Insomniactive

In her new book, Peggy Noonan decries the increasing incivility of our public discourse, and the decreasing regard we seem to hold for those whose opinions differ from our own. She also laments the fact that her generation-the Boomers-are widely held to be shallow, materialistic, and without empathy for their fellow citizens. She believes nothing could be fundamentally farther from the truth, although she doesn’t much apologize for the behavior of those in her cohort who choose to act out. Hers is a delicate balancing act-the finger wagging with the one hand and the soothing and flattening of ruffled Boomer feathers with the the other.

In Ms. Noonan’s pantheon of no-no’s, coarse, echo-chamber incivility reigns supreme. Close behind, however, is the rampant “me-first-ism” she detects in our country. You can imagine my embarrassement, then, at the sequence of my reactions to this book. My first was, “God, I wish I had written this.” Only secondarily did I think, “God, I wish every American would read it.” On me-first-ism in the first degree, I stand guilty as charged.

Ms. Noonan starts from a premise she says she derived from her idol and boss, Ronald Reagan: that in the history of man, no civilization has developed a potent weapon which it has not used. In her nightmare, the weapon in question is a small nuclear device, highly potent and imminently transportable. Assume that a number of these will be detonated on American soil in the near future, she implores, and then work back from there in terms of the civil society we should have. Not surprisingly, she finds it woeful in comparison to the civil society we do have, with the distance between the two growing greater by the day. Assume, in a metaphor which is so strongly developed that I will leave the reader to discover it, that we will all be “helping each other down the steps” in the very near future. Wouldn’t that change the way we state our case; the tone of our voice when we disagree; the willful caution we should but often don’t employ before questioning one another’s motives?

This very small book is packed with so many gems that I can’t say much more without ruining the reader’s experience of discovering them for himself. But I can say this. Every once in a while, a book comes along that I buy in bulk and give to anyone who I think can string two thoughts together. This is most emphatically one of those.

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