Peggy Noonan Returns To College, Stunned To Find Kids Still Hate Her

'I thought being an adult would make me cool.'

Ah, academe! The collegiate campus of stately columned buildings and sunny quads and great hordes of the sprightly young rolling in one undifferentiated mass towards the horizon! The very air pregnant with a sense of serious purpose, of curious minds gathering to hash out the intricacies of great literature or the unsolved mystery of Landau’s problems! The anxieties of youths navigating the feeder road that leads to the zooming, cacophonous highway of adulthood!

It was good to be here, thought Peggy Noonan, sister in good standing of the Order of the Dexies Martini with a Benzo Back. It was good she had found her way to the campus of Columbia University in her beloved New York. She had been most distressed at the images flashing across the screen of her television cabinet: the yelling, red-faced crowds, the ugly signs, the cheap Wal-mart tents inhabited by students in keffiyehs popping up across the nation like refugee camps.

Peggy liked a robust debate about the issues as much as the next barfly wearing out the ear of the tipsy businessman holding down the adjoining stool. What she could not countenance was all of this … this … disorder. This was America! We respect each other in America! We use our indoor voices in America!

It was unseemly, is what it was.

So she strode the campus of Columbia, notebook and pen at the ready, purse stuffed with cheeses purchased from an Upper East Side cheesemonger and a thermos full of Irish coffee for sustenance. She wanted to speak to these children, to explain to them what they were doing wrong.

But alas, they would not speak to her. They averted their eyes, ignored her imprecations and frantic waving, hurrying off to join their comrades at the barricades. And she a journalist! She a scribe here to listen, to learn, and then explain why they would be better served with perhaps a touch less yelling.

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Weary and not a little bloated with cheese, she dropped onto a bench. From the direction of the nearby encampment came the sounds of revelry. Drunk on their own self-importance! Her head drooped. She would rest for just a minute. She would regather her strength, and then she would start anew her so-far-fruitless quest.

“You can try,” said a voice beside her. “Oh, you can wave cheese and whiskey at these cherubs until the farmers come in from the fields with backs bent from their labors. But Peggy, you’re a square. And these kids don’t dig squares.”

She opened her eyes. There, at the other end of the bench, sat a balding man with a most unkempt salt-and-pepper beard and box-shaped glasses that magnified his eyes. He wore a flowing white caftan, sandals, and a necklace of wooden beads, and the slight smile looked as if it might remove itself entirely from his face and come snuggle at her side. She looked again, and now she was sure that she knew him. Her mind stretched back, back, back to dusty literary journals and San Francisco hills. It could not be … and yet …

“Yes, I’m Allen Ginsberg,” the smiling man said. “Bard of the Beat poets, keeper of the literary tradition that upended the mid-20th century comfort of the middle class and its lily-white suburbs. The people Norman Mailer had in mind when he wrote ‘The White Negro.’” He shook his head, amused. “I had a drink one night in 1967 with Norman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at this joint in the East Bay, and Lawrence was reading this new poem of his that I was really digging, and all Norman could talk about was the hipster-square duality. Good God, you would have thought the man had just split the atom. He wasn’t that onto something.”

America is a country of First Amendment rights … It understands and accepts peaceful demonstrations. But it doesn’t respect breaking our laws. It doesn’t support violence as a tool or tactic and will move against it.

“I don’t see anyone moving against the pigs, actually,” Ginsberg said. He began snapping his fingers in a vaguely jazz-like rhythm.

It’s romantic to be a revolutionary and pleasurable to claim fierce commitments. It’s good to show you’re a force in the world, that you’ll march for the right and moral thing. Critical thinking isn’t your strong suit, emotion is.

“The kids haven’t wanted to speak to a condescending old woman, you say? Hard to believe.” Ginsberg looked down at his outfit and sighed. “I get that you probably mostly hung around squares in the Reagan White House, but why are you imagining me wearing this? Not all leftists in the sixties and seventies dressed like Nepalese monks.”

Unlike protesters of the past, who were usually eager to share with others what they thought and why, these demonstrators would generally not speak or make eye contact with members of the press, or, as they say, “corporate media.”

“Peggy, pardon me wigging out, but what in the damn hell do you think The Wall Street Journal is, if it is not corporate media? It’s owned by Rupert goddamn Murdoch. It’s for total squares! These kids associate it with the old man complaining about his 401k. They all watched Succession, they’re hip to what’s going on. Say, you gonna bogart that coffee?”

I was on a bench taking notes as a group of young women, all in sunglasses, masks, and kaffiyehs, walked by. “Friends, please come say hello and tell me what you think,” I called. They marched past, not making eye contact, save one, a beautiful girl of about 20. “I’m not trained,” she said. Which is what they’re instructed to say to corporate-media representatives who will twist your words. “I’m barely trained, you’re safe,” I called, and she laughed and half-halted. But her friends gave her a look and she conformed.

Ginsberg was guzzling her Irish coffee. He lowered the thermos from his lips, burped, wiped a billowy white sleeve across his mouth. “First question: If she was wearing sunglasses, a mask, and a kaffiyeh, how could you tell she was beautiful? She could have looked like the Elephant Man under that getup. Second, ‘Friends, please come say hello’? Who jives like that? And third, based on the condescending way you’re talking about them, I can’t blame those chicks for staying as far away from you as they could get.”

Two male students with a big rough rope were hauling up food—vegetable sandwiches on wheat bread, Dunkin’ Donuts—from the first floor entrance way. They hauled that black plastic supermarket hand cart up like they were re-enacting the siege of Sevastopol. There was a lot of re-enacting going on.

“I didn’t realize the students were not allowed to eat while they protest. No one ever said this was a hunger strike, far as I know. Beats being on the nod at least, doesn’t it? Hey, check this out. You’re giving me ideas.” He began snapping his fingers again. “Turtles! America! Turtles! In the vast heartland where we conceal prophecy. Ashes, all is ashes. Arise, Moloch! Arise in Peoria! Arise in this Illinois cold night! Arise on your stubby legs, you green gods!”

He stopped and frowned. “Damn, where did that come from? It’s terrible! The cats would blow their jets if they heard that garbage. If you’re going to hallucinate me, could you read some of my work first?”

An important thing now is that the students of the class of ’24, at Columbia and most other schools, will be allowed to graduate in the usual ceremony, with the usual celebrations. […] It would have been the injustice of injustices if they had been robbed of this final undergraduate graduation ceremony on May 15.

“Maybe you should wait until May 16 before you lock this column.”

People want peacefulness. They want to go about their lives. It’s not too much to ask.

Ginsberg sighed and stood up from the bench. “You came all the way over from the Upper East Side, sat here for a couple of hours, watched these kids, listened to their chants, and you learned absolutely nothing? Your entire journey here starts with ‘Kids these days’ and ends with ‘Kids these days’? What, then, was the point?”

He stopped, and his eyes seemed to light up. “Now, see, that was some goddamn poetry. I’m going to go write that down.”

Then he was gone, an older man dressed like a vanilla ice cream cone moving away from her, deeper into the campus and out of sight. She felt a twinge of pride, for she had inspired one of the 20th century’s greatest poets to compose a new verse. And now she was free to go home to her fabulous aerie above Manhattan and compose her new column.

[WSJ]

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