Still hoping some grown-ups will rescue us...

I have been down most of the week; perhaps it's just the winter blues. Perhaps I'm overworked, which is fortunate because many aren't working and don't expect to be working.

Peggy Noonan feels the same and opines:

'A major reason people are blue about the future is not the stores, not the Treasury secretary, not everyone digging in. It is those things, but it's more than that, and deeper.

'It's Sully and Suleman, the pilot and "Octomom," the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He's the only one who doesn't applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

'This is why people are so moved: We're still making Sullys. We're still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: "Come on and light this candle."

'But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy '73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

'What we fear we're making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. "Suley" doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm.'

I have almost given up on my own generation. There are few political figures in either party of my generation that give me confidence that pension funds, social security, banks, insurance companies, bonds, or securities are safe. Outside of David Petraeus and a few others, I am not confident we can fight off the barbarians within or without.

I can only hope that the young people and their officers who have risked their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan will rise up, cut the crap, and silence the shrill weenies who pretended they were going to change the world in 1968 and have nothing to show for it but film clips and reunion tours.