Peggy Noonan, who will tell you how to be an American, you stupid, loves reading the tea leaves or some such bullshit, explaining how the nation feels, based on her own ideology and false narratives. Her latest WSJ opinion piece is a real spectacle, calling for making boys into men by teaching them how to toxify the country, a place which is home, after all, to the skeleton of Ronald Reagan. Having a federal job program for unemployed people that builds or rebuilds infrastructure would be great, humanistically and economically, but it needn’t shouldn’t revolve around a certain pipeline. From Simon Malloy at Salon:

“Noonan also shared her thoughts on the Keystone XL pipeline, which … well, here, just read it:

And there is the Keystone XL pipeline and the administration’s apparent intent to veto a bill that allows it. There the issue is not only the jobs the pipeline would create, and not only the infrastructure element. It is something more. If it is done right, the people who build the pipeline could be pressed to take on young men—skill-less, aimless—and get them learning, as part of a crew, how things are built and what it is to be a man who builds them.

On top of that, the building of the pipeline would show the world that America is capable of coming back, that we’re not only aware of our good fortune and engineering genius, we are pushing it hard into the future. America’s got her hard-hat on again. America is dynamic. ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.; Not just this endless talk of limits, restrictions, fears and ‘Oh, we’re all going to melt in the warm global future!’

I am completely at a loss for why Keystone XL, among the many construction jobs available to young men (but not women, apparently), would be uniquely capable of transforming ‘skill-less, aimless’ young men into real American manly men of manly valor. Apparently the pipeline will carry not just horribly toxic tar-sands oil, but also good old-fashioned American gumption (imported from Canada).

And I’m absolutely baffled at the suggestion that the world will stand up and take notice of American engineering and dynamism because we successfully built a long metal pipe.”