Peggy Noonan has written a few really horrible columns, but most of the time she's pretty good. This one's certainly a good one.
She does have a speech-writers habit of simplifying and writing down to her audience, which I find a minor annoyance. I prefer someone like Steyn who writes with sharp intelligence and the hell with you if it's over your head. It's not that Peggy is stupid, it's just the way she has trained herself to write.
Unlike, let's say, Maureen Dowd, who writes in an atrocious, pseudo-pop style because she's a conceited idiot.
You got a picture to back that up?
Interesting take.
Her tendency to simplify seems more a function of her thinking than her style, tho.
(As opposed to Steyn. I love Steyn.)
Style aside, she is a lot like Dowd, I'm afraid.
'Thousand points of light' 1or 'if she wept, the wires that hold her together would short,' that is, the 'poetry,' suggests a thinking process that is more visual than analytical. 1. See W. H. Auden, Charles Dickens and Thomas Wolfe, among others. |
Noonan graduated from a New Jersey high school, (a B student), and attended the local NJ college (FDU). Yet she never mentions Jersey. Says she's from Long Island. Maybe Peggy's 'snot style' of speech was the mechanism by which she distanced herself from her 'Joisey' origins, much as it was for Martha.
1. "Peggy, We Hardly Knew Ye", Part I, Peggy Noonan: The High School Years, Gloria R. Lalumia 2. "Peggy, We Hardly Knew Ye", Part II, Peggy Follows the Path to Success and We Meet Along the Way, Monica Finch
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