Mass Murderers.

Terrorists.

Child Molesters.

Kidnappers.

Global Warming.

Rappers.

Hmmm. One of these is not like the others…

mikey

Good thing no children were frightened in the 1950s or 1960s, especially not really well off and insulated white kids. America at that time was exactly like our fondest memories of certain television programs. Nobody had any other life experiences worth mentioning.

It was a good thing, too, because then a lot of those comforting kids were then sent as slightly older kids to kill and be killed in an invasion of South Vietnam supporting a hated and unpopular government.

Times are so different now, and it has nothing to do with Republicans, it’s all the fault of those nasty people who paint true stories about Columbus.

Looks like Noonan just now got around to watching ‘Bowling for Columbine’. Better late than never.

Maybe if concern trolls like Peggy didn’t hype up threats for a pretense of relevance the kids would be ok?

Just how tall is the Peggster, anyways?

Dunno, mikey. Seems to me at least two of those things are not like the others. But maybe that’s why I keep flunking the IQ tests.

The mural Noonan mentions in her column. Tune in next week when she worries about the poor children of Mexico after discovering the works of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros.

50 Cent is was scarier then the instant and total annihilation of a major city in the blinding instant flash of a man-made sun, as thousands of degrees flash fry everyone within a 10 mile radius, and those are the LUCKY ones.

Seems to me at least two of those things are not like the others.

Well sure, if you’re gonna go all college on me….

mikey

Sounds to me like Noonan is doing the usual liberal monster thing.

If there’s any cloud of terror hanging over this nation and its children, it’s the cloud caused by Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie, Rice, Peggy and others in the inner circle to initiate an illegal and immoral war that has caused the rest of the world to loath us and created countless deaths and terrible injuries. And oh yes, to spread Democracy while it is trying to destroy it at home with constant spreading of terror and fear in the populace.

THE HORROR…THE HORROR!

There was nothing scary in the 60s at all. I imagined those three assassinations, the burning of huge chunks of major American cities, the national guard shooting college students, the anarchy of Chicago, not to mention Vietnam on the news every stiinking day for virtually the entire decade. The cold war, the talk of violent revolution, the reactionary hard hats, the panthers, the Klan, sit-ins, Selma, Bull Connor, George Wallace. Yeah, it was a fuckin’ walk in the park compared to Fiddy Cent.

These people are such deliberate morons.

Well sure, if you’re gonna go all college on me….

Hey! A promotion! You gotta admit, it’s better than patrolling the halls looking for stoners skipping out of the pep rally . . .

I have never seen a weaker,whinier,more afraid and fucking mean bunch of people in my life as today’s”conservatives”. How the fuck can anyone get out of bed every morning if they hate the world so much? And they do hate the world and everyone on it.

My mother is like this,only worse. She will not visit my home(or her only grandson)because I have books in my home about various religions. Unless I remove all those books and lock them in the trunk of my car. I shit you not. Those books, you see ,are a portal to Satan,directly. And appearantly the trunk of my car is Satan proof,which is good to know I suppose. The owner’s manual doesn’t mention this feature, but hey,what do I know? Of course this would also mean locking my son in the trunk because good ol mom thinks his autism is punishment for my sins AND he’s now predestined to become a serial killer(no,I am not making this up,stop giggling). Actually it’s probably better for all of us that she pushed me too far about 3 yrs ago and we don’t speak anymore.

Of course I’m on a bit of a tangent about this whole kind of thing right now anyhoo,I just read Chris Hedge’s American Facists,and it’s pretty much my childhood in a nutshell.

I wish I could sue the southern baptists for what they’ve done to my family.

In case anyone was wondering, Peggy Noonan is an idiot. She doesn’t remember being fearful as a child (other than that “one huge thing” about atomic bombs possibly annihilating everyone without warning), but she doesn’t for a moment consider that maybe children are just less afraid of the world than the adults around them. Now, she assumes that kids are viewing the world the same way she does — as a horribly scary place filled with Play-Doh, bacon and brown skin (oh wait, that’s someone else’s fears).

I remember being a kid when Nixon was reelected in 1972. My folks were clearly unhappy with the result, but I, in my kid-rewriting-history-to-suit-myself mode, just told myself that I had wanted Nixon to win all along (because he had won, and everybody wants to be with the winners). The point? I was uninformed and unaware, and it just wasn’t a big factor in my life. THAT’S HOW KIDS VIEW THE WORLD.

So. Are there adults out there who make it their business to try to terrify everyone, including children, on a daily basis? Yep. Some of them are called overbearing parents. Some of them are called journalists. And some of them are called Republicans. Fortunately, most kids seem to be quite capable of blithely ignoring the fear-mongering (rolling their eyes at the parents, switching channels from the journalists and being blissfully unaware of the Republicans). I’m sure there are some kids who absorb the terrorizing messages of their elders, but I bet there were just as many in the halcyon days of yore that Peggy Noonan so fondly and mistily recalls.

I’m not giggling, angryoldbroad. Most of my family — my mom, a few of my siblings — are pretty much christonuts, but of a much milder variety. We can still visit each other as long as I do the topic-avoidance dance all day long.

Anyway, I’m really very sorry — for you, for your son, and also for your mother.

Are there adults out there who make it their business to try to terrify everyone, including children, on a daily basis? Yep. Some of them are called overbearing parents. Some of them are called journalists. And some of them are called Republicans.

A moment of silence, please, to express our thanks that we’re not Bill Kristol’s kid.

I find it hard to believe that the nuns did not terrify Little Peggy. Every Catholic I know (not just the lapsed ones) has a horror story to tell.

These people are such deliberate morons.

I don’t think that’s it.

I think it’s that they think we are.

And now they’re panicking, because they’re beginning to realize we (well, most of us, anyway) aren’t.

OK, I clicked. Shouldn’t have. Rule #1: Never click through to something involving the word “Noonan.” I never learn.

So of her seven examples of things kids see on TV that they shouldn’t see, six are very specific, as in direct quotes from the news or from action-TV shows or advertisements or whatever.

The seventh? “Smug and menacing rappers.”

Just . . . y’know . . . in general. Their very existence is a threat to the tykes. They don’t have to say anything or do anything. They just have to be. Nice, Peggy. Very nice.

“If you have money in America, you can hire people who compose the human chrysalis that protects the butterflies of the upper classes as they grow. The lacking, the poor, the working and middle class–they have no protection. Their kids are on their own. And they’re scared.”

Does she realize how true this statement is, although not for the reasons she gives?

Kids sense what really scares their parents, and that’s REALLY scary to them. That’s why the Cuban Missile Crisis terrified me as a child. What I didn’t have to worry about was getting sick and not having health insurance, or having an abcessed tooth and no money for a dentist, or losing our home because we had a subprime mortgage and couldn’t cover the raised payment, or my father suddenly losing his job to someone in Asia.

She’s right that more American children are facing those fears now than anytime since the Great Depression.

Can you please never post that picture of Noonan again? That uber-smug look on her face gives me a horrible urge to smack her around like a redheaded stepdaughter.

Gentlewoman–

Your post reminds of something someone said last year (although who remembers?) about Bush: “It’s not that Bush is stupid. It’s that he thinks everyone else is.”

I thought this was a Robin-Hood-splits-the-Sheriff-of-Nottingham’s-arrow bull’s eye. I would just amend it to add, “…as he HAS to think, given his deep insecurities and resentments and buried Oedipal ‘issues.'”

But then I always say that.

Oh, and–

What IS it about Peggy Noonan that’s so repellent?

I think it’s this: She presumes to write about “our” feelings. Feelings are her beat. “We” feel this way; “we” feel that.

But everything she says is so made-up, so contrived to suit her agenda, so disingenuous, that she manages to be offensive on two levels at once.

First, one’s sense of intellectual honesty is offended–which resides in the realm in which we try, at least, to be impersonal and objective. Yes, one has one’s biases and assumptions, but (unlike the propagandists) we try at least to refer to the objectively provable (or proven) to advance an argument. It’s at bottom a question of good faith.

But here’s Pretty Peggy pretending to that but doing so with dishonest, made-up invocations of feeling.

So we’re offended–at least I know I am–also on the subjective level. She presumes to argue via objective assertions, and yes, it’s a disaster. But she
also presumes to patrol the subjective terrain, and it’s equally mendacious and smugly self-serving and false. (And what can be more smug than one’s pride in one’s feelings? Nothing, is what.)

See, Peg, I DON’T feel that way. So your presumption that “we” do is both intellectually AND emotionally phony.

Okay, I’m done.

“Most of my family — my mom, a few of my siblings — are pretty much christonuts, but of a much milder variety. We can still visit each other as long as I do the topic-avoidance dance all day long.”

Which is why I don’t either bother to discuss politics with mine, even though they’re liberal about most things.

If you have money in America, you can hire people who compose the human chrysalis that protects the butterflies of the upper classes as they grow. The lacking, the poor, the working and middle class–they have no protection. Their kids are on their own.

Dear me. If Pegster wasn’t a conservative, I’d think she was committing Class Warfare!

And re: the placid 60’s – as a teenager in a Midwest suburb, I recall being frightened for a classmate because he was considering attending college at Columbia – in my mind, it was a place so dangerous he could be shot.

I read an oral history project recently about the neighborhood in Seattle where I lived in the 80’s and 90’s. The oral history was a memory of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Apparently, during that time there was a lot of turmoil among neighborhood political factions, and there were several bombings – yes, BOMBINGS OF HOMES – in the neighborhood.

My high school was evacuated for bomb threats three times during the 3 years I attended there.

And of course Pegster will tell us that black children in the Southern States slept more soundly during the halcyon days of the 50’s and 60’s than they do now.

g: I was in Seattle in the 60s (late ’64-June ’69) and you’ve piqued my curiosity: which neighborhood did all this happen in?
I was relatively well-informed, and don’t remember anything like that.
By the way, I was mostly scared of people my own age (bullying assholes) during the 60s. Peggy’s being a little disingenuous, aren’t children actually the very worst part of humanity?
BREAKING NEWS: Shooting at mall in K. C., MO, two dead. Shouldn’t we close all the malls?
I remain, smugly menacing……

Shouldn’t we close all the malls?

Hmm, just thinking out loud here…but can’t we close Iraq and Afghanistan?

Jumpin’ Jeebus, but that’s one big shitload o’ stupid packed into one little o’ Pegster.

was in Seattle in the 60s (late ‘64-June ‘69) and you’ve piqued my curiosity: which neighborhood did all this happen in?

M. Bouffant – CD, Captiol Hill and Madrona. Yeah, it blows my mind, too. See oral history project at the Museum of History & Industry.

Just a brief meta observation, if you will. Wot the hell is with the great, enormous quantities of shortersâ„¢ of lately?? Scrolling down the front page, there must be four or five of ’em, going up over the past couple o’ daze. WTF gives?! We haven’t had a good Pastor Swank, Kaye Grogan, or full-length Virgin Ben in freakin’ ages! Harrumph!