BOOK
REVIEW The crisis of American journalism
A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag:
America Today by Peggy Noonan Reviewed by Piyush Mathur
"This war happens
to be the reason he is president: because something big
and bad and dark was coming, and he was the man to lead
us through it ... My sense is that he walked into office
knowing huge history was coming but not knowing when,
what, where. Now he knows. I can quite imagine him
thinking, This is the reason I'm here." (pg 60)
No, the above is not an excerpt from some
Halloween story told to a five-year old by her mystical
Californian mother: It is, in fact, a passage from an
essay written by a veteran journalist affiliated to a
prominent publishing establishment of the United States.
I regret to report that, between the covers of A
Heart, a Cross, and a Flag, I had to slog through
269 pages of such poppycock from Peggy Noonan, a
contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a
speechwriter for former president Ronald Reagan.
Had irrationalism, vacuity and tediousness been
the book's only features, I would have probably opted
out of reviewing it. Unfortunately, however, Noonan's
rhetoric has the additional demerit of being
pathetically truncated and therefore politically
dangerous; a review is further warranted because the
book exemplifies a certain crisis of representation that
appears to have gripped mainstream American journalism
past the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Divided into 50 entries (excluding the Preface),
A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag comprises
journalistic articles and columns that Noonan originally
put out between September 13, 2001 and September 11,
2002. The compilation is purported to capture and
reflect retrospectively the spirit of America in the
wake of the terrorist attacks. What it really delivers
are the baffling reactions of an opportunist pleased
somewhere underneath that a colossal national tragedy
has succeeded in mainstreaming the brand of ideology
that she happens to cherish.
That is the brand
that favors: ultranationalism; self-righteous
unilateralism; Christian evangelism carried over to
global political and cultural diplomacy; machismo;
heroism; and personality cults. In accordance, Noonan is
ecstatic that both God and "masculine men" are back in
the vogue in America, and that with the tragedy "the age
of the genius is over and the age of the hero began" (pg
27; pg 67). She is also convinced that what makes the
American president ultimately attractive - as in more
attractive than a Hollywood superstar - is his ability
to "nuke someone" (pg 163).
Noonan herself has
chosen to call and advertise this collection - rather
repetitively, ie, both on the front and back flaps as
well as in the preface - as "a book about love". On that
count, the book is easily a dreadful disappointment both
generally and conclusively: It tells the American to
"think like a warrior" (pg 55), asking him or her to
emulate the Israeli; strongly supports country - wide
profiling; and, in its final chapter, "Time to Put the
Emotions Aside", advises America to "get coldly serious:
Arm the pilots, fortify cockpits, man flights with
marshals and profile passengers (pg 269)." If advice
such as the above is a recipe for love, then Noonan
should perhaps now start focusing on devising ways to
authoritarianism, mistrust, militarism and paranoia.
Anyway, other than the local backdrop of that
politically sensitive one-year time period, there is
little else to unite the book on the level of narrative;
the reader could, of course, deduce from the essays
Noonan's views on a range of topical events - and choose
to view them as a loose story. That story would most
likely reveal the following plots and subplots:
Visceral, and viscerally religious, portrayals of
America past the September 11 attacks; fly-by-night
hagiographies - of Ronald Reagan, Harry Truman, Rudy
Giuliani, and key members of the Bush White House
(especially the president); sentimental outpourings of
the religious right variety (with several sections
devoted exclusively to Catholicism and the Pope);
neo-conservative redefinitions of American nationalism
and patriotism; general existential rant, typically
accompanied by sundry advices to American government and
the average American (though Noonan never seems to
wonder whether the two may sometimes differ); and,
focused interpretations of particular disputes, events,
or episodes that took place in America through that
one-year period.
Of the above, perhaps the only
category in which Noonan is tolerable is the last one
(with chapters such as "The Great Iraq Debate"; "Will
Clinton Talk?"; "Weenies or Moles"; and "Bush Makes the
Right Move"). The rest are either too sentimental to be
of public use (especially now, over two years past their
original publication), or politically dangerous, or
unnecessary (for having been preceded by government
declarations), or very boring (for Noonan has no
literary talent).
Some of the above lacunae,
such as the author's defensive sentimentalism or
rambling descriptions of public reaction to the attacks
are understandable - especially keeping in mind the
tight journalistic deadlines under which she is likely
to have written the essays. What is troubling, however,
is the transfer of that sentimentality to issues in
realpolitik and matters of the White House, and the
sheer decision to reprint those knee-jerk reactions in
the form of a book.
On the more specific front,
Noonan's portrayals of religiosity, Catholicism, and the
Pope are overshadowed by her politics and nationalism,
and are too selective to include the Vatican's
articulate opposition to America's military response and
the fact of the homing of much of America's peace
movement within its numerous churches. As far as the
political hagiographies are concerned, Noonan has
typically infused them with the irrational and the
superhuman (such as in the excerpt I quoted at the
beginning of this review), and with labored conjectures
amounting to comically blatant misrepresentations.
For example, she deems George W Bush - who
earned a reputation for his laughable gaffes even before
he became US president - "boring" (and thus executively
preferable to former president Bill Clinton, whom she
chastises for his "vulgar ... smoothness," pg 188). She
also goes on to argue, in upholding the supposedly
boring persona of Bush, that presidents "should be
boring", and that they are not hired "to entertain us",
leaving me to wonder whether she is still talking about
somebody who has consistently been a dubious darling of
cartoonists and stand-up artists both in America and
abroad (pg 188). Likewise, she identifies Bush's lack of
"need" for the job and his not having lusted for the
same as "the key" to his popularity - even though Bush's
nasty battle with Al Gore in his run-up to the White
House is common knowledge and has since been the stuff
of American political history (pg 188).
Insofar
as the hagiography is a genre inherently clouded by
sycophancy, Noonan's little narratives aren't shy of
opportunistic contradictions. Hence, Bush the president,
admired for not "having a neurotic fixation on the
office" (pg 189), is upheld elsewhere as Bush the
politician, who knows that if his "popularity falls, his
party's suffers", and who "will do almost anything to
keep that from happening" (pg 192). Also, the words of
Bush the-eloquent-for-being-plainspoken are considered
so intricate as to require a full-blown, but really
quite unnecessary and inane, exegesis ("Plainspoken
Eloquence"; "Open Your Eyes").
Contradictions,
however, are found elsewhere too - and mark the
carelessness of the writer. So, even as Noonan devalues
the unmanly man - "intellectual, or a writer" - she
belabors her advice elsewhere that every American should
write about his or her experiences through and past the
attacks, and that "[we] need a poet ... a writer of
ballads and song to capture what happened" through the
rescue mission at Ground Zero (pg 30; pg 22).
All aside, some of the most flippant moments of
the book are encountered when Noonan refashions
journalistic ethics for the sake of national security
(specifically in the backdrop of Bush's review of the
no-first use nuclear policy). In her view, "We" -
American journalistic fraternity and the US government -
"should not be leaking that we are reviewing our nuclear
capacity ... [or] reporting in hyperventilated tones the
review of our nuclear policy" (pg 153). Rather, "We
should be very quietly debating in the offices of
government what an appropriate response would be to the
bombing of America" (pg 153). She points out that that
"is not censorship [but] using judgment in a time of
war" (pg 153).
There, however, she forgets to
reason out how the journalistic establishment is
supposed to work objectively in a country that is mostly
at war with one nation or another, and is now openly
determined to fight with terrorists around the world
indefinitely (to reminisce the launching of
Operation Infinite Justice). For, if truth is the first
casualty of a war, and since the United States has made
war its part-time job all-year long, then we are apt to
wonder what such a political climate must do to its
press, which is supposed to speak truth to power.
The question, then, that Noonan's book
unwittingly leaves for American journalists is whether
they could even fancy themselves in positions other than
"embedded" - as in, pardon my English, being in bed with
their government. And, as governments worldwide are
forced to emulate the American model of countering
terrorism, that question is likely to become relevant to
journalistic communities outside America as well.
The brand of journalism that Noonan herself
seems to favor, and indeed practices - as evident in
this collection - is short on history but long on
polemics. According to this journalism, the era of the
weapons of mass destruction has just started, thanks to
the ilk of Osama bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins (even
though the last and only atomic bombing took place about
half a century ago, and was executed by the United
States), and John Wayne, "a symbol of American
manliness", was killed - not by the tobacco industry,
(knowing that he died of lung cancer), but-by
"feminists, peaceniks, leftists, [and] intellectuals"
(pg 30). Of course, Noonan's journalism precludes any
reporting of the history of America's Middle East or
Arab policy or any serious historical referencing of
American diplomacy.
Noonan's is also the brand
of journalism that refuses to admit the cultural
plurality of its own domestic readership, reduces
America to a mere improvement over Europe, and stays
blind to the nation's non-Western heritages, histories,
traditions, and lineages. This is also the journalism
that is too flat to be evocative and too exclusive to be
accurate or representative; and, unfortunately, such
journalism rules the roost within America.
Noonan, however, takes this exclusionary logic
of American journalism to its wildest extremes,
exhibiting her own incomprehensible levels of contempt
for the democratic role of the domestic media. As such,
she calls the pro-active coverage of such notorious
episodes as the hate-murder of Matthew Shepard (a
homosexual male), and racially motivated police
atrocities against Rodney King (an Afro-American male),
as indications that American journalism has "failed" (pg
42)! For her, the rectification of such an institutional
failing appears to lie in putting the media to the
service of the state. Whereas, on the global scale, she
advises the alliance of the American media and the
nation-state to "lower [its] voices, and be chary with
words" - if it wishes, as it must, to act as
"well-meaning professionals in an asylum who want to
keep everyone safe, and help the sick, and keep them as
safe as possible too" (pg 153).
It so happens
that at one place in the book Noonan suddenly stops
after the usual ramble, and asks, "This is big stuff,
isn't it?" and then goes on to answer candidly: "I don't
know where to go with it" (pg 246). Well, that is an
answer that I would like to rephrase as a question and
then throw open to - and at - all American journalists
belonging to the big networks and publishing houses.
I would like to ask them whether they know where
to go with all the big stuff into which they are thrown
along with their military. I would like to ask them how
their hyper-aggressive state has affected the ways
through which they "go" wherever they must, the ways by
which they may intervene in the social and informational
spheres of their own country. Finally, and on a more
specific level, I would urge them to ask themselves
whether the direct relay of the opinion of a
hyper-tensed populace, as was strategically encouraged
by most media establishments in the US during the
September 11 crisis, was also not yet another way to
discourage individual reporters from carrying out their
investigative and critical duties objectively and
responsibly.
A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag:
America Today by Peggy Noonan, New York: Free Press;
A Wall Street Journal Book, 2003; ISBN: 0-7432-5005-2;
271 pages; Hardcover; price US$25.
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2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Nov 15, 2003
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Central, Hong Kong
"This war happens
to be the reason he is president: because something big
and bad and dark was coming, and he was the man to lead
us through it ... My sense is that he walked into office
knowing huge history was coming but not knowing when,
what, where. Now he knows. I can quite imagine him
thinking, This is the reason I'm here." (pg 60)
