The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  Before the ceremony began the bishop stood with us in a little side room. He looked dignified and weighty, holding a tall staff shaped like a shepherd’s crook and wearing a miter, the big pointy hat, or rather the liturgical headdress, that bishops and cardinals sometimes wear. He was in bright red robes. He had thick eyeglasses and gray hair and was in his 70s, and as the girls and the boys chirped and shoved and laughed he took a hard look at them and said “Quiet!” in a way that made me mildly ashamed of my inability to whip them into shape. They listened to him for at least eight seconds before becoming themselves again.

  * * *

  I love some of these children. Some of them have been my son’s friends and in my house since preschool and I want to hug them when I see them. Some are so kindhearted that they bring tears to your eyes. Some of them are deep inside good and mean to do good in the world. A handful of them are brave, too, and have had a lot to put up with in their parents.

  But some are victims of the self-esteem movement. They have a wholly unearned self-respect. No, an unearned admiration for themselves. And they’ve been given this high sense of themselves by parents and teachers who didn’t and don’t have time for them and who make it up to them by making them conceited. I’m not sure how this will play out as they hit adulthood. What will happen to them when the world stops telling them what they have been told every day for the first quarter century of their lives, which is: You are wonderful.

  Maybe it will make for a supergeneration of strong and confident young adults who think outside the box and proceed through their lives with serenity and sureness. Maybe life will hit them upside the head when they’re 24 and they get fired from their first job and suddenly they’re destabilized by the shock of not being admired. Maybe it will send them reeling.

  I always want to tell them: The only kind of self-respect that lasts is the kind you earn by honestly coming through and achieving. That’s the only way you’ll make a lasting good impression on yourself.

  * * *

  One of the best things about Tuesday night was that the church was almost full, and so many families with many generations were there, and it was a pretty night in June and everyone could have been somewhere else, and yet here they were, making their responses during the mass and making them with strong voices, as if they knew what comes next. Which in a mass is not always so easy. But here we all were, and it always seems a surprise to me, the acting out of such old beliefs in the heart of new-millennium Manhattan by sophisticated mommies and daddies and hip grandmas. It was moving. It was as if the Holy Spirit were saying “It’s all right, there is a future here.”

  When it was over, families fanned out into neighborhood restaurants, and we went to an Italian place called Vico, where they had a vanilla cake for my son, who had taken his confirmation name from St. Jude. The cake had a cross and said “Hey Jude,” and when the waiters brought it to him they sang happy birthday.

  The restaurant—smallish, white-walled, with doors and windows open to the street—had some long tables with happy families. The Picas were across the room with an assortment of uncles and aunts, and with a handsome young man named Alex Mendik, who recently lost his well-loved father, Bernie, and whom everybody hugged with great affection. At our table was young Miles Pope, also an eighth grader, a young conservative intellectual who quotes Aristotle in an appropriate and unshowoffy manner, not an easy thing in a young man.

  It was just a happy night. It was like the junior high school graduation scene in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” except we weren’t in an ice-cream parlor and it cost roughly 200 times what egg creams for everyone cost Francie Nolan’s mother. But the spirit of Mrs. Nolan, who made Francie so proud by knowing that on a night like this you should leave a tip, prevailed, and my son’s father and my former husband, as flawed and messy modern Catholics say, was generous and charming and had a great debate with the boys about the nature of the modern European Union. My son’s grandmother, Peggy Byrne, our Aunt Peggy, merrily made faces as the boys talked about continents and kings.

  And then it was going on 11 p.m. and we all kissed goodbye and jumped in cabs or walked home. And I thought: I belong to a community. My son belongs to a community. This is it. It’s a neighborhood community, and a community of faith, a school community and a community of old relationships that last forever.

  You can forget that you are part of a community. You don’t even notice it, and then one night you look around and realize that you’re in the middle of it. It’s a good feeling to be part of something so big and so important, and to realize that when we celebrate something like a confirmation, we’re celebrating what we belong to and what we’ve just joined.

  So I turned and told Jude.

  Old Jersey Real

  The greatness of The Sopranos.

  The Wall Street Journal: June 8, 2007

  “The Sopranos” wasn’t only a great show or even a classic. It was a masterpiece, and its end on Sunday night is an epochal event. With it goes an era, a time.

  You know the story, and if you don’t, you’ve absorbed enough along the way as you overheard people chat Monday morning around what we still call the water cooler and mean as the line at Starbucks. A New Jersey mobster with a family, a business and a therapist makes his way through life. It was a family drama that was a mob drama, but in some hard-to-put-your-finger-on way it was the great post-9/11 drama of our time.

  “The Sopranos” first aired on HBO in 1999, but rewatching the first season, there’s an air of preamble to it, as if something were coming. Something was, and the show really got its shape and mood from what followed in September 2001. Sometimes this was subtle—Tony goes to his old uncle’s place upstate and suddenly thinks about going to live up there where it’s safe, where the birds fly on the lake. Sometimes it wasn’t—in the bar, he reads from a newspaper story about how unprotected the Port of Newark is. I remember this because at the time I’d begun to worry about the Port of Newark.

  That kind of thing happened a lot with “The Sopranos.” It was real, Old Jersey real (Satriale’s butcher shop, not the mall) and primal. It was about big things, as all great drama is—the human hunger for dominance, for safety, for love; the desire to rise in the world; the need to belong to something, to be a Jet or a Shark, a Crip or a Blood, and have mates, homies, esteemed colleagues or paisans; how we process the hypocrisy all around us, in our families and among our friends, as we grow up; how we process hypocrisy in ourselves.

  Because it was primal, its dialogue was pared to the bone and entered the language. You disrespecting the Bing? You wanna get whacked? And other famous phrases, many of them obscene.

  * * *

  The drama of Tony, the great post-9/11 drama of him, is that he is trying to hold on in a world he thinks is breaking to pieces. He has a sense, even though he’s only in his 40s, that the best times have passed, not only for the Italian mob but for everyone, for the country—that he’d missed out on something, and that even though he lives in a mansion, even though he is rich and comfortable and always had food in the refrigerator and Carm can go to Paris and the kids go to private school—for all of that, he fears he’s part of some long downhill slide, a slide that he can’t stop, that no one can, that no one will. Out there, he told his son and daughter, it is the year 2000, but in here it’s 1950. His bluster, his desperate desire to re-create order with the rough tools of his disordered heart and brain, are comic, poignant, ridiculous, human.

  Tony became a new and instantly recognizable icon, and his character adds to American myth, to America’s understanding of itself. It’s a big thing to create such a character, and not only one but a whole family of them—Uncle Junior, Christopher, Carmela. This is David Chase’s great achievement, to have created characters that are instantly recognizable, utterly original, and that add to America’s understanding of itself. And to have created, too, some of the most horrifying moments in all of television history, and one that I think is a contender for Most Horrifying Mo
ment Ever. That would be Adriana desperately crawling—crawling!—through the leaves in the woods as she tries to flee her lovable old friend Silvio, who is about to brutally put her down.

  * * *

  Here is a question that touches on the mystery of creativity, and I’ll probably put it badly because I can’t define it better than what I’m going to say. David Chase is the famous and justly celebrated creator of “The Sopranos,” the shaper of its stories. The psychological, spiritual and emotional energy needed to create a whole world, which is what he has done, is very great. It is a real expenditure, a kind of investment in life, a giving of yourself. You can’t do what he does without something like love. Not sentimentality or softness or sweetness, but love. And yet in a way, if you go by “The Sopranos,” Mr. Chase loves nothing. Human beings are appetite machines, and each day is devoted to meeting and appeasing those appetites. No one is good, there are no heroes, he sees through it all. The mental-health facility is a shakedown operation where they medicate your child into zombiehood and tell him to watch TV. Politicians are the real whores. The FBI is populated by smug careerists. In the penultimate show, a table full of psychotherapists top each other with erudite-seeming comments that show a ruthlessness as great as any gangster’s. I guess I’m asking where the energy for creativity comes when you see with such cold eyes.

  Not that they’re unrealistic. They’re not. One of the reasons the show was so popular—one of the reasons it resonated—is that it captured a widespread feeling that our institutions are failing, all of them, the church, the media, the law, the government, that there’s no one to trust, that Mighty Mouse will not save the day.

  In Mr. Chase’s world, everyone’s a gangster as long as he can find a gang. Those who don’t are freelancers.

  And what he seems to be telling us, as the final season ends, is that all your pity for Tony, all your regard for the fact that he, too, is caught, all your sympathy for him as a father, as a man trying to be a man, as a man whose mother literally tried to have him killed, is a mistake.

  Because he is a bad man. He has passing discomfort but not conscience, he has passing sympathies but no compassion. When he kills the character who is, essentially, his son, Christopher, he does it spontaneously, coolly, and with no passion. It’s all pragmatism. He’s all appetite. Tony is a stone-cold gangster.

  * * *

  There have been shows on television that have been, simply, sublime. In drama there was “I, Claudius,” a masterpiece of mood and menace—“Trust no one!”—from which writers and producers continue to steal (see HBO’s “Rome”) and PBS’s “Upstairs Downstairs.” A few others. “The Sopranos” is their equal, but also their superior: It is hard to capture the past but harder to capture the present, because everyone knows when you don’t get it right. It takes guts to do today.

  David Chase did, and he made a masterpiece. I’ll be watching Sunday night, but I’ll wake up that morning with blue moon in my eyes.

  CHAPTER 6

  Making Trouble

  When you write a political column you find yourself making temporary friends and permanent enemies. This is in part a reflection of the old political adage, “Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.” A column is a statement, and when you make critical statements in public about people, it’s understandable that they don’t forget.

  What follows are some tough judgments.

  * * *

  “Dutch” Is Shocking Because It Is Simply Awful

  The Wall Street Journal: October 1, 1999

  New York’s Central Park, 6:43 a.m. on a Thursday in late September, a morning dark, cool and rich with something latent. I walked along head down, lost in thought, trying to understand how a brilliant man could write, would write, such a base botch of a book. If only I were with him and could ask. Suddenly I stepped upon an acorn, and an electric shock tore through me. Suddenly, in an almost occult sense, I was there! In his office, in the townhouse on Capitol Hill. The rows of shelves groaning and gleaming with books, the long gray filing cabinet below and, within it, the famous yards of cards, the ones he showed so proudly on “60 Minutes,” each marked in careful, spidery script with a Mont Blanc pen whose use signifies a commitment to calligraphy, a writer’s love of sparkly things, or nothing much.

  “Edmund,” I said, “I’m writing like a nut because I’m imitating you! I agreed to review your book because I was sure you’d been unjustly criticized. I expected something of breadth, depth and sweep—something serious. Not this—high-dive belly-flop into the pools of Narcissus.”

  He looked at me—wire-rimmed glasses, soft bangs and beard. Why, he looks like Lytton Strachey! (Later, from my notes: “His unconscious homage to wiggy but groundbreaking Bloomsburian biographer?”) At first he was dismissive—the criticism is the sort of thing that “always greets any kind of original idea.” Then he was pleading. Fourteen years of expectation, 14 years of the elusive Reagan, and all the while as each year passed he got closer to… the battlefield. When his book on Teddy Roosevelt came out in 1979 Teddy was long dead, the historical case long settled. But Ronald Reagan is alive, the argument rages, there is no settled opinion! The editors, reviewers and social figures with whom Mr. Morris dines—Mr. Reagan is, still, their full moon; they see him, they bay. And sometimes bite.

  “Do you know how all this pressure left me?” he asked.

  “Don’t say barking mad.”

  “No—unnerved, in time enraged, at last quite desperate. So I got someone else to write the damn thing, a made-up character with a made-up life who has made-up interactions. I called him ‘Edmund Morris.’ If you don’t like the book you can bloody well blame him.”

  * * *

  I will.

  But where to start.

  Edmund Morris’s “Dutch” (Random House, 874 pages, $35) is a shocking book, not a work of sustained scholarship but a mere entertainment, and not an entertaining one. It is at turns bilious and cold, corny and cynical, manic and flat. It is also almost heartbreaking in that it marks such a waste—of history’s time, the Reagans’ faith, the writer’s talent.

  The famous central literary device, as I think we all know, does not work; it confuses, frustrates, obscures what it was meant to illumine. The reader never quite understands who is talking and whether he is being given a fact, a joke, a serious opinion, a bit of speculation or a guess. The fictitious “Edmund Morris” is a bore, tedious and windy, and a distraction from the more compelling story, fitfully told, of Ronald Reagan.

  From beginning to end a badly written meanness permeates. Mr. Reagan goes to “a hayseed school” where the girls have “ugly names” and wear “cheap perfume.” His first radio broadcasts appeal to “Dust Bowl brats like little Hughie Sidey.” His early California supporters are patriotic and honest but, tragically, lack “irony.” They are “aesthetically blind, culturally retarded… they view all threats to the Constitution—their Constitution—with the utmost seriousness.” Silly them. At White House dinners Mr. Morris puts up with more tacky people, a boring female theologian and a Palm Beach socialite “stiff with jewels.”

  When he is not mean he is English, not necessarily the same thing. He has no feel for the Midwest, and when he gives his characters dialogue—“There was more ’nuff roasted chicken and corn as evening came on” and “Jay Russell got him a new Buick”—they sound like extras in “Show Boat.”

  His portrait of America in the ’60s seems written by someone who wasn’t there; clichés are not avoided but seized upon and held high. The free-speech battles at Berkeley get deservedly long attention, but the central characters are not Mr. Reagan and university president Clark Kerr but Mr. Morris and his fictitious son, “Gavin,” who calls the Black Panthers “bad cats I dig in Oakland.” You will, literally, wince.

  The political perceptions and assertions are almost uniformly common wisdom. For all his references to dusty archives and the pains of research (one wonders why he makes so many), much of what Mr. Morris says about Reagan�
��s presidency reads like clippings from Time magazine. A troika rules the White House, Edwin Meese has a messy briefcase, pragmatists and hardliners disagree, David Stockman is tense, supply-side economics silly. SDI, the missile defense system Mr. Reagan fought to research and deploy, is presented, cheaply and cornily, as an idée fixe whose appeal to Mr. Reagan is its similarity to sci-fi novels and B movies. Mr. Morris does, however, allow others to make the case that holding to SDI at Reykjavik changed everything in the U.S.-Soviet relationship and was a key element in the Soviet collapse.

  The book’s judgments on Mr. Reagan are mixed but not balanced, and the language deployed seems an attempt to cloak the author’s indecisiveness. The result is a striking inconsistency. Mr. Reagan is an apparent airhead. Mr. Reagan has a clean, orderly, serious mind. Mr. Reagan tells pointless stories. Mr. Reagan’s stories have a serious allegorical purpose. Mr. Reagan is a yahoo. Mr. Reagan is a reader with a high enjoyment of style and a writer of crystalline clarity. Mr. Reagan lacks compassion and heart. Mr. Reagan’s emotions well over when he speaks of about that which he deeply cares. Perhaps strangest of all, “Reagan was America, and he wasn’t much else.” What a sentence. You have to be very strange to think that isn’t quite enough. The flaws of the book were reflected (and perhaps rehearsed) in Mr. Morris’s “60 Minutes” interview last Sunday, in which he dismissed Mr. Reagan’s character and gifts and then posed, weeping, as he read the president’s last letter to the country.

  “Dutch” has some moments. The reporting of the John Hinckley assassination attempt has the simple force and power of that old popular classic, Jim Bishop’s “The Day Lincoln Was Shot.” Mr. Morris’s rendering of the blacklist era, almost thwarted by the insertion of fictional movie scripts and song-and-dance patter, is tugged along by the sheer force of Mr. Reagan’s actions, which are presented as courageous and idealistic. The sections on the Reagan-Gorbachev summits are strong. All of the author’s interruptions, conceits and bizarre devices cannot derail these few but solid narratives. Mr. Reagan’s function in this book made me think of what was said of FDR: He is like the Staten Island ferry, big, unstoppable and bringing all the garbage along in its wake.