Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has been gently critical of the Bush administration, implying that his leadership is flawed and his perspective both narrow and shallow. In this column, she goes a step further and questions whether ANY president has the depth and integrity to govern effectively these days...as the "wheels come off the trolley and the trolley comes off the track" not only in DC, but seemingly across the country, and the world. Noonan articulates an uneasy feeling about where we're headed in an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world.
My question: do you think the "wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks" as we hurtle onward? Is Noonan's fear shared by more and more thoughtful people?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."
<snip>
Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.
But this recounting doesn't quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.