Peggy on Beauchamp

Drudge didn't have the Scott Thomas Beauchamp transcripts up for very long, but it was long enough. The MSM has noticed. Peggy Noonan doesn't say anything new about the controversy you haven't read already in Ace, or Confederate Yankee, or Michael Goldfarb. What's new is her assessment of the new generation of journalists and leaders:

I'll jump here, or lurch I suppose, to something I am concerned about that I think I am observing accurately. It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business. They have had good lives, happy lives, but there is a sense with some of them that they didn't so much live it as view it. That they learned too much from media and not enough from life's difficulties. That they saw much of what they know in a film or play and picked up all the memes and themes.

...

But this new leadership class, those roughly 35 to 40, grew up in a time when media dominated all. They studied, they entered a top-tier college, and then on to Washington or New York or Los Angeles. But their knowledge, their experience, is necessarily circumscribed. Too much is abstract to them, or symbolic. The education establishment did them few favors. They didn't have to read Dostoevsky, they had to read critiques and deconstruction of Dostoevsky.

It's an interesting jump because Beauchamp is much younger than 35. I'm not even sure Franklin Foer is in that demographic. I think this is a slam at the upper tiers of TNR, the ones who let themselves be seduced by Beauchamp because he told them what they wanted to hear.

I read Peggy's description of the vicarious media and thought of the now-penitent Mr. Calvan, discussed here.

JYB Beauchamp blogging: warming to the topic here and here. More importantly, this is where the sadly absent Geoff noticed (I think before anyone else in the blogosphere) the significance of Beauchamp's admission that the woman was in Kuwait, not Iraq.

More on the left's bizarre and unpleasant reactions here and here. Couple more posts here and (eww!) here.

MORE: Very closely related to Peggy's assessment of adolescent adults is Diana West's. Here's a bit from a good review (it uses the word "tree-humpers") in the AmSpec of her book, Death of the Grownup:

West concludes with a stern warning that permanent adolescence puts us at risk before a confident and imperialist political Islam. Not surprisingly her critics have had at her for implying that it takes self-assured grown-ups to recognize and respond to the threats posed to Western Civilization -- that immature tree humpers and naked peace marchers are not up to the job. William Grimes of the New York Times dismissed West's book with the headline "Dress like Your Child, Terrorists win." Understandably, West's critics are discomfited. No one likes to hear that his worldview is infantile, and it is all the more unsettling when statistics and research support your thesis.

It's more unsettling still when a bunch of no-name mad blog rabble, one of whom works in a gun store, make you look like tools.