Noonan laments the ‘end of placeness’

August 15, 2008

I’ve read Peggy Noonan’s latest WSJ column a couple of times, trying to make heads or tails of it. I’m at a bit of a loss.

The end of placeness is one of the features of the campaign. I do not like it.

Pretend you are not a political sophisticate and regular watcher of the presidential race as it unfolds on all media platforms. Pretend, that is, that you are normal.

OK, quick, close your eyes. Where is Barack Obama from?

He’s from Young. He’s from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He’s from TV.

John McCain? He’s from Military. He’s from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state.

Chicago? That’s where Mr. Obama wound up. Modern but Midwestern: a perfect place to begin what might become a national career. Arizona? That’s where Mr. McCain settled

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, a perfect place from which to launch a more or less conservative career in the 1980s.

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. Even Bill Clinton was from a town called Hope, in Arkansas, even if Hope was really Hot Springs. And in spite of his New England pedigree, George W. Bush was a Texan, as was, vividly, LBJ.

Messrs. Obama and McCain are not from a place, but from an experience.

I have no idea what Noonan is talking about. She seems to wish that Obama and McCain were running from the same place they grew up. I don’t know why, or how this is supposed to be relevant to anyone.

Reagan, for example, grew up in Illinois before moving to California. W. Bush got to Texas by way of Connecticut. John Kerry was born in Colorado, not Massachusetts. Howard Dean grew up in NYC before landing in Vermont.

Who cares?

The lack of placeness with both candidates contributes to a sense of their disjointedness, their floatingness. I was talking recently with a journalist who’s a podcaster. I often watch him in conversation on the Internet. I told him I’m always struck that he seems to be speaking from No Place, with some background of beige wall that could exist anywhere. He leans in and out of focus. It gives a sense of weightlessness. He’s like an astronaut floating without a helmet.

That’s a little what both candidates are like to me.

Mr. Obama hails from Chicago, but no one would confuse him with Chicagoans like Richard Daley or Dan Rostenkowski, or Harold Washington. “There is something colorless and odorless about him,” says a friend. “like an inert gas.”

Noonan argues that this matters, because if there is an “end of placeness,” leaders may care less about pork-barrel spending.

All this is part of a national story that wasn’t new even a quarter century ago. Americans move. They like moving. Got a lot of problems? The answer may be geographical relocation. New problem in the new place? GTT. Gone to Texas…. I miss the old geographical vividness.

Beats me. Can anyone explain why Noonan wrote this and the WSJ published it?

Because she is a right-wing hack and the Murdoch Street Journal ™ loves them some right wingers?

  • OK, quick, close your eyes. Where is Peggy Noonan from?

    She’s from Crazy. She’s from the town of Insane in the state of Confusion. She’s from Overpaid Idiocy.

  • Could we maybe elect an American in 2008?

    Seems like. Sorry Peggy, maybe statism went out the window a couple of generations ago. Even Lincoln was born in a state other than the one he ran from for President.

  • Well, if energy prices keep rising all the non-rich will end up trapped in a geographic spot, with large numbers (as was the case with pre-industrial revolution societies) being born, living and dying inside a few square mile area. Maybe that would make Noonan happy. That and getting rid of this newfangled internet stuff with common people talking to each other all across the planet, not knowing their “place.”

  • Noonan is badly in need of a history lesson. Abe Lincoln was born in Kentucky where he grew up until his family moved to Indiana when he was about seven years old. He lived in Indiana until he and his family once again moved, this time to Illinois when he was 21. Thus “Abe Lincoln of Illinois” did not move there until he was an adult.

  • And in spite of his New England pedigree, George W. Bush was a Texan,

    No, she’s got it backwards. In spite of pretending to be a Texan, Bush is moneyed New England…with a mean streak.

    Noonan tries to be ethereal but she’s just surreal…in a bad trip kinda way.

  • Crissa said:

    WTF is ‘placeness’?

    I think it’s all Noonan’s way of saying Obama doesn’t know his place. (Which is in the White House btw.)

  • “disjointedness”?
    “floatingness”?
    “placeness”?

    Are these even real words? Is Noonan speaking some other language we just can’t comprehend?

  • Let’s remember that Peggy Noonan once dedicated an entire column to rhapsodizing about George Bush’s balls. Yes, I mean those balls. How can you take seriously anything she says after that? I’m not making it up; try Googling the column by its title; “He’s got two of ’em”. *mandatory warning* Don’t eat anything that you’d be sorry to see come back up before reading.

  • Yes, based on your quoted material, this essay does seem weak. But I imagine what she is lamenting is her inability to evoke local color, character sprung from geography. Writers love that notion. She’s probably a fan of Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko. In high school she probably liked Faulkner and aspired to be the next Harper Lee. American literature is filled with this metaphorical technique.

  • Yes, based on your quoted material, this essay does seem weak. But I imagine what she is lamenting is her inability to evoke local color, character sprung from geography. Writers love that notion. She’s probably a fan of Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko. In high school she probably liked Faulkner and aspired to be the next Harper Lee. American literature is filled with this literary device and she wants to apply it in her own writing about the candidates but can’t figure out how.

  • Letsee… Clinton was Born in Arkansas, went off to college, then back to Arkansas before being President.

    Bush I was born in MA, but moved to TX, then got into politics there. He evntually moved back east.

    Reagan wasn’t a Californian.

    Carter! Carter was born, educated, and entered politics in Georgia.

    I have no idea what she means that these people need a place. Hawaii isn’t a place? Arizona isn’t a place?

  • CB wrote: Beats me. Can anyone explain why Noonan wrote this and the WSJ published it?

    Aw come on, CB. Try a factless mood piece every once in a while. :–)

  • doubtful beat me to it; Peggy Noonan, the dipshit clown from clueless town. And anyway, do McCain’s followers want to know where he’s from, since he’s… originally from Panama?

    “There is something colorless and odorless about him,” says a friend. “like an inert gas.”

    I think you heard them wrong, Peggy, due to the inert gas in your head. What they said was “people who quote unnamed ‘friends’ to promote their own ideas are guilty of journalistic malpractice”.

    Can anyone explain why Noonan wrote this and the WSJ published it?

    Because if they start talking about the real issues… they’ll LOSE.

    You know, if there wasn’t a moronic media to laugh at it would be a sadder world.

    Or not.

  • How does any of this contribute to getting an Amendment passed that will allow Ahnold to become President in ’12 or ’16?

  • Tom B: She’s probably a fan of Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko.

    In a just world, Mike Royko would gladly come back from the dead and beat her to death with his tombstone. He HATED people like Noonan.

  • TomB said:American literature is filled with this literary device and she wants to apply it in her own writing about the candidates but can’t figure out how.

    You might be write, TomB. A less generous assessment might be that she’s looking for what pulp writers called “tags” to make a character immediately recognizable without real characterization and into a handy stereotype.

  • If Obama were a Republican, Ms. Noonan’s column would have praised these same qualities, using phrases like “young, restless, peripatetic, like America.” She would have thrown Horace Greeley in there somewhere.

    That’s if Obama were a Republican.

  • Why does she remind me of Ann Landers after taking a political science course….Oh that’s right, Noonan never took political science.

    She must be under contract to write something…anything will do…and it did. Placeness???non-sensical mental masturbation that leaves one frustrated.

    Why bother mentioning it?

    Now back to McCain/Schunermann/Rove tactic of advising Georgian president to invade a Russian territory to advance McCain’s political campaign. The so called “October surprise” in August. Lobbyist trying to write foreign policy. Just pathetic.

  • Don’t forget Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney have both lived in at least 3 different states so it’s not like the alternative nominees would have changed her nonsensical narrative any. People move around more than they used to. Big shock.

    “There is something colorless and odorless about him,” says a friend. “like an inert gas.”

    Yeah, Obama is the colorless and odorless inert gas even though he is drawing huge enthusiastic crowds. What does that make McCain, a lone electron trying to latch onto any random gathering of bikers he can find just so he can draw any crowd at all for the cameras?

  • I think this could be a lame attempt at dealing the race card from the underside of the deck. Obama is “colorless and odorless.” It tries to focus on Obama’s “otherness” and McCain’s “normalness.” Normal to whom?

    Or,

    Noonan is as intellectually bankcrupt as she is ideologically.

  • You are reading MoDo with your head. You need to read her with your gut.

    Then you will see that it’s not so much the meanings the words have that is important, it’s the feelings that the sounds make as they slide around, flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither while they pass they slip away across the universe.

    Jai guru de va om
    Nothing’s gonna change my world,
    Nothing’s gonna change my world.

  • Seems pretty clear to me. Noonan laments there are no American dynasties whose names are synonymous with a particular place, hence the “old geographical vividness” comment. Why this matters is beyond me. I guess it solidifies one’s American-ness?

  • Ronald Reagan was from Hollywood if he was from anywhere, and his career marks the beginning of the trend Noonan seems to be trying to describe. I wonder why she forgot/overlooked that.

  • “Mr. Obama hails from Chicago, but no one would confuse him with Chicagoans like Richard Daley or Dan Rostenkowski, or Harold Washington. ‘There is something colorless and odorless about him,” says a friend. “like an inert gas.'”

    So what is the color and odor of a Chicago native?

  • Can someone get her psychiatrist on the phone? That piece was written by someone who needs her meds adjusted.She’s talking about feeling disconnected, and that people around her are floating? Please keep her away from sharps and guns for a while, OK?

  • Republican. Conservatism. Right-Wing Ideology.

    I think these are euphemisms for: Mental Disorder.

    There is something so weird about them.

    In 2000 they looked at Bush and saw an honorable man
    They look at McBush now and see someone who just isn’t there (and in my opinion never was)

    Is there something in the GOP gene code which enables people to believe things that are complete, total, demonstrable lies?

  • She is unsettled about where she is from herself. I think her alias is Nonny and she followed Mork here some years ago.

  • Folks may be reading a bit too much into this and giving Noonan too much credit. The only theme in her stuff is that she gets paid to write a column. She has a deadline to meet. She has nothing of substance to write about. So she makes up some transparently ridiculous meme so her editor doesn’t get mad and stop the paychecks.

    It really is that simple. I don’t think there are any hidden depths of meaning here. She’d have to be a lot more clever to do that with the bankrupt ideology she’s been supporting for the last eight years or so.

  • Given that the first President she could say all this about was Sainted Ronnie the Ray-Gun, for whom she toiled mightily in the vineyards, we once again see that Peggy too is missing a “place” – the place where she puts her missing brain.

  • As awful as the piece is — and boy is it awful — it’s at least a step forward from David Brooks’s recent column basically saying exactly the same thing but only about Obama, the “sojourner.” Even Noonan’s garbage is unoriginal.

  • She can’t get a grasp on where these guys are REALLY from. And if you don’t know who they’re REALLY from, how do you know who they’d prefer to kill?

  • doubtful @2 totally won this thread.

    The whole thing reminds me of the crazy old guy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest who “explains” objects, saying things like “Mexico…is a walnut” and “Republicans…are butter” except that the old guy almost kind of makes sense. Noonan is just babbling.

  • Winkandanod #27, you hit my thoughts,
    “Mr. Obama’s mother was somewhat itinerant,” only tme itenerant is used is “itinerant farmer” or a PC way of saying “Share Cropper” couple that with “colorless and odorless” attributed to a “friend”.
    Now, Miss Noonan, a wordsmith extrodinaire, in now way was trying to bring up race in the article?

  • BTW, Jimmy Carter had WAY more “placeness” than Ronald Reagan, unless Hollywood is a real place and not a bunch of fake backdrops populated with fake people who have fake faces and fake smiles.

    But I’m sure Noonan knows that, and hopes her fake concerns about “placeness” get her a real paycheck. They really should pay her with Monopoly money.

  • He’s from Young. He’s from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He’s from TV.

    John McCain? He’s from Military. He’s from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state.

    It’s political code:
    a. if you are old, Obama doesn’t have experience, don’t trust him;
    b. if you are a “regular guy/gal”, if you are undereducated, Obama’s not your man;
    c. if you are interested in “real” men, McCain’s your man–Obama is fiction, props, make-up; and,
    d. miitary is obviously connected to McCain’s so-called “strong point”: security and defense, and the references to Vietnam and the Sunbelt is an echo of Nixon’s Southern strategy.

    Other than that? The woman can’t write to save her life.

  • It’s simple enough. Correction. She’s simple enough.

    Peggy wants it like the good old days. You were born in your small town. You grew up in your small town. You married someone from your small town (or maybe from somewhere exotic, like the town up the road).

    Nice people had nice children that got nice jobs and socialized with other nice people. Poor people were honest, hardworking and had a strong sense of community (i.e. hung out with other poor people).

    White Anglo Saxon Protestants from fine White Anglo Saxon Protestant families ran the country. Because they were born to it. The noble values they had instilled in them at the country’s best schools made sure that they’d make a good job of it.

    These days, well it’s just so confusing. People moving around and stuff. Getting educated. Moving up through a meritocracy. No problem with that, but these smart kids from disadvantaged backgrounds were never meant to run the country. They were meant to be the lawyers of the people who ran the country.

    It’s all so confusing.

  • Red State America looks at Obama, and they see that he is not from here, but somewhere else. He does not have the blood ties, the heritage rural Americans intuitively understand.

    It’s about blonde women, and Barrack’s feminine, wiry, Muslim frame. Without those ties to the land, and our English forefathers, even one with a Muslim father and white, blonde mother can become elitist, because they lack those roots that bound us to this place in the beginning, when they came over from England. The slaves were ripped away, the land of their hearts was in Africa, where Obama’s father was born, and America was always foreign to them.

    This isn’t about racism, but skin pigment and nooses, and burning crosses. It’s about regular people, and people like him. Chris Matthews understands this. It’s bred deep in his genes.

  • Lamenting the so-called old days where things were supposedly easier to understand. People were born, lived all their lives, and died in the same few miles and others could tell a lot/pidgenhole based on that. Sort of like how newscasters go to school to loose their regional accents. Or like the mall-ization (homogeneous) of America?

  • Shorter Noonan: more heavy stereotyping, please.

    Bummer that this nation is becoming less stereotypical. Westerners that don’t wear cowboy boots, Southerners that don’t run moonshine, Californians that don’t surf and instead vote Republican.

    It’s so much easier to bash Obama as a candidate and lionize McCain if they had healthy stereotypes to make Peggy Noonan’s life easier. The moral of the story is: make a right-wing pundit’s life easier and give them easy pigeonholes to exploit.

  • Dear Peggy,
    As someone born and raised in Kentucky, I would not recommend advertising your notion that Abe Lincoln is only affiliated with Illinois too much. The log cabin where Lincoln was born is very much venerated in the Blue Grass state and Kentucky school history books are replete with tales of Lincoln’s childhood years in Kentucky. And after all, it’s probably a Red State populace that you would not want to offend.

    Sincerely,

    Lou. (who moved from there at about the same age as Lincoln and never looked back)

    PS Isn’t go westward young man, Horace Greeley, Jack London, Daniel Boone, Little House on the Prairie and all of that about as American as you can get? Isn’t that more American than staying in the same place for 400 years?

  • I’ll give you an example of the kind of discomfort all this social mobility causes the fragrant Ms Noonan.

    I was at a wedding last weekend in England. The groom was a splendid chap who owns his own thriving business. He also happens to be the son of Pakistani immigrants.

    He was meeting and greeting guests near to the door of the country house hotel where the reception was being held.

    In walked a crusty old English couple, who looked at him, dropped their luggage and said “Take these bags to our room.” Imagine the embarrassment all round.

    This would never have happened in the old days of Peggy’s ‘placeness’. I mean, you could place everyone just by looking at them.

  • Kathleen Parker said: “It’s about blonde women, and Barrack’s feminine, wiry, Muslim frame.”

    Where the hell did that come from. I mean I don’t go looking for pictures of Barack Obama, but what I’ve noticed seems to show a man about my age with a far better body (I’m hitting the gym though, come four years and I’ll be looking better than you Barry) which I would not call wiry or feminine.

    And I certainly wouldn’t suggest it was Muslim. Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity. It doesn’t give you a body form.

  • Why do you even bother to read what Noonan says? She was Nixon’s speechwriter for crying out loud. That means that she was a right wing nut case in the beginning and on top of that has been layered another 40 some years to reach senility besides!!

  • All you have to know about Nooner is she wrote an Op Ed linking the Decision Making of George Bush to a Gift from God.

    I got the dates if anyone to read this nonsense.

  • I’m still reeling from the piece about Bush’s balls. If I ever embarrassed myself that badly in public I think I’d find a freight train to jump in front of.

    These people truly have no shame.

  • I’ve read Peggy Noonan’s latest WSJ column a couple of times, trying to make heads or tails of it. — CB

    You read it more than once? And still didn’t figure out that, in order to “make heads or tails” of it, her head would have to be separated from her tail? Are you a trained surgeon, sir?

  • Any of us whose family moved to a small midwestern town where we were the among the few who had no history, no cousins or grandparents, in the town, recognize Peggy Noonan.

    She wasn’t necessarily the most talented or popular kid in the class, but she always knew the score — which kids in the class were tainted or unknown because of their family history (or lack of it) — which ensured that some “newcomers” were still marginalized years after their arrival.

    Normal people, in the view of the Peggy Noonans, had a home town with deep roots. Everybody else was suspect, or foreign, or other.

  • Reading Noonan’s column, I certainly got a sense of her sense of placeness. She’s obviously from Clueless.

  • Noonan sees the world entirely through a prism of sepia. She’s a nostalgia dispenser. This column is consistent when considered through that filter. She’s one of those Republicans who has ordained themselves Keeper of America’s True Heart. Creepy, yes; but also harmless. Tough for people under 40 to understand her schtick. She’s a dying breed, and I find it entirely encouraging that people are puzzled by her. It means we’ve moved on.

  • I can proudly say that i’ve never read a Peggy Noonan column (that I know of). But, man have I read about her.

    It’s too bad that Wingnut Welfare is lavished upon people like her. I do recall that she got all wet after seeing Commander Codpiece strut around that carrier. That was enough to convince me to never waste my time reading her stuff.

    Honestly, nearly every regular commenter here has a better grasp of the real world than she does, and can express their thoughts without people asking “WTF?”

    Placeness? What dumbshit gave her this gig? Oh, yeah, I remember, she’s a Republican. Never mind.

  • Perhaps the mesmerizing and mellifluous Mz. Noonan was combining two topics. Perhaps while putting place marker pins in a US map she simultaneously attempted to reorganize her butterfly collection.

    Entirely incomprehensible, but quintessentially Noonan. How else could we recognize her?

  • Peggy Noonan was 18 years old during Nixon’s first presidential run, so if she was a Nixon speechwriter she was a very young one. She was a speechwriter for Reagan and GHWB.

    As for the Texanness of the presidents she mentions: LBJ’s Texanness was genuine. GWB’s Texanness is a pose. You can learn more at http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/11/08/house_of_bush/index1.html If I could ask GWB any question at all, I would ask him why he’s the only member of the Bush family who speaks with a Texas accent. I’m sure he wouldn’t say it was to get back at his “daddy.”

    Thank you, MW, for setting the record straight about Lincoln, and thank you, Crissa, for setting the record straight about Reagan.

    And while I’ve never seen the word “placeness” until today, I have seen much talk about a “sense of place,” or the lack of it.

  • “Placeness?” There are words for what she’s describing. She doesn’t know what they are, so she takes a common noun and twists it like a balloon like some middle schooler hacking her way through an essay for school? Bah. WSJ has writers on staff.

    Where the heck is Peggy Noonan from, anyway?

  • CB,

    Read it again, but this time, either out loud or in your mind, read it using your best Andy Rooney impression.

    THEN you’ll get the idea of how this article should be experienced.

    I’m glad to help.

    • Comments are closed.