High Noonan

Roy Edroso at Alicublog highlighted Peggy Noonan's latest column, and I'm struck by how cranky, contradictory, and bizarre it is. Please note the two passages I've set off in italics.

From the Wall Street Journal, Editorial:

Here is that larger fact: America has become creepy for women who think of themselves as ladies. It has in fact become assaultive.

I would add that a lady need not be stuffy, scolding, stiff. A lady brings regard for others into the room with her; that regard is part of the dignity she carries and seeks to spread. A lady is a woman who projects the stature of life.


I experience [some degree of violation of my dignity - as a person. An adult. A woman. A lady.] - when I see blaring television ads for birth-control devices, feminine-hygiene products, erectile-dysfunction medicines. I experience it when I'm almost strip-searched at airports. I experience it when I listen to popular music, if that's what we call it. I experience it when political figures are asked the most intimate questions about their families and pressed for personal views on sexual questions that someone somewhere decided have to be Topic A on the national agenda in America right now.

Let me tell you what I say, in my mind, after things like this--the symposium, the commercials, and so forth. I think, We are embarrassing the angels.

Imagine for a moment that angels exist, that they are pure spirits of virtue and light, that they care about us and for us and are among us, unseen, in the airport security line, in the room where we watch TV, at the symposium of great minds.... We are embarrassing the angels.

Do I think this way, in these terms, because I am exceptionally virtuous? Oh no. I'm below average in virtue, and even I know it's all gotten low and rough and disturbed.

Lent began yesterday, and I mean to give up a great deal, as you would too if you were me. One of the things I mean to give up is the habit of thinking it and not saying it. A lady has some rights, and this happens to be one I can assert.

"You are embarrassing the angels." This is what I intend to say for the next 40 days whenever I see someone who is hurting the culture, hurting human dignity, denying the stature of a human being. I mean to say it with belief, with an eye to instruction, but also pointedly, uncompromisingly. As a lady would. All invited to join in.

Now, to me, saying "You are embarrassing the angels" is kind of the definition of scolding. And stuffy. And stiff.

Ms. Noonan seems not to have realized that she's crossed over into little old ladyhood, wherein life becomes a series of offensive tableaus, populated by young whippersnappers who don't understand the meaning of the term "respecting your elders" and never had to walk to school in the snow without shoes while being chased by wolves and hunted by the Soviets (BOTH WAYS!).

Nor does she seem to understand that the sort of people she intends to scold for their relentless assaults on "the culture" are probably not going to be too distraught over having some crazy woman wag her finger at them while lecturing about beings of light. Most likely, this will amuse. And possibly inspire mocking bumper stickers.ig

And since when does lent involve "giving up" personal boundaries and your previously tenuous grip on silence in the face of things that bother you? Can we just "give up" anything, now? I'd like to give up my habit of eating broccoli for lent! And my habit of taking out the trash!

Oh, I give up.