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Book excerpt: “A Certain Idea of America” by Peggy Noonan
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In her new collection of columns from the Wall Street Journal, “A Certain Idea of America” (to be published November 19 by Portfolio), Pulitzer Prize-winner Peggy Noonan writes about the history and character of our nation, the remarkable figures who personify the best of America, threats to the social fabric, and the “better angels” of our democracy.
Read the foreword below, and don’t miss Robert Costa’s conversation with Peggy Noonan on “CBS Sunday Morning” November 17!
“A Certain Idea of America” by Peggy Noonan
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Foreword
This is not a book about the day to day of our national political life. It is simply about loving America and enjoying thinking aloud about it.
The columns gathered here are varied in terms of subject matter. They are about the things that endure, and things that deserve to be encouraged. A number of them are about spectacular human beings. As my editor and I read through the past few years of Wall Street Journal columns, if I said, “I really enjoyed writing that,” or she said, “I loved this,” or I said, “This was important to me,” it was in. If not, out. We chose about eighty from more than four hundred. We found ourselves most attracted to themes of history and its pleasures.
The book is divided into seven parts.
“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is mostly about great figures and artists of the twentieth century, from Billy Graham to Oscar Hammerstein, from Queen Elizabeth II to Senator Margaret Chase Smith of the state of Maine, and from Tom Wolfe to Bob Dylan, with some side trips to the nineteenth century and the generals of the American Civil War. Looking back on a career of now fifty years, I see that from the beginning what I have loved most, what has most moved me, is writing honest praise.
“I Don’t Mind Being Stern,” on the other hand, is about having fun, as a public writer, taking as big a stick as you can to people and things you are certain deserve it. The U.S. Senate changing its dress code to accommodate a senator who enjoys dressing like a child? Get the stick. Vengeful Prince Harry? Ditto. We were certain a recent Broadway production of Cabaret deserved our stern attention, in a piece whose last line is its summation: “Life Isn’t Merde.” We castigate men who aren’t gentlemen, and admonish parents who, as their personal vanity product, wind kids up to become mindless status robots. Also receiving fire are woke academics who speak garbage thoughts with garbage words. (I am sorry to use the word “woke,” which is boring and sounds merely sarcastic, but the thing is that when you say it, everyone pretty much knows what you mean.) I believe we were the first to compare contemporary social justice warriors with the practitioners of the struggle sessions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We enjoyed pointing out that the leaders of the French Revolution were, largely, sociopaths. There’s a piece written in the hours after January 6, 2021.
In “Try a Little Tenderness” we turn to love, which we posit as a very good thing. We call for artists to enter politics. We meditate, after the fire that swept the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, on the enduring presence and power of religious faith. We unabashedly love, we swoon over and wish to marry, Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace. We mourn for Uvalde, Texas. We talk about the endless drama of men and women, and instruct America that more happens every day in the office than business. Also we declare Taylor Swift an American phenomenon, and if you don’t like it you can just shake it off.
“It Appears He Didn’t Take My Advice” is two columns long. The first, on Joe Biden, was so spectacularly wrong in its central prediction that it made us laugh. Yet looking back five years, it seemed to me in its reasoning to be still oddly pertinent. The second, on Donald Trump, on the eve of the 2016 election, seems to me to have some prescience as to his central problems as a historical figure. Also in the writing of it I remember a feeling of poignance.
“On America” is about the foibles, troubles, and triumphs of our country. It includes the story of my great-aunt Jane Jane, and how, as an Irish immigrant, she came to love her new country. I’d say the general theme of this section is about keeping your poise under pressure. It includes recent college graduates, the Normandy invasion, and the spirited, against-the-grain testimony of an old-fashioned capitalist. Also included, a portrait of the dynamics that produced a political sea change: “The Protected Versus the Unprotected.”
“Watch Out” contains columns about the worries that preoccupy my mind: the dark potentials of AI, skepticism as to the character and motives of its inventors; the possible use of nuclear weapons, and the ongoing dramas in Ukraine and the Mideast.
“We Can Handle It” is about working our way, as a nation, through things that roil us, from the #MeToo movement to the abortion wars, from the creation of a sane foreign policy, to the low state of the American presidency.
This collection draws its title from the famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s “War Memoirs,” most happily translated as “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” It struck me when I read it many years ago and stayed with me because all my life I have had a certain idea of America, and from the beginning it shaped my thinking and drove my work.
What is that idea? That she is good. That she has value. That from birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement. Its founders were engaged in the highest form of human achievement, stating assumptions and creating arrangements whereby life could be made more: just. In the workings of its history I saw something fabled. The genius cluster of the Founders, for instance—how did it happen that those particular people came together at that particular moment with exactly the right (different but complementary) gifts? Long ago I asked the historian David McCullough if he ever wondered about this. He said yes, and the only explanation he could come up with was: “Providence.” That is where my mind settles, too.
De Gaulle said his thoughts on France were driven as much by emotion as reason, and the same for me. A piece in here dated July 3, 2019, speaks of both:
I’m not really big on purple mountain majesties. I’d love America if it were a hole in the ground, though yes, it’s beautiful. I don’t love it only because it’s “an idea,” as we all say now. That strikes me as a little bloodless. Baseball didn’t come from an idea, it came from us—a long cool game punctuated by moments of high excellence and utter heartbreak, a team sport in which each player operates on his own. The great movie about America’s pastime isn’t called Field of Ideas, it’s called Field of Dreams. And the scene that makes every grown-up weep is when the dark-haired young catcher steps out of the cornfield and walks toward Kevin Costner, who suddenly realizes, That’s my father.
He asks if they can play catch, and they do, into the night.
The great question comes from the father: “Is this Heaven?” The great answer: “It’s Iowa.”
Which gets me closer to my feelings on patriotism. We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement, a political invention based on the astounding assumption that we are all equal, and that where you start doesn’t dictate where you’ll wind up. We’ve kept it going, father to son, mother to daughter, down the generations, inspired by the excellence and in spite of the heartbreak. Whatever was happening, depression or war, we held high the meaning and forged forward. We’ve respected and protected the Constitution.
And in the forging through and holding high we’ve created a history, traditions, a way of existing together.
We’ve been doing this for 243 years now, since the first Fourth of July and in spite of all the changes that have swept the world.
It’s all a miracle. I love America because it’s where the miracle is.
I would say of the above, welcome to my deepest heart.
You’ll see some of the U.S. Civil War here. It has been a lifelong preoccupation and followed my interest in Abraham Lincoln, whose life has gripped me since childhood. He is the only American president who was both a political and literary genius—literally, genius—and about him clung an air of the mystical. He was completely human (homely ways, off-color jokes, depressions, a writer of angry letters) and yet there was something almost supernatural in his ability to be fair, to be just, to be merciful toward his tormentors (the angry letters were thrown in a drawer). What a figure. Tolstoy thought him the greatest man in history.
Religious faith is a constant subtext here because it’s my constant subtext.
Anyway, America. With all her harrowing flaws (we have always been a violent country, for instance) she deserves from us a feeling of profound protectiveness. Our great job as citizens is to shine it up a little, make it better, and hand it on, safely, to the generation that follows, and ask them to shine it up and hand it on. I think that is often what I was trying to do. When you see this I will have been a weekly columnist in The Wall Street Journal for just shy of a quarter century. I am grateful I haven’t run out of opinions.
Excerpted from “A Certain Idea of America” by Peggy Noonan, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 Peggy Noonan.
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CBS News
McDonald’s investing $100 million to lure customers back to the fast food giant after E. coli outbreak
McDonald’s is investing $100 million to bring customers back to stores after an outbreak of E. coli food poisoning tied to onions on the fast-food giant’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers.
The investments include $65 million that will go directly to the hardest-hit franchises, the company said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that slivered onions on the Quarter Pounders were the likely source of the E. coli. Taylor Farms in California recalled onions potentially linked to the outbreak.
The E. coli outbreak has sickened 104 people in 14 states, federal health officials said in an update on Wednesday.
At least 34 people have been hospitalized, and four developed hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a serious condition that can cause kidney failure. An 88-year-old man who resided in Grand Junction, Colorado, died, as previously reported. The illnesses began at the end of September, and the most recent onset of illness occurred as of Oct. 21, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The Food and Drug Administration has said that “there does not appear to be a continued food safety concern related to this outbreak at McDonald’s restaurants.”
However, the outbreak hurt the company’s sales.
Quarter Pounders were removed from menus in several states in the early days of the outbreak.
In a statement Wednesday obtained by CBS News, McDonald’s said it had found an “alternate supplier” for the approximately 900 restaurants that had temporarily stopped serving Quarter Pounders with slivered onions.
“Over the past week, these restaurants resumed the sale of Quarter Pounder burgers with slivered onions,” McDonald’s said.
CBS News reached out to McDonald’s on Saturday for a statement regarding the reported investment.
Health officials said Saturday they have confirmed the first U.S. case of a new form of mpox that was first seen in eastern Congo.
The person had traveled to eastern Africa and was treated in Northern California upon return, according to the California Department of Public Health. Symptoms are improving and the risk to the public is low.
Mpox is a rare disease caused by infection with a virus that’s in the same family as the one that causes smallpox. It is endemic in parts of Africa, where people have been infected through bites from rodents or small animals.
Earlier this year, scientists reported the emergence of a new form of mpox in Africa that was spread through close contact including through sex.
More than 3,100 confirmed cases have been reported just since late September, according to the World Health Organization. The vast majority of them have been in three African countries – Burundi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Since then, cases of travelers with the new mpox form have been reported in Germany, India, Kenya, Sweden, Thailand, Zimbabwe, and the United Kingdom.
Health officials earlier this month said the situation in Congo appears to be stabilizing. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated Congo needs at least 3 million mpox vaccines to stop the spread, and another 7 million vaccines for the rest of Africa.
The current outbreak is different from the 2022 global outbreak of mpox where gay and bisexual men made up the vast majority of cases.
CBS News
China school knife attack kills at least 8, wounds 17, days after fatal car attack killed dozens
Eight people were killed and 17 others wounded Saturday in a knife attack at a vocational school in eastern China, and the suspect — a former student — has been arrested, police said.
The attack took place in the evening at the Wuxi Vocational Institute of Arts and Technology in the city of Yixing in Jiangsu province, police in Yixing said in a statement, confirming the toll.
This was the second incident of fatal violence in China in a matter of days.
Earlier this week, a 62-year-old man killed 35 people and wounded more than 40 more when he rammed his small SUV into a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai. The suspect was discovered in the car with a knife, with wounds to his neck thought to be self-harm injuries, according to the police.
Police said the suspect in the knife attack was a 21-year-old former student at the school who was meant to graduate this year, but failed his exams.
“He returned to the school to express his anger and commit these murders,” police said, adding that the suspect had confessed.
In Yixing, police said emergency services were fully mobilized to treat the wounded, and provide follow-up care for those affected by the attack.
Violent knife crime is not uncommon in China, where firearms are strictly controlled, but attacks with such a high death toll are relatively rare.
In recent months, there has been a spate of other attacks.
In October in Shanghai, a man killed three people and wounded 15 others in a knife attack at a supermarket.
And the month before, a Japanese schoolboy was fatally stabbed in the southern city of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong.
McDonald’s investing $100 million to lure customers back to the fast food giant after E. coli outbreak
U.S. health officials report 1st case of new form of mpox in a traveler
China school knife attack kills at least 8, wounds 17, days after fatal car attack killed dozens
McDonald’s investing $100 million to lure customers back to the fast food giant after E. coli outbreak
U.S. health officials report 1st case of new form of mpox in a traveler