For we lived so well so long

"I don't know a soul who's not been battered, don't have a friend who feels at ease ..."

I haven't always enjoyed Peggy Noonan's writing, but I seem to agree with her a lot more than I once did.

Noonan's book "Patriotic Grace" opined that we should all try to be a little nicer to each other, because all of us really are in this together. That's not the consensus either on the far left or the far right, where folks tend to think more about ovens, guillotines or firing squads for their political opposites. It is, I think, where most Americans fall, though.

Of course Noonan didn't write the lines that open this column; they're from the wonderful 1973 Paul Simon song "American Tune." But her column in the Wall Street Journal today sounded a lot to me like Simon in the late Nixon era. Titled "There's no pill for this depression," the Noonan column says basically that whatever "depression" we're going through right now is as much a crisis of spirit as it is of finance.



Simon's song -- which you really ought to listen to if you've got 4 minutes -- was pitch perfect for the way we felt in 1973, with Vietnam winding down, Nixon fighting to stay in office and economic stagflation that had lasted for three or four years by that point.

Yet now it's easy to look back on that period and think of it as the "good old days." Gas was still cheap, most of what we bought was still Made in America and the Reagan/Clinton/Bush attack on the middle class was just a gleam in some baby neocon's eye.

Of course I'm romanticizing it. Of course I was only 23 then, believing that possibilities still stretched out before me. But I'll tell you one thing. I knew very few people in the mainstream who worried that they would lose everything they had.

Noonan writes:

The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, "We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time." We are actors in a moment of history, taking part in it, moving it this way or that as we move forward or back. The moment we are living now is a strange one, a disquieting one, a time that seems full of endings.

I think she's absolutely right. We lived very well for a very long time, and we are coming to the end of something. I don't think it's necessarily the end of America or anything like that, but I think it may well be the end of the time when it matters what kind of coffeemaker you have or how many expensive pairs of shoes are in your closet.

I think we're coming to some sort of testing, a testing of not only our intelligence, but also of our guts and our hearts.

I pray we pass.