Peggy Noonan (Opinion Journal)
The English language needs a new adjective. No word currently available truly captures the essence of the latest Peggy Noonan column.
Hers is an op/ed piece complete with fictional characters, imagined conversations, and interior monologues (the interior monologues being even more dreadful than the stilted external conversations). Oh, and absolutely no point.
You are a cardinal of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, a modern man, and for the past seven days, in private conversations in Rome with cardinals you trust, you've been admitting what you would never say in public.And thus the hallucination begins. (Kids, just be glad this isn't the assigned theme for a college entrance exam.) Here are some of the things the cardinal would never say in public but says in his head:
Wait, the guy could barely walk, he couldn't even move his face. He looked like, God forgive me, the Hunchback or something. He was writing encyclicals and telling people what seems to be good is not good, and what seems to be old is true. That doesn't sound like a rock star.The guy? The guy? Is this really how a cardinal would refer to the Pope, even in an interior monologue? The guy?
And the hallucination goes on and on to include dinner at a fine Roman restaurant with a handful of cardinals from America, South America, Asia, and, tellingly, Germany. (No cardinals from Africa, however.) There is chianti. And an enterprising crew from NBC shows up (yes, specifically NBC).
Then the whole mess ends with the bizarre invocation of the 1972 Nixon campaign slogan:
And our modern cardinal walked home to the Vatican, met with his aides in the suite, lay down with his headache, which was now very bad, closed his eyes and thought: Now more than ever. He dragged himself up, and knelt by the bed.Well, now more than ever, I wish Peggy Noonan would stop writing OP|pulp|ED fiction.
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