In the rough future our country faces, bad things will happen. We all know this. It's hard to imagine some of those things on a beautiful day with the sun shining and the markets full, but let's imagine anyway.
Among the things we may face over the next decade, as we all know, is another terrorist attack on American soil. But let's imagine the next one has many targets, is brilliantly planned and coordinated. Imagine that there are already 100 serious terror cells in the U.S., two per state. The members of each cell have been coming over, many but not all crossing our borders, for five years. They're working jobs, living lives, quietly planning.
Imagine they're planning that on the same day in the not-so-distant future, they will set off nuclear suitcase bombs in six American cities, including Washington, which will take the heaviest hit. Hundreds of thousands may die; millions will be endangered. Lines will go down, and to make it worse the terrorists will at the same time execute the cyberattack of all cyberattacks, causing massive communications failure and confusion. There will be no electricity; switching and generating stations will also have been targeted. There will be no word from Washington; the extent of the national damage will be as unknown as the extent of local damage is clear. Daily living will become very difficult, and for months--food shortages, fuel shortages.
Let's make it worse. On top of all that, on the day of the suitcase nukings, a half dozen designated cells will rise up and assassinate national, state and local leaders. There will be chaos, disorder, widespread want; law-enforcement personnel, or what remains of them, will be overwhelmed and outmatched...
…And all this of course is just one scenario. The madman who runs North Korea could launch a missile attack on the United States tomorrow, etc. There are limitless possibilities for terrible trouble."
In this example, Peggy’s Janusian stance and shameless fear-mongering on behalf of the military-industrial complex are beyond the pale. Typically, Ms. Noonan extols the virtues of small government through fiscal conservatism, cuts to federal programs to uplift the poor, and progressive tax decreases. Yet when her cronies in the defense industry face the potential of diminished profits, Ms. Noonan rolls out her propagandistic Howitzer and blasts her readers in the face with a heavy dose of dread.
Painful as it is, let’s have one final look at an excerpt from Noonan’s loathsome agitprop. From March 30, 2001, we have “The Haves vs. the Will-Haves”:
“Class warfare, says Mr. Barone, is at odds with Americans' hopeful nature. ‘We don't identify ourselves as permanently downtrodden; it is not the American experience that you're kept down and can't move up.’ In America you can not only move up, but do so quickly. The divorced single mother of this year gets a job or remarries and suddenly she and her children are not the bottom line on anybody's statistical readout anymore.
It is the fantastic fluidity and hopefulness of Americans, their enduring sense that in only one generation they can go from nothing to everything and nowhere to anywhere, that contributes to some surprising statistics on the death tax. Only 2% of Americans pay the levy, but in the polls 70% are consistently against it. Maybe this is because, as Steve Forbes used to say, they think it unfair that anyone should have to deal with the undertaker and the taxman in the same week. But it's also probably a good bet that this majority opposes the death tax because they believe that some day they'll have money, or their kids will, and they won't want to pay it.
We all think we can make it. We all think we can work hard and succeed, or win the lottery, or our cousin's new restaurant will be a big success and he'll hire us as greeter or maitre d'. We all dream. The inheritance tax seems antidreamer because it seems anti-American dream. A lot of Americans think that when you bash the rich you're bashing their future ZIP code.”
Whoa there, Peggy! Someone needs to rein you in before you become hopelessly lost in the nether regions.
In actuality, Ms. Noonan is far too educated to actually believe the tripe she has written here. The meritocracy myth is a cornerstone of the opulent class’s relentless yet nearly invisible grip on wealth and power in the United States. Once can cite numerous examples of individuals who “pulled themselves up by their boot-straps” and “made something of themselves” in this land of “unlimited opportunity”.
Yet we live in a nation of 300 million people and statistics expose these “Horatio Alger's” for the anomalies that they are. The top 1% of the US population boasts ownership of 40% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 80% “hoards” about 9% of our riches. A child born into the bottom 20% of the US income stratification has a 1% chance of joining those in the top 5%. Those born into the middle class have a “greatly enhanced” 1.8% chance of enjoying such upward mobility. For every Larry Ellison or Bill Gates there are tens of millions of “won’t-haves”.
Incidentally, the reason many poor and working class US Americans oppose the “death tax” is precisely because media whores like Ms. Noonan have convinced them that the ESTATE TAX is “anti-American dream” and have bamboozled them into believing that there is more than an infinitesimal chance they will acquire enough financial wealth to face such a tax. The purpose of the estate tax is to limit the perpetuation of the very entrenched aristocracy Ms. Noonan would have us believe does not exist in the United States.
While Ms. Noonan is merely one soldier in an army of mendacious propagandists waging war on behalf of the moneyed elite in the United States, her incestuous ties with government, her veil of respectability, and her platform from which she penetrates the consciousness of millions who are intellectually unprepared to fend off her toxic perversions of the truth combine to make her quite formidable.
So the next time you are reading one of her columns or books, or listening to her speak, remember that Peggy Noonan is probably weaving a clever, subtle, and sophistic argument to advance the agenda of thieves and murderers. But it’s too late to worry about her soul. She made a whore of that long ago.
Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who strives to remain intellectually free. He is Cyrano's Journal Online's associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine's Corner within Cyrano's at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/.
