Dorkness at Noonan

Thanks for the laughs, Peg!

OK, guys, it’s Thanksgiving night, I’m full of stupid food (including the leftover rosemary-olive-oil croutons I made for the cauliflower soup, on which I am snacking as I write, just a few hours after declaring “I’m stuffed”) and I can barely think much less write.

Fortunately Peggy Noonan did me the favor of writing about what she was grateful for this Thanksgiving:

Right about now Time magazine would be choosing its Person of the Year, a designation I’ve followed from childhood because their choices tend to vary from sound to interesting.

That’s a helluva reason to follow something for, what, 70 years — this time, will it be interesting, or will it be sound? I’m on pins and needles!

Also I almost always know who they’ll choose and enjoy finding out if I’m right. Here I tell you who it will be and must be or I will be displeased.

Miss Taylor Swift is the Person of the Year. She is the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023.

I know what you’re thinking: What’s her racket? We know the music means nothing to Noonan — in a later section she basically cops to it: “I’m not the demo,” she says. “I’m Porgy and Bess, the American Songbook and Joni Mitchell.” (Cut to Noonan at the desktop smiling to herself: Got a blackish thing in there, and something that’s less than 100 years old! So I had to pad it with “the American Songbook” – how many Pulitzers do you have?) Plus Swift’s politics are the opposite of hers. So what does she like about her — and oh God please don’t let it be “girl boss” or any equivalent thereof, that’d just make me feel bad for her and I couldn’t stand that.

This fact makes her a suitably international choice because when something good happens in America, boy is it worldwide news.

Oooh wait, I think I get it now.

… Downtowns across the country—uniquely battered by the pandemic and the riots and demonstrations of 2020—are, while she is there, brought to life, with an influx of visitors and a local small business boom. Wherever she went it was like the past three years didn’t happen.

Now I know I get it.

Some of my older readers may remember when, in 1984, the wingnut brain trust, via George F. Will, pretended Bruce Springsteen, then at perhaps the height of his fame and cultural influence, represented the Reaganite dream of America, and even the Gipper himself worked Springsteen into his stump speech. Like Swift, The Boss was pretty liberal — his smash hit “Born in the U.S.A.” was a song about desperation, not patriotism — but it was a lot harder in those day for a lowly rock musician to cross the streams, as it were, when politicians plundered their popularity as boob bait for young voters. (Or maybe Springsteen didn’t dare; a lot of the people buying “Born in the U.S.A.” had no idea it was the exact opposite of a rightwing wet dream, and it would have been impractical to disabuse them.)

Noonan certainly remembers, and seems to think she can work the same routine on Swift. She uses some of the same tropes as Will did on Springsteen — “She works herself like a rented mule,” Noonan gushes, in much the same way Will said of Springsteen “an evening with Springsteen… is vivid proof that the work ethic is alive and well.”

But she gives it a MAGA-era twist. Like all conservatives Noonan paints “the past three years” as a nightmare because, well, look who’s been in charge! Though the “riots” she mentions happened when Trump was president, rightwingers always use it in this context to suggest a transitive property — that liberals had riots over the blacks and this confused voters so much they accidentally elected evil Joe Biden.

Noonan then portrays Swift, not as a successful Democratic-leaning artist, but as a force that restores the Old Order:

Over the summer I was fascinated by what became familiar, people posting on social media what was going on in the backs of the stadium as Ms. Swift sang. It was thousands of fathers and daughters dancing.

This is probably total bullshit — like the fan who supposedly told Will that Springsteen “sings about faith and traditional values”— but the idea that a hard-working pop star can heal the generational enmities that have young people running away from the rightwing beliefs of their parents is right down the old Reagan pipe.

I bet Noonan really believes this nonsense will fly, which is why she ends with a madly confident leap into gibberish: She compares Swift’s romance with Travis Kelce to that of “Marilyn and Joltin’ Joe” (as if no one would make an unfortunate connection with the fate of that romance, and of Monroe) and then goes kookoo bananas:

Onward to further greatness, Taylor Swift. Onward Travis Kelce. Win the Super Bowl this year, make an impossible catch, jump a man’s height to snatch the ball from the air with 10 seconds to go, score the winning touchdown, hold the ball up to your girl in the stands as the stadium roars and the confetti rains down.

As the American Songbook might say: It’s de-lightful, it’s de-licious, it’s de-compensating. But this isn’t 1984, and the trick can’t work for two reasons: First, no one gives a shit what prestige media columnists like Noonan think anymore, and second, even if she could shovel-pass this idea to other conservatives, nearly all of them would be more interested in screaming at Swift for prancing like a trollop on stages instead of breeding little white babies, while a few of the more pathetic cases will actually attempt to defeat her with music criticism. I’ll leave it to you to say whether that’s an improvement.