On Values: Conversations with PeggyNoonan

Now I hate the idea of divorce, too - and I hate it as only a veteran can. It's like dying, as my wife Celeste says - but you still have to wake up the next day. What offends me about "On Values" is its general, elitist assumption that only the best and most sensitive of us - Noonan, you, and me - feel the emptiness. This is top-down morality, analogous to the trickle-down theory of wealth that Noonan and others re-invented for the Reagan Revolution. And - to formulate a very subtle political/moral position - it's dead wrong.

That very serious, widely mourned man, Christopher Lasch, in his last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, argued that the social engineers of the post-New Deal era have produced a government that is in conflict with the idea of culture: a set of sterile legalisms of "rights" that in fact wars against the imperatives of "duties." Lasch's book is to Noonan's series as King Lear is to a Road Runner cartoon. Having lost our original certainties, can we regain them by simply making believe the loss never occurred? You want to try to think your car keys back into your pocket? Sei gesund.

What "On Values" does accomplish, though, is at least an opening of the question - and on PBS, the channel that Newt & Co., self-appoited guardians of our moral sense, want to trash. And that's important for those of us who want to live neither in "Father Knows Best" nor in "Married with Children."

A cheer-and-a-half to Noonan, and here's to the agonozing search for vaues - which is, itself, a value.

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