Peggy Noonan? The Pulitzer Prize-winner for commentary for 2017?
Do you mean the partisan phrase-maker of the Reagan-Bush era who seems so affectedly self-important? Do you mean the woman who represents precisely what's sadly become of contemporary journalism, meaning an incestuous orgy in which you can't tell the flailing arms and legs of the campaign operatives from those of the supposedly trained news persons?
Do you mean the woman who writes one column a week for the Wall Street Journal? Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin surely turn over in their graves. For that matter, Breslin turned over while still alive. When once-a-week columnist Paul Gigot got the Pulitzer years ago, it was Breslin, of an adulthood spent hitting the pavement to write three or four columns week after week, who wondered aloud whether he might win two Pulitzers if he wrote no columns a week.
Yes, that Peggy Noonan.
Then I read on the Pulitzer website a few of Noonan's winning entries. Then I got it, better late than never.
If prizes should go to columns that see the truth early and understand and explain it, and that show the rest of us in retrospect how it ought to have been done, and how it must be done better in the future, then the Pulitzer judges got it right.
Donald Trump, Brexit--Noonan had them figured out and expressed and analyzed and predicted in February 2016, when others of us were still thinking Marco Rubio would make the inevitably logical run, or that Ted Cruz and John Kasich would force a brokered convention where the party insiders would reject Trump and anoint an establishment coalition ticket, or that Trump would finally say or do something so offensive that he simply could no longer survive in an American political game dominated for decades by caution.
Noonan fashioned a new construction. While others talked of elites or insiders or the establishment, she saw the rising of the "unprotected" against the "protected."
Let's turn the column over to a few award-winning paragraphs:
"The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful--those who have power or access to it. ... They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they've got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. ... They're insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions. ...
"[I]mmigration ... is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one, but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
"It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump. Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. ...
"If you are an unprotected American--one with limited resources and negligible access to power ... [y]ou know the Democrats won't protect you and the Republicans won't help you. ... The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.
"Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration--its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine--more workers at lower wages."
That column was published Feb. 27, 2016.
Noonan's protected-unprotected construction made me think about my late dad, undereducated, war veteran, and working man. After being retired on a Workers' Compensation settlement from his warehouse job, he made a living painting and roofing houses and doing maintenance work. Today, nearly three decades after his death from cigarettes, he would be facing competition from immigrants. He would be politically unprotected, just as he, as a poor working man, was economically unprotected. His little flat-top home, once set alone on a quiet graveled lane, and his pride, was, within a decade, abutted on two sides by low-end, jam-packed trailer parks.
The protected live in places with political clout and zoning restriction. They work at jobs posing little risk of on-the-job injury.
With dread, I checked to see what I was writing on Feb. 27, 2016.
I wrote of talking with a state Republican Party insider who related his attendance two weeks before at a Trump rally at Barton Coliseum. He told of recognizing only a dozen or so people in a crowd of 8,000. He told of talking with an auto repair shop worker who said he wasn't a Republican or Democrat but had taken the day off to see at long last a politician who spoke to and for him.
I'd have been better off at Barton Coliseum talking with the auto repair shop worker directly.
The valuable lesson of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for 2017 seems to be that we spend too much time instinctively scoffing and not enough time observing and understanding what's coming.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/13/2017