What She Said

"She" bein' Peggy Noonan, writing in Saturday's WSJ.  Here's a piece-part:

Pretty much everyone over 50 in America feels on some level like a refugee. That's because they were born in one place—the old America—and live now in another. We're like immigrants, whether we literally are or not. One of the reasons America has always celebrated immigrants is a natural, shared knowledge that they left behind everything they knew to enter a place that was different—different language, different ways and manners, different food and habits, different tempo. This took courage. They missed the old country. There's a line in a Bernard Shaw play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession": "I kept myself lonely for you!" That is the unspoken sentence of all immigrants toward their children—I made myself long for an old world so you could have a better one. 

But everyone over 50 in America feels a certain cultural longing now. They hear the new culture out of the radio, the TV, the billboard, the movie, the talk show. It is so violent, so sexualized, so politicized, so rough. They miss the old America they were born into, 50 to 70 years ago. And they fear, deep down, that this new culture, the one their children live in, isn't going to make it. Because it is, in essence, an assaultive culture, from the pop music coming out of the rental car radio to the TSA agent with her hands on your kids' buttocks. We are increasingly strangers here, and we fear for the future. There are, by the way, 100 million Americans over 50. A third of the nation. That's a lot of displaced people. They are part of the wrong-track numbers. 

So is this. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because being a parent is hard, and not everyone has the ability or even the desire. But in the old America you knew it wasn't so bad, because the culture could bring the kids up. Inadequate parents could sort of say, "Go outside and play in the culture," and the culture—relatively innocent, and boring—could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Popular songs, the messages in movies—all of it was pretty hopeful, and, to use a corny old word, wholesome. Grown-ups now know you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed. And there isn't less bad parenting now than there used to be. There may be more. 

There is so much unease and yearning and sadness in America. So much good, too, so much energy and genius. But it isn't a country anyone should be playing games with, and adding to the general sense of loss.

This goes a long way to explaining all the GOML stuff we see these days, a lot of which is posted in these pages.  Ms. Noonan went off on a tangent here, given the principal thrust of her column ("This Is No Time for Games") was about the debt-ceiling shenanigans, but this was a tangent that's both good and true.  I have a lot o' fun with my "Get Off My Lawn!" (you were wonderin' about the acronym, weren't ya?) bullshit, but a lot of it ISN'T bullshit.  Like Ms. Noonan I really AM beginning to believe things were better 20 or 30 years ago, but I'm also of the same mind that produced that last paragraph, above.  All isn't lost, yet.

I'd give ya a link to the full article, Gentle Reader, and encourage ya to RTWT as is my wont... but I can't, as Mr. Murdoch & Co. have seen fit to sequester Ms. Noonan behind their pay wall.  Sorry.