Peggy Noonan Channels John Denver

Holy Crap! I must have been seriously preoccupied by the thick miasma of inert funk that is forever hovering about my person to have missed Peggy Noonan's latest column. What a gem it is. No joke. Yep, our old pal Peggy "Blubbery-Pudenda" Noonan recently slithered off to West Virginia and was overcome by the folksy hominess of the place. To get the ball rolling, she starts us off with a little joke:

A Southern lady sees a vacationing society lady from the Northeast. The Southern lady is gregarious: "Where y'all from?" Society lady is put off: "I'm from a place where they don't end sentences with a preposition." Southern lady smiles, nods her head: "Beg your pardon. Where y'all from, bitch?"

HAW HAW!!! That sure is funny. Why? Well, because the lady from "the Northeast" (i.e. Jew York City) is so totally a Bitch. Duh. Well done Peggy. Thanks for keeping it real.

It's fun to see cultures collide, because that's one of the ways you know they still exist.

Whoa. That's an understatement. Cultural collisions aren't just fun – they're side-splitting knee-slappers of the highest order! Remember that PBS documentary by Ken Burns about the Civil War? Well, I'm not ashamed to say that it inspired the most violent and convulsive bouts of pants-wetting laughter in my life. Big fun.

America continues to be full of differentness, in spite of the samening effect of national media. (I made up samening. It refers to the tendency of different, small and localized pockets of culture to take on the ways and values of national culture as it is imposed by television, music and movies.)

Aww. You're too modest. You also made up "differentness". But I'll let it slide because you're so very right. Values are indeed "imposed" upon me by television, et al. I'd go so far as to say that I'm nothing more than a meat puppet of the Lords of Popular Culture. Why else would I read your column, you nasty cooch? After all, the rag you "write" for (WSJ) has a larger circulation than any other paper in the country; it's only fitting that a blockhead word like "samening" should be minted on your keyboard. Idiot.

I have just been [in West Virginia] for the first time, and it is a jewel of a state. It is like an emerald you dig from a hill with your hands.

Yeah, so much dirtier and nasty looking than those emeralds you find in, say, a jewelry store. Isn't it just sooo axiomatic that the grimier, poorer, more grotesque something is, the more authentic it is as well? There's a theme you might want to develop a little more… because it's so totally fucking original.

You know when you've passed into [West Virginia] from the east because suddenly things look more dramatic. You get the impression you're in a real place. […] It is a tall state--the hills, trees and mountains--and shadowy-dark, with winding roads, except for where it's broad and beige and full of highway, courtesy of Robert Byrd. The highways are perfect looking, unstained by wear and tear, and not many people seem to use them.

Oh SNAP! There it is – that signature Noonan style we all love so much: a sprinkling of bullshit-dust followed by a smidgen of soft-focus sentimentality, finished off with a flat-footed slam of a Senior Democratic Senator for legislative pork. Brilliant! And I'm totally simpatico with you about roads: they suck. You probably flew into West Viginia – first class? – like a civilized person, right? Roads are for savages and pagans. Too bad your beloved President doesn't have a clue:

...our economy depends on us having the most efficient, reliable transportation system in the world. If we want people working in America, we've got to make sure our highways and roads are modern. We've got to bring up this transportation system into the 21st century.

What an idiot. Sorry about that unseemly diversion. What were you saying Peggy?

There are little churches in every town, where the highest thing is the steeples, and road signs with exhortations to follow Jesus, and big crosses made of white wood on the side of the road. The ACLU would do well not to come here and do their church-state thing.

Okay, now you're starting to piss me off. Clearly you didn't observe those quaint little towns with enough critical scrutiny. I'd be willing to bet cash money that the highest thing in town is probably some poor West Virginian bastard who can't get a West Virginian job and has to live in his West Virginian mom's basement. On the other hand, you're right (once again) about the ACLU and their "church-state thing"; they ought to stay as far away from West Virginia as possible. Remember James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman? There's a cautionary tale if ever there was one. They thought they'd go down to Mississippi in 1964 and get the coloreds all riled up when they didn't have no business down there no how. Gettin' dead served 'em right. Same goes with them church-state folk and their goddamn sekular hoomanizm.

Few people I met seemed interested in politics. I got the impression they see is [sic] as something dull and faraway, as a normal person would.

Amen. God forbid that people should be mislead into believing that they have a civic duty to learn about and participate in the institutions of democratic government. That wouldn’t be “normal”. Let’s skip ahead to one of your more ingenious passages:

At the store the man behind the counter was friendly, intelligent and missing an eye. He had no artificial eye, no eye patch, just a red space where the eye would be. When I asked his name he said, "Jack, but my friends call me One Eye." I nodded at this information and remembered what a friend told me. He works with a local man who was complaining about his lazy brother-in-law who's on welfare. "He wouldn't take a job in a pie factory!"

That’s deep. It’s also unsettling. Your readers hold you in high regard, Peggy, and when you write something that – at first glance – makes absolutely no earthly fucking sense, well... it makes a person feel stupid. My first guess is that this is some feeble kind of non sequitur commentary on welfare, but it may just be that your mutant mind has transformed itself into its gaseous state as a defense mechanism against the ascendant evil of your soul. It’s a toss up.

Well, I’d like to continue this wonderful dance, Peggy, you barren shitheel, but you’ve filled the final half of your column with a cheesy re-printing of the entire ballad of John Henry. So I’ll wrap this up. Your gasping reverence for backwoods/folksy ignorance might be touching if it weren’t so manipulative, insincere, disingenuous, self-serving and downright retarded.