Who Put Salt In Your Coffee?

Peggy Noonan frets that the world, or at least America, is handbasketly hellbound:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."

Well, Peggy, America has been hurtling towards an unknown destination for 229 years now. Longer, really, because the same spirit was present even before independence.

Hurtling forwards is no great drama. Hurtling backwards, now that would be a problem.

I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay.

Cloning shmoning. Sheep that look like their "mothers". Big deal.

Nuts with nukes? We've had that since the fifties.

Epidemics? You mean like SARS, which killed hundreds of people, nearly as many as died recently in a panicked crowd in Iraq?

No such thing as security? And this is news?

As for leaving our kids with a bill they can't pay, this is possible for a number of European countries; far less likely for America which isn't suffering the same demographic implosion.

A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS.

Not the first time the courts have got something wrong. As for the great American newspaper - does the name Walter Duranty ring any bells?

The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them.

By that devilish jazz music!

Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity.

Uh, Peggy...

Let me focus for a minute on the presidency, another institution in trouble. In the past I have been impatient with the idea that it's impossible now to be president, that it is impossible to run the government of the United States successfully or even competently. I always thought that was an excuse of losers. I'd seen a successful presidency up close. It can be done.

But since 9/11, in the four years after that catastrophe, I have wondered if it hasn't all gotten too big, too complicated, too crucial, too many-fronted, too . . . impossible.

I'll give Ms. Noonan this one. Isaac Asimov wrote a story on exactly this subject some years ago. In the story, presidential candidates must pass a series of test on various subjects, and as time goes by and the job grows, the requirements become more and more stringent until, one election year, none of the candidates manages a passing grade. The problem is resolved by having a team of experts answer the tests in their individual fields, with one man acting in the presidential role, taking advice from his cabinet.

Oh.

The special prosecutors, the scandals, the spin for the scandals, nuclear proliferation, wars and natural disasters, Iraq, stem cells, earthquakes, the background of the Supreme Court backup pick, how best to handle the security problems at the port of Newark, how to increase production of vaccines, tort reform, did Justice bungle the anthrax case, how is Cipro production going, did you see this morning's Raw Threat File? Our public schools don't work, and there's little refuge to be had in private schools, however pricey, in part because teachers there are embarrassed not to be working in the slums and make up for it by putting pictures of Frida Kalho where Abe Lincoln used to be. Where is Osama? What's up with trademark infringement and intellectual capital? We need an answer on an amendment on homosexual marriage! We face a revolt on immigration.

The range, depth, and complexity of these problems, the crucial nature of each of them, the speed with which they bombard the Oval Office, and the psychic and practical impossibility of meeting and answering even the most urgent of them, is overwhelming. And that doesn't even get us to Korea. And Russia. And China, and the Mideast. You say we don't understand Africa? We don't even understand Canada!

Canada? Beer. Snow. A determination to be recognised as Not America. And a nasty case of France.

Africa? Corruption.

The port of Newark? Isn't there a Harbour Master, a Mayor, a Governor, a Director of Homeland Security, a whole bunch of people working on that? It's not like playing Age of Empires where you have to click on the little people to get them to do anything.

When I was young we didn't wear earrings, but if we had, everyone would have had a pair or two. I know a 12-year-old with dozens of pairs. They're thrown all over her desk and bureau. She's not rich, and they're inexpensive, but her parents buy her more when she wants them. Someone said, "It's affluence," and someone else nodded, but I said, "Yeah, but it's also the fear parents have that we're at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories. They're buying them good memories, in this case the joy a kid feels right down to her stomach when the earrings are taken out of the case."

You said that, Peggy. No-one else said that.

This, as you can imagine, stopped the flow of conversation for a moment.

Yes indeed. One of those moments.

Then it resumed, as delightful and free flowing as ever. Human beings are resilient. Or at least my friends are, and have to be.

Well.

Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley?

Some do, I'm sure. But some of us are busy trying to upgrade the trolley's turbojets to ion drives.

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

Well, duh, Peggy.

You're talking about journalists, who never really did anything about anything in the first place - excepting a few accidents of history - and now are being shunted off the public stage entirely. The Trolley of Journalism is not just off the tracks but upside down in a ditch. Hopefully a passing blogger will call for an ambulance.

You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making your life a little fortress. That's what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

Let's see:

Politics, politics, politics, journalism, politics, actual useful human being, potentially useful human being, politics.

You don't think there might be a reason why these "elites" act this way? (And in the case of politicians, always have?)

That's what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don't even express it to themselves, wonder if they'll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

The latter group, Peggy, is known as engineers, and they have kept the human race afloat for 8000 years, since we first grew beyond the tribe. They do not wonder if they'll go down with the ship, because they are too busy fitting the ship with wings. But they do wish from time to time that the passengers would stop trying to knock holes in things.

(via the Llamas)

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