Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life!
Pardon us for dredging up Peggy Noonan again, but something has gone unremarked about her appearance last Sunday, and it’s really nagging at us.
It’s not what she said. It’s how she said it.
First, let’s get to the quote itself, starting around 2:50:
Sometimes in life, you want to just keep walking… Some of life has to be mysterious.
Peggy’s plea for proactive ignorance aside, watch her delivery — the sincerity, the earnestness, the empathy. Yes, we know the Wronged Woman shot the bastard, but he was a bastard, and sometimes we have to take extenuating circumstances into account. Doctor Phil, your comment?
Except she’s talking about — how to put this delicately — drowning people. Slamming them against walls. Starving them. Stuffing them in boxes. Keeping them awake until they hallucinate. All under the careful supervision of — let’s not forget this part — trained doctors.
And not even to protect us, but to gin up an excuse to invade a foreign country. You provide the false confessions, we’ll provide the war.
Peggy quickly takes back the “mysterious” line — too late, of course — but even if she found just the right word to express her delicate sensibility, her manner remains. It’s the manner of privilege, the plantation belle who would prefer not to know what’s heppening in the fields, the kinder, gentler Republican who cares about image, but let’s not trouble ourselves with substance.
It’s a great shtick. And thank god it never caught on.
8:03 am • Saturday • April 25, 2009
May I share? There is a point. Sort of.
I once was auditioning for a voice over for an Elizabeth Taylor scent called, as I remember, Slut. So I go to the office and meet the producer and she starts telling me how the copy I am about to read is not copy but a pome. How the copy writer is a poet and such as. And I’m like, well OK. SO I read this piffle to myself and then aloud. Since I have a Limey accent and am naturally effete she is impressed by my sensibilities. So she goes and calls in the poet so she can hear me read this pome. Only this time they will do it while running the spot for me to see! so I can appreciate just how extraordinarily wonderful it all is and how not like a commercial but like Art. So the copy writer enters: a short, stout woman (Roseann before she got glam) in black leggings and sweat shirt with appliques whose breasts look like luggage. She was modest about her work (with good reason) and bucked at the poem description preferring instead to say that it was merely ‘poet-ic’. So I read this trash again while images of Elizabeth Taylor, at her most immense, rising from a pool of water are being run. (Maybe the stuff was called Whore of Babylon or Orca) The disconnect between what was happening and what they semed to think was happening was so immense that I only barely made it out of there alive. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.
Peggy Noonan always makes me think of those women. With her ‘lady poetess’ air and abilities which she has parlayed into an extravagant income and reputation. She is also, I think, quite an intelligent woman – in a Barbara Cartlandish way. Imagine how much Nancy Reagan must hate her.
My little commercial experience is the farce equivalent of the malign lack of perception displayed by these people. They seem to have no conception of what they do and have done. They use language to hide the truth and prettify reality. With her patience and gentility and eloquence…! These people used all the same language to describe Vietnam and the horror we unleashed there. Sitting around a table deploring the New York Times for wanting to disturb their dreams.