[Peace-discuss] Brilliant send-up of David Brooks

Fri Dec 20 23:40:14 UTC 2013

David Brooks is supposed to be an expert on American culture, he is a republican hack. He not only writes for the NYT's he has for years done the circuit of "talk shows" that is  "Charlie Rose"," Meet the Press", etc. etc. Yes, I did watch those programs at one time, certainly no longer. The Salon article does him well.

From: davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net
To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; ewj at pigsqq.org
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:22:24 -0600
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Brilliant send-up of David Brooks

Here, Here !

Well said Wayne !

Whats new in China ?

Haven't seen you post in a 
while.
Either your busy or were 
boring.

David J.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: 
  "E. Wayne Johnson 
  朱稳森" 
  To: David Green 
  Cc: Peace Discuss 
  Sent: Friday, December 20, 2013 4:57 
  PM
  Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Brilliant 
  send-up of David Brooks

I 'd never heard of David Brooks.

Wikipaedia says he 
  writes for the New York Times.
I suppose that's why I've never heard of 
  him.

Wp also states that David Brooks is an admirer of Barack 
  Obama.
That's the equivalent of saying that David Brooks is some sort of a 
  fucking idiot.

On 12/21/2013 6:25 AM, David Green wrote: 

    David Brooks: The Columnist
    By: Alex Pareene

    It seems a pleasant life to be a 
    Columnist. He writes a few hundred words once, or at most twice a week. He’s 
    paid more to read those words out loud to people at elite colleges and 
    conferences. Naturally, people frequently want to know where a Columnist 
    comes from and how they come to have columns.

    The Columnist begins as a Young 
    Conservative Intellectual. It is important for the Young Conservative 
    Intellectual to be a converted radical, so he will have a story of his 
    foolish young radicalism and of his 
    conversion, which he will credit to William F. Buckley and 
    Milton Friedman. He finds meaning in seriousness as a concept. He admires 
    Edmund Burke. The Columnist will be a public intellectual, not a mere 
    pundit. He will be wry, but never funny. Lightly ironic, but never 
    sarcastic. If he mocks, it will always be gently.

    The Columnist floats around the 
    Conservative Media for a while, where he is guaranteed work for life so long 
    as he remains ideologically correct, but the columnist has grander dreams. 
    He wants everyone to admire his seriousness, and that will not happen so 
    long as he’s writing “The Democrats Are the 
    Truly Stupid Party” and “The Clintons Are Actually 
    to Blame for Enron” at a conservative magazine, where those 
    takes are conventional and expected, instead of an Ideas magazine, where 
    those takes would be fresh and counterintuitive. At the Weekly 
    Standard, “The way George Bush ran 
    his baseball team shows his many impressive leadership 
    qualities” is simple partisan cheerleading. But at the 
    Atlantic? So the Columnist moves to a magazine of Ideas.  He writes 
    things like, “Liberals are more materialistic than they claim to be,” and 
    “Liberals are less tolerant than they claim to be,” and “I have read 
    Reinhold Niebuhr.”

    Ideas, for those who aren’t clear on the 
    concept, are simply attention-grabbing assertions. The Columnist is one of a 
    group of people who create these assertions and sell them to rich people. 
    His first book, “I Confirmed All My Biases By Driving to a Strip Mall,” is a 
    big hit among people who like to feel superior while reading gentle mocking 
    of people who like to feel superior. “Some Americans enjoy NASCAR,” he 
    writes. “Others prefer arugula and are very proud of themselves for this 
    fact.” He treats this observation as a bold Idea. He invents a term, to mock 
    (gently!) a very specific social class, and he freely condescends to a 
    larger one. The Columnist will never deny being one of the arugula ones, of 
    course, he will just position himself as that class’ foremost chronicler of 
    its little hypocrisies. His satire was once silly, and 
    Perelman-esque. It is now muted, and practically 
    indiscernible.

    In fact, you never know when the Columnist 
    is joking, which allows him to get away with quite a lot. He writes patent 
    falsehoods. A young reporter calls him and points them 
    out. The Columnist asks, don’t you get jokes? He says, “Is 
    this how you’re going to start your career?” A Columnist does not expect to 
    be fact-checked. He interprets it as a threat, from a would-be future 
    Columnist.

    But the Columnist learns that it doesn’t 
    matter. The Columnist’s work is fantasy, an extensive anthropology of 
    fictitious creations, and other serious people are enchanted. For the 
    serious, a good Idea doesn’t need supporting evidence. The Idea is its own 
    justification. The Columnist moves from his magazine of Ideas to his 
    rightful position as official Columnist at the last newspaper.

    Of course the Columnist knows he didn’t 
    just get this job for his Idea. The Columnist got this job because the last 
    newspaper is liberal, or perceived as liberal, but wants very, very much to 
    also be fair, so one or two of its columnists are conservative. But you have 
    to be a very specific kind of conservative to fit in at the last newspaper, 
    whose most important readers are sensitive, liberal and rich (not 
    coincidentally, just like everyone the Columnist writes about). You have to 
    be a “not-too” conservative, preferably an erudite one who claims his 
    conservatism from, say, Burke. You have to support the Republican Party most 
    of the time but be careful to concede that they’ve perhaps gone just a bit 
    too far some of the time.

    In this unjustly successful phase the 
    Columnist will be one of the most influential people alive. Or at least 
    “influence” will be something else he projects, alongside “seriousness.” Our 
    Columnist may not have started intending to become The Columnist. He may 
    have preferred to be a humorist or essayist or maybe even a simple Ideas 
    magazine editor. But no one turns down a column, and now his time is 
    occupied with Sunday show panels, the follow-up books, debates of 
    world-shaping importance (conducted only with other Columnists of his 
    stature), and Ideas Festivals. (The Columnist spends the Bush 
    years being wrong about Iraq.)

    By now the Columnist uses the word “modesty” a 
    lot, as in, “A few 
    decades ago, pop singers didn’t compose anthems to their own prowess; now 
    those songs dominate the charts.” The Columnist’s take is widely praised, 
    and he even wins an award for 
    civility.
    Soon, there is even a serious president. 
    The president immediately takes to the Columnist. They bond over their 
    shared habit of mentioning having read Edmund Burke. They are both of them 
    more serious than they are liberal or conservative. The president wants very 
    much to be the sort of president the Columnist likes, and the Columnist 
    wants very much to be the sort of Columnist the president reads. It seems 
    like a perfect relationship.

    But the Columnist is secretly already in 
    decline. His party no longer even bothers to put forth the pretense of 
    pretending to take the Columnist seriously. While the Columnist is writing 
    “modesty manifestos” the powerful people he is supposed to have a channel to 
    are all talking Breitbart, not Burke. Of course they had always liked Rand 
    more than Burke anyway, but they had once thought, like the president 
    thought, that they needed to protect their alliance with the Columnist in 
    order to preserve their legitimacy among the serious. It turns out that 
    ignoring the columnist does no damage to the brand. No power is lost when 
    the party spurns the Columnist. The president still talks to the Columnist, 
    but the president no longer acts like his world resembles the Columnist’s 
    world.

    But a Columnist is secure for life. His 
    influence can wane, and the fun can go out of his work, but he will always 
    be taken care of. He will be asked to teach at a prestigious school. His 
    lack of expertise in any subjects beyond meeting deadlines and the 
    projection of seriousness won’t be a problem, of course. Projecting 
    seriousness is a useful tool for future elites. He will call his course 
    something like “Modesty” and while he will prepare himself for snarking from 
    the uncivil mob he will insist that there is nothing 
    inherently ridiculous about assigning his own work in a 
    class on “modesty.”

    He teaches them seriousness. They teach 
    him Macklemore. He studies his small sample of young people, 
    unrepresentative of anything but their own class backgrounds, and as he 
    always does he extrapolates to the whole. He uses their 
    work for his column, and they dutifully keep up the charade 
    that these specific young people stand in for the entire world of young 
    people.

    He gets to know these kids. And he 
    realizes, or decides, that he hates them. They’re unjustifiably 
    self-assured. They’ve got atrocious taste in everything, especially music 
    and politics. They’re all unaware beneficiaries of a cushy life of grade 
    inflation. These people are going to succeed him? This miserable bunch, 
    these kids who’ve mistaken their performance of overachievement for actual 
    achievement of any kind?

    He hates them, and he hates, too, the 
    people he imagines them growing into. He imagines them becoming the kinds of 
    people he has always hated, in fact. People who’d helped to erode his status 
    signifiers and people who mock his seriousness. People who 
    write for Web sites. Web sites! And the people writing for Web sites have no 
    deference for the Columnist. He has always dismissed these Web sites, but he 
    now worries they are where new columnists will come from. Younger men, with 
    more marketable sensibilities, adopt his patented method 
    of Idea generation, and generate more buzz than he can now 
    manage. People realize that the Columnist speaks to a constituency of one. 
    Seriousness is still a valuable trait, obviously, and the Columnist will be 
    welcome at Aspen every year for the rest of his days. He will not go hungry. 
    But the Columnist sees this world just beside his own, where his seriousness 
    is disrespected, even scorned. This world is the problem, he decides.

    Now the Columnist decides he’ll write a 
    column just for his constituency of one.

    He writes a column for 
    himself. The column is about those terrible kids. It is 
    about those awful Web site writers. It is about everyone the Columnist knows 
    professionally and socially. Of course, most of all it is about the 
    Columnist. Because the Columnist is an expert in conflating unrelated or 
    irrelevant elements in order to craft an Idea, he will conflate all of the 
    things he hates into one subject, and then he will imagine that subject’s 
    decline into irrelevance and existential dissatisfaction. (The column is 
    self-hating, but he is still the Columnist so it is also still 
    self-aggrandizing. The Columnist makes sure to recognize and praise his own 
    modesty and humility, compared to the relentless assuredness of those kids 
    and those Web site writers.)

    There are still jokes. There is a joke 
    about Macklemore, a reminder of the column he had those kids write. There 
    are slightly exaggerated observations of the habits and foibles of the 
    Columnist’s hyperspecific socioeconomic and regional milieu, of the sort 
    he’s always made. Indeed, the central joke is very nearly one he’s 
    already made. But the Columnist is no longer lightly 
    ribbing. The Columnist is trying to inflict damage. But no one really 
    understands why, or whom the column is directed at.

    Of course, the column that the Columnist 
    wrote for himself, that makes no sense to others, gets buzz. The Web site 
    writers tweet about it on their iPad Airs and the Ideas magazine writers 
    discuss it and drive traffic to it. The Columnist takes no pleasure in the 
    buzz. Death approaches. But until it arrives, no one will ever 
    take away the Columnist’s column.

    From Salon, December 18, 
    2013
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