SICKNESS AND SUBJECTIVITY
Tourists
in New York City? How suspicious can you get? And they
were "Mideastern looking," according to Detective Noonan,
which could mean anything. But seriously deluded people
never realize just how and why they've turned into nut-balls:
their subjectivity is a shield, behind which they are safe
from any objective analysis. Emotions, not facts, energize
their fantasies, because, you see, for someone suffering from
an advanced case of mental illness, trying to put what they
are seeing together is a process that doesn't resemble thought
in the slightest. What it seems like, from Noonan's vivid
description of her interior mental processes, is a very bad
case of PMS:
"We
watched them. After a minute or so they finished taping St.
Pat's and turned toward where we were. We were about 20 feet
away from them, and we eyeballed them hard. They stared back
at us in what I thought an aggressive manner: a deadeye stare,
cold, no nod, no upturned-chin hello."
'HEY, ISN'T
THAT PEGGY NOONAN?'
Come on,
Peggy, admit it: you think you're so damn famous that you
really were astonished they didn't recognize you. It's as
if you expected them to get all excited and exclaim: "Hey,
there's Peggy Noonan, the famous speech-writer and columnist,
staring rudely at us! Whaddaya know about that?"
"They
stared at us staring at them for a few seconds, and then they
began to videotape Rockefeller Center. We continued watching,
and I surveyed the street for a policeman or patrol car. I
looked over at the men again. They were watching me. The one
with the camera puts it down for a moment. We stared, they
stared. And then they left. They walked away and disappeared
down a side street.
"Let
me tell you what I thought. I thought: Those guys are terrorists."
PRINCESS PEGGY
IS MIFFED
So what,
exactly, had been the great crime of these two "Mideastern
looking" guys? That they were videotaping an edifice that
has been the favored subject of millions of tourists? That
they were probably Italians with great tans, maybe a couple
of Sicilianos? Perhaps the real crime of these two darkies
was that they somehow failed to genuflect in the direction
of Princess Peggy, and instead returned her hostile glares
with a well-deserved "deadeye stare." Noonan, ditzy to begin
with, has quite clearly lost her mind. But, then again, she's
in good company, because so has much of the rest of the country.
THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY
OF MADNESS
Noonan's
crazed column is a perfect case study in the mass psychology
of madness, the kind of insanity that leads to lynch mobs,
lawlessness, and the final breakdown of the social order.
A female, screaming in panic, is suddenly gripped by hysteria
isn't this a common feature of any disaster scenario? Noonan
isn't the only one: Ann Coulter, as I discussed
in another column, has fixated on the alleged dangers
of all Mideastern-looking men, and wants to deport them (except,
those who are US citizens). Mona
Charen, who once had the nerve to smear Pat Buchanan as a
"racist" and "xenophobe," concurs:
"There
are thousands of Arabs in the United States at this moment
on student and travel visas. They should all be asked, politely
and without prejudice, to go home. This will work hardships
in many cases, and that is regrettable. But
."
THE FEMALE
MIND
Like Coulter,
Charen doesn't bother facing the question of what to do with
all those Arab-Americans who are US citizens, since
presumably given these paranoid premises they would
pose an equal danger. But, then, the female mind does not
work logically, and especially not in a time of crisis, when
they are genetically programmed to go ballistic.
AN ATAVISTIC
LIABILITY
Perhaps
this had some survival value back in the days when human beings
were hunter-gatherers, trolling the savannas in packs: when
danger threatened, the females would set off a chorus of frenzied
screams, loud enough to be heard for miles. This would be
the signal for the males to come running to the rescue. However,
this is one atavism which is a definite liability in the modern
world, especially now that we have such a thing as newspaper
columnists of the female persuasion. As catastrophe strikes,
and the women start to scream, it's best to get them into
the lifeboats and out of the public discussion. This is
a time for cooler heads to prevail
.
THE GIRL CAN'T
SHAKE IT
Noonan,
as I have indicated, has to be read to be believed. While
she admits to a moment of lucidity "And then I thought:
Whoa, wait a minute" this soon passed, and all those female
hormones took over. Of course, if she had flagged down a cop
car I can't believe there wasn't one in sight, the city
was crawling with them in the wake of 9/11 and demanded
they arrest the men, they would have told her to take a chill
pill and go home fer Chrissakes, lady! "So I just filed
it away," she writes, "as did my son." Oh, clever Peggy Noonan,
a smart Irish girl who knows when to keep her mouth shut.
"But neither of us could shake it," she writes. Yes, madness
is like that
.
A PARANOID
RIFF
Everything
has significance to an advanced nut-case, there are no
coincidences: the smallest events are fraught with meaning,
usually ominous. Noonan's symptoms are classic: she blithers
on about her driver, who, miraculously, wasn't a Pakistani.
She was on her way to the Oprah Winfrey Show, and to gather
material from the plebeian classes by way of research,
you understand she asks the guy: "So, you bothered like
everyone else at what's going on?"
It is an
odd question, really, I mean who wouldn't be bothered
driving down the street in midtown Manhattan, just a few days
after the attack on the World Trade Center, with the stench
of death still hovering in the air? There is also, you'll
note, a strange phraseology in her question, as posed: something
is said to be going on, although it isn't clear, from
the context, just what Noonan means. But the driver picks
up on it right away, without having to be told, and goes into
a paranoid riff:
"Yeah,
I am. I been feeling funny since a thing I saw the other day.
I'm standing with a bunch of limos and drivers, we're waiting
outside that big building, 520 Madison. And suddenly we're
all hanging around talking and suddenly we see these two
guys, Mideastern guys, in turbans. And they're videotaping
520 Madison Avenue top to bottom. Right in front of us. So
we look at them and they look back and then they keep doing
it! So one of our guys starts to walk toward them, and the
guys with the camera got outta there quick. And I'm telling
you, it gave me the creeps!"
CALLING THE
TIP LINE
Oh, the
wisdom of limo-drivers! Why, who knows how many newspaper
columns might never have been written if not for their Solomonic
sense of rectitude! This, I'm afraid, was enough to push poor
Peggy over the edge, and right after the show she rushed off
the set and called the FBI tip line, babbling her story at
some poor G-man:
"I say,
You guys must be getting 1,500 tips an hour.' He says yes
[his sigh is almost audible], but they're all appreciated
and if I see any more Mideastern looking men videotaping I
should call."
DIALING FOR
DUMMIES
Crazy people,
the real nutballs, are typically gullible to a fault, almost
childlike in their naivetι, and never know when they're being
humored. But our Peggy is no dummie:
"I figured:
They're busy taking other, more urgent tips, this isn't going
anywhere. Then I remembered an FBI agent I'd met in the neighborhood,
tried to reach her, couldn't get her at her office or home.
I leave messages, hear nothing, figure she's out chasing the
bad guys."
THE NOONAN
MYTHOS
Good lord,
the poor woman is positively frantic, at this point, dialing
the phone as if it is her one last link to sanity. The problem
is, no one is answering, or at least no one is giving her
the answers she wants to hear. So instead of confronting the
issue of her own, uh, lunacy, she retreats deeper into her
developing psychosis. Like the schizophrenic girl portrayed
in I
Never Promised You A Rose Garden, whose fantasy realm
of gods and heroes is her shield against a world where human
ambiguity can be dangerous, Noonan creates an entire mythology
out of the random occurrences of her life:
"Now
jump to this past week. Two things happen. My son is surfing
Internet chat rooms last Sunday and goes to a conservative
site, where he sees an interesting thing. A man or woman has
written in to say again I paraphrase The oddest thing
happened at work the other day. I work at a petrochemical
company, and these two Mideastern looking guys come in and
say they want to videotape the inside of the plant for a college
course they're taking. They were approached and asked for
identification by the manager. They became surly, angry, and
left. Later the manager phoned the school they claimed to
be students at and they weren't even registered!'
"My
son calls to me, we read it and look at each other. I decided
to call the FBI again."
SHE SAW IT
ON THE INTERNET
I will pass
over the question of why Noonan didn't name the "conservative
site" in question, aside from noting that if that site had
been Lucianne.com the
Wall Street Journal would no doubt have taken the opportunity
to broadcast the fact to the world. FreeRepublic.com
is the name of the site, it is the most popular and consistently
interesting site on the Right side of the Web, and I, too,
saw the thread that tall tale was on. I have seen hundreds
like it, and so has Noonan, if she's spent any time at all
on FR recently: like society at large, the Freepers are in
a state of hysteria only more so. And, as in the world
of the punditocracy, a good proportion of the hysterics are
women, like the
broad who posted reply #64 on this thread:
"I have
a small disposable camera and a little spiral-bound notebook
in my purse or backpack now wherever we go. About a week after
9-11 my kids and I went to the local Wal-Mart. As we were
walking from our vehicle through the parking lot, I saw two
young Middle Eastern guys, twenty-somethings, walking out
of WM toward us. They had no bags from the store. They had
nothing in their hands at all. But in the 10-15 feet width
of space between parked cars, they were walking like they
were joined at the hip, with their arms pressed together and
their heads down, kind of a let's hurry up and get out of
here before someone sees us' kind of exit."
'BE EVER VIGILANT!'
Good G*d!
So here is this harpy carrying her little camera and notebook,
following people around, and generally making an all-around
nuisance of herself and she doesn't feel in the least bit
embarrassed about it! Indeed, she broadcasts her madness to
the world she's proud of it! That's the defining
characteristic of life in wartime: it brings out the absolute
worst, as well as (on some rare occasions) the best. A mild
snoop becomes a fanatical spy, and the slightly obnoxious
become utterly intolerable because, you see, they are in
charge, or think they are. I'll spare my readers the rest
of this vicious woman's tirade, except that she ends her peroration
by exclaiming: "Be ever vigilant!" Of such people police states
are made.
WAR HYSTERIA
AS A MENTAL ILLNESS
Of course,
you'll find the biggest opponents of a police state
on FreeRepublic, too, but that's because the place is so big
and has so much traffic that it reflects not only the conservative
movement but the country at large. In any case, there are
hundreds of such paranoid ravings on FreeRepublic, a good
deal of them posted by hysterics of the female persuasion.
That Noonan glommed onto one of them so readily is yet another
symptom of what appears to be a widespread illness, a mass
hallucination amid a veritable epidemic of anthrax-sightings,
otherwise known as war hysteria. Any normal person, especially
one with some background in journalism, might look askance
at this story: to an hysteric, however, it appears to be the
gospel truth, since it seems to imbue Noonan's hallucinations
with the aura of credibility: "My son calls to me," writes
Noonan, "we read it and look at each other. I decided to call
the FBI again."
THE FBI CALLS
BACK
It is like
something out of the diary of a mad
housewife: mother and son uncover heinous plot to blow
up Walmart's, or Saint Patrick's Cathedral, or whatever.
And, you know what? The FBI called her back! I kid you not:
this is how our intrepid law enforcement agencies are going
after Osama bin Laden by listening to Noonan's semi-coherent
conspiracy theories and solemnly taking it all down:
"My
initial tip line report has, apparently, trickled up into
the check it out' category. Or maybe they've gotten enough
reports like mine that a discernible pattern has emerged.
At any rate, the agent asked me to go through my story and
the driver's story, and then I threw in the report on the
Internet, and he gave me his name and number and asked me
to call if I saw anything else. All this, of course, has me
thinking. Maybe it has you thinking, too."
BE VERY
AFRAID
.
You bet
it does, Peggy girl. It makes me think that the Wall Street
Journal editor who let that one go through the editorial
process untouched by human hands ought to be fired forthwith.
It also makes me wonder whether someone so obviously disturbed
ought to be entrusted with the care of a 14-year-old boy:
this kind of madness is apparently all too communicable. But
most of all it makes me very much afraid: I mean, is this
what the FBI is spending its time on when a cabal of crazed
mass murderers is on the loose? No wonder they didn't have
a clue as to what was happening in the days prior to 9/11.
If Noonan's nuttery is something they take seriously, then
they are sure to miss out on the real thing when it passes
right under their noses and in that case we are all doomed,
now aren't we?
THE SLEEPERS
There have
been plenty of public exhibitions of madness in the days since
9/11, but none, to date, is so blatant and embarrassing
as Noonan's acting out on the op-ed page of the WSJ. For all
this anecdotal "evidence" of a Vast Arab-American Conspiracy
i.e. the overheated ramblings of other hysterics is
just the buildup for La Noonan's grand conspiracy theory,
to wit:
"I think
there are a lot of sleeper cells' not a few, as we all
hope, but a lot. I think some of them are in Queens and Brooklyn
and Manhattan, and in Jersey City and elsewhere in New Jersey.
Boston, too. Maybe some are in the capital or Virginia or
Maryland. Maybe some of those who delivered anthrax to the
U.S. Capitol took a taxi. Maybe on the other hand they took
the shuttle from LaGuardia."
PUT DOWN THE
CRACK PIPE, PEGGY
Yeah, and
maybe they hitchhiked. It is incredible that such nonsense
could be printed on the editorial page of any mainstream newspaper:
Oh, those pod people are everywhere! Sleeping underground,
germinating their nefariousness, until, one day, they awaken
.
Put down the crack pipe, Peggy, and snap out of it!
Having lost the key element that separates the inmates of
an asylum from the rest of us the ability to distinguish
fantasy from reality you are sliding down the slippery
slope into a mental abyss. You need professional help and
so does the Wall Street Journal for allowing you to
embarrass not only yourself but also the entire staff of that
paper.
A FEW GOOD
WHITE GUYS
Is it really
necessary to say that the ethnic cleansing program envisioned
by the Three Witches of the War Party is eminently impractical
as well as utterly un-American? Okay, then, I'll explain to
the more hysterical females and their male counterparts: surely
all Bin Laden has to do in order to get around this dubious
strategy is to recruit a few white guys. Shoot, he
has already. And what about those Arabs who are
also American citizens? La Charen says that they will have
to undergo "scrutiny" but why draw the line there? Why not
simply subject everyone to merciless scrutiny, just to be
on the safe side: why not set up a full-fledged police state,
complete with injunctions against certain types of speech,
while deporting all Arabs (or those who even look vaguely
Arabic)?
THE TURBAN
QUESTION
This last
is not so unthinkable, for, according to Noonan, she was thrown
into a veritable tizzy by the sight of "Mideastern looking"
men "wearing turbans." The idea that Osama bin Laden's underground
army is going to be parading around the streets of Manhattan
in turbans is just ludicrous enough for a space case
like Noonan to believe. Please don't tell her that
it is the Sikhs closer to Indians (from India) and not
in the least bit Arabic who wear turbans, and that these
guys were very probably not Afghans, or Arabs:
it would spoil her fantasy, and, besides, that isn't how delusional
systems work.
FANTASY WORLDS
Fantasy
worlds constructed by the clinically insane are the products
of careful editing: everything that contradicts the
reality of the fantasy is simply edited out. So it doesn't
matter that the tinfoil-hat stories Noonan picked up on FreeRepublic
are not verified, or verifiable: it doesn't matter that there's
no evidence for the kind of widespread indeed, practically
omnipresent conspiracy imagined by her. When you want to
believe something, it doesn't take much convincing. And clearly
Noonan wants to believe it out of some need to impose a pattern
on what is otherwise, to her, inexplicable.
A TERRORIST
VIDEO LIBRARY?
It is especially
funny unintentional humor is the best kind, don't you think?
when the touchy-feely highly emotional Noonan, who admittedly
is going off on a "hunch," goes all analytical on us. These
cell members, she solemnly informs us, "may not be sure what
their next move is. They're not sure of their next assignment."
Gee, I don't know, maybe the anthrax in the Capitol has something
to do with their next move, but then I'm not a Wall Street
Journal pundit, so what do I know? Ms. Noonan,
naturally, has her own theory, and it is a unique one:
"I think
cell members have been going around taking home movies of
potential targets. I suspect they've been downloading them
into computers and shooting them off to Osama and his lieutenants
in the caves. I suspect they've been building a video library
of places they might hit over the next few months and years
and decade. And I think once they take one of the targets
down they'll happily return to the scene of the crime, take
a nice tourist-type videotape of the crater they made they'll
tell the cops they want to record the brave rescue workers
and send it triumphantly home."
FEMININE INTUITION
Of course,
admits La Noonan, "that's all based on nothing but hunches,"
otherwise known as feminine intuition. Now, let's look at
this logically (and, ladies, do try to follow along
with me
.): Why are they bothering to videotape these
well-known targets (such as St. Patrick's Cathedral) an activity
that is sure to arouse a certain amount of suspicion post-9/11,
when there are plenty of images of these targets already extant?
Of what possible use would a "video library" of potential
targets be to Al Qaeda to "send them triumphantly home"
to what purpose?
A FEVER DREAM
Noonan's
screed here veers off into complete incoherence, but what
comes through is an abiding hatred of all things Arabic: turbans,
and the "arrogant" and "showy" "Mid-eastern looking" men who
wear them. Noonan writes with the fervent dreamlike urgency
of a madwomen whose visions have overwhelmed what little common
sense she once possessed:
"I think
I saw some of them that night across from St. Pat's, and I
continue to regret not confronting them, questioning them
and, if I had to, tackling them and screaming for help. I
could have gotten us all arrested. If they had been innocent
tourists I would have apologized, begged their forgiveness
and offered to buy them a very nice dinner. If they had not
been innocent, I would have helped stop some bad guys."
IF ONLY
Oh, how
I wish she had tackled those poor tourists stuck
in New York, probably, and wandering about in hopes of salvaging
their vacation. Noonan would then have been, rightly, arrested,
and, when she tried to impress them with her importance by
dropping a few names Ronald Reagan, Wall Street Journal
it would have infuriated them just enough to clap her in
the hoosegaw, where she would have cooled her jets, and learned
a much-needed lesson.
IN ALL CAPS
The whole
world would then have read about the ex-Reagan speech-writer
and Wall Street Journal columnist driven stark staring
mad by the 9/11 attack, who had been arrested, screaming,
after assaulting some hapless tourists. As it is, we will
not be spared her hysterical subjectivity: she'll just get
worse, until her madness becomes so apparent that she'll be
forced to get help. Either that, or the rest of the world
will have gone made along with her in which case no one
will notice that a nut-ball, the kind that usually writes
20-page letters-to-the-editor in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, is pontificating
on the op ed page of one of the world's leading newspapers.
And this last may be a real possibility
.
THE MADNESS
SPREADS
As Noonan
cheerily informs us:
"In
the past month I have evolved from polite tip-line caller
to watchful potential warrior. And I gather that is going
on with pretty much everyone else, and I'm glad of it."
I, for
one, am not glad of it. The lunatics, it seems, have
taken over the asylum: not only that, but their craziness
is contagious, and its partisans are actively trying to spread
it: why else write such a newspaper column? Noonan then goes
on to record her glee at reading a story about some minor
indignity endured by two "Mideastern looking" men on a plane,
who were asked not to sit together. While admitting that "they
were probably going to a bioethics convention," she nonetheless
revels in their discomfort:
"They
made it clear they resented being split up, and I understand
their resentment, and would feel real sympathy if they told
me about it. You would, too."
"But
you know what? I think we're in the fight of our lives, and
I think we're going to need their patience. And I think those
who have not yet developed patience are going to have to grow
up and get some."
THE THREE WITCHES
Let's all
be "grown up," here, and go hysterical, like the Three Witches
of Neoconservatism. Let's ditch the Bill of Rights, the Constitution,
the social contract and the fabric of society itself, in a
panic to stamp out the "sleeper cells" that live in Peggy
Noonan's overheated imagination. We're in the fight of our
lives, all right: not only against Osama bin Laden, but against
hysterics with a not-so-hidden agenda who will invoke "patience"
and even "patriotism" as a rationale for abandoning the free
society.
CANDY ANDY
AND THE THREE HARPIES
People like
Noonan, Mona Charen, and Andrew Sullivan (as shrill and womanish
as any of the aforementioned harpies) are all so predictable:
Sullivan, for example, is a foreigner, who presumes to lecture
American critics of the war for being "anti-American" and
darkly implies that an Arabic-leftist "fifth column" needs
to be dealt with, perhaps, like Ariel Sharon (his hero) is
dealing with the Palestinians. He doesn't care about the Bill
of Rights: after all, they don't have any such Bill where
he's from. Charen and Noonan, too, brush all concern for civil
liberties aside with very little ceremony. Here is the latter
on the "very special circumstances" in which all laws, both
human and divine, must be suspended:
"Because under very special circumstances and these
are special circumstances you sometimes have to sacrifice.
You have to drop your burly pride a little and try to understand
and be accepting and accommodating and generous-spirited.
"I think
we're going to require a lot of patience from a lot of innocent
people. And you know, I don't think that's asking too much.
And when it's not given, I think we should recognize that
as odd. About as odd as videotaping a great cathedral in the
dark."
'SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES'
It's not
asking too much from a people already half-enslaved. Yes,
there's always some "special circumstance" in which the laws
propounded by the Founders not to mention the laws of simple
human decency have to be repealed out of sheer necessity.
These "emergency" edicts are always "temporary," of course
except that, as history has shown, they always somehow
become permanent. People get used to being ordered around,
and, when nobody much objects for fear of being thought
"odd" this state of affairs seems normal and right.
THE REAL EPIDEMIC
In an important
sense, the mass poisoning of American society has been carried
out much more effectively than any anthrax attack could guarantee:
the spores of hatred, suspicion, and the totalitarian mentality,
are being spread throughout the land. The Noonans, the Charens,
and the Coulters are the carriers of this deadly bacillus,
and the contagion is spreading dangerously. The madness known
as war hysteria, first trumpeted by a bevy of mostly female
Bacchantes,
is sure to spread to the less enlightened sectors of the male
population, starting in the editorial offices of the Weekly
Standard and the Wall Street Journal, and ending
G*d knows where
.
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