I (heart) Peggy Noonan

Back in 2009 I wrote two posts called "I (heart) Peggy Noonan" and "I (heart) Peggy Noonan, part deux". Today I'm writing about Peggy Noonan again, so this post should probably have been called "I (heart) Peggy Noonan, part trois". I don't care. What I have written, I have written. A year's free subscription to my blog (folks, it's free already) if, without looking it up, you can identify the person who most famously uttered the previous sentence, and why. (Hint: It wasn't necessarily in English.)

[Editor's note. Since I didn't want to send you off on wild goose chases, please notice that I did not include links to those two 2009 posts about Peggy Noonan because the links in those posts to columns written by the aforementioned Peggy Noonan for the Wall Street Journal no longer connect to those columns. They are now forever lost in the annals of time or at least in the archives of the Wall Street Journal. --RWP]

To be clear, I don't (heart) the actual living, breathing Peggy Noonan who looked like this in a 2016 photograph by American photographer Gage Strickland:

No, friends, I (heart) Peggy Noonan's way with words. She is a wordsmith of the first order.

Wikipedia says of her, "In 1984, Noonan, as a speechwriter for President Reagan, authored his "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. She also wrote Reagan's address to the nation after the Challenger explosion, drawing upon the poet John Magee's words about aviators who "slipped the surly bonds of earth... and touched the face of God." The latter is ranked as the eighth best American political speech of the 20th century, according to a list compiled by professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A&M University. The "Pointe du Hoc" speech ranks as the 58th best speech of the century....Later, while working for then Vice President George H. W. Bush, Noonan coined the phrase "a kinder, gentler nation" and also popularized "a thousand points of light," two memorable catchphrases used by Bush. Noonan also wrote the speech in which Bush pledged: "Read my lips: no new taxes" during his 1988 presidential nomination acceptance speech in New Orleans (Bush's subsequent reversal of this pledge is often cited as a reason for his defeat in his 1992 re-election campaign)."

At long last, we finally come to the reason for this particular post, Peggy Noonan's column of April 26, 2018, entitled "What Does This Moment Demand of Us?"

Happy reading. I hope you will (heart) Peggy Noonan too.

I (heart) Peggy Noonan, part deux

Back on May 9th of this year, I wrote a post entitled “I (heart) Peggy Noonan.” For those of you who don’t know, Peggy Noonan writes a weekly column for the Opinion page of The Wall Street Journal. She is an excellent communicator; a quarter of a century ago she was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan.

For those who (a) just can’t get enough of Peggy Noonan or (b) don’t read the above-mentioned fish wrapper on a regular basis, here is her latest contribution, which I thought was a particularly telling and timely piece:

(Peggy Noonan’s latest contribution, which I thought was a particularly telling and timely piece)

For readers of this post in future days, I don’t know whether the above link will continue to show the column I want you to read or will change to Ms. Noonan’s current column as more weeks and more columns occur. The column I want you to read is entitled “Coruscating On Thin Ice.” If that’s not the one you get, you may have to search through the archives of the WSJ to find it. I apologize for the inconvenience, if, in fact, you encounter an inconvenience. If you don’t encounter an inconvenience, just ignore what I’m saying, or rather what I’m trying to say and saying so poorly. I was never a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.

For those of you who don’t care for Ms. Noonan, you should be thanking your lucky stars I didn’t decide to link to Ann Coulter.

Left to right: Peggy Noonan, Ann Coulter, some dude named Matt Drudge

I (heart) Peggy Noonan

God bless her. Her column in today’s Wall Street Journal
says it better than I can.

Reading it brought to mind the famous essay “Politics and the English Language” that George Orwell wrote in 1946. Here is a summary, by Wikipedia, of George’s points. If you are interested, you can Google the title of the essay and read the whole thing for yourself.

The point of Peggy Noonan’s column is not President Obama’s policies or his appointees or even current attempts at health-care reform, the point is that if the values Americans have held dear for more than two centuries go to Hell in a hand-basket, language such as Peggy Noonan and George Orwell decry will be one of the reasons.

Maybe only former English or journalism majors really care. And just so you know, the way to tell whether you are a former English or journalism major is to read Peggy Noonan’s column and see whether it brings to mind the famous essay “Politics and the English Language” that George Orwell wrote in 1946.

As undoubtedly another former English major once said (and if he or she wasn’t, he or she should have been), “Eschew obfuscation; espouse elucidation.”