearing Delta so wistfully and romantically if she had to live and work there. But it seems her souvenir-like memories of it are more important that the place and people themselves. Except that they hold the reins of power, why would any serious person care about how Peggy and her crowd define America?

By the way, how did Podhoretz answer you at that luncheon?

LA replies:

As best I remember, he didn’t reply specifically, he just said he disagreed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 17, 2008 02:29 PM | Send