[Peace-discuss] Brilliant send-up of David Brooks
"E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森"
ewj at pigsqq.org
Sun Dec 22 19:55:02 UTC 2013
I dont read the New York Times but I noted just yesterday that
they had this to say some years back-
I/t is not to speak hyperbolically , in the circumstances, to say that
"Through the Looking Glass" is a book for all time. It is as
fresh and charming to-day as it was thirty odd years ago./
- The New York Times, November 8, 1902.
*
I am particularly interested in the hyphen in to-day
and I am considering how I might make better use of
hyphens in my work. We dont do any research on
poultry other than the occasional frying or boiling of
eggs for lunch but one of my assistants is very fond
of hens. I mean to ask her about the hyp-hen.
I've been busy.
We have moved our office to a much larger building we rent
north of the city in a small village in Changping district so
I have spent much time there getting things going.
I give a lot of lectures around the country on pig
disease prevention and control and we do some
research on intractable problems like Classical
Swine Fever.
We have invented some tools for re-placing the xylene
and alcohol series used for de-waxing and staining of
histo-pathology slides. It's sort of a small scale dishwasher
using very hot water.
I dont have to mow the lawn and there are very few
police in this country and no one is looking in to see
how I am maintaining the courtyard at our office. We
have purchased some seeds of Impatiens walleriana and
will be starting those soon.
On 12/21/2013 7:22 AM, David Johnson wrote:
> *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" <mailto:ewj at pigsqq.org>
> *To:* David Green <mailto:davegreen84 at yahoo.com>
> *Cc:* Peace Discuss <mailto:peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
> *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
>> <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/will-journalism-go-the-way-of-whaling/?hp&_r=0> and
>> of his conversion,
>> <http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0402/features/index-brooks.shtml> 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”
>> <http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/000/095darhb.asp> and
>> “The Clintons Are Actually to Blame for Enron”
>> <http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/770alraf.asp> 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”
>> <http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/010/702ickxq.asp> 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.
>> <http://gawker.com/5167640/sounds-like-david-brooks-did-a-lot-of-acid-in-college> 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.
>> <http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos-in-paradise/> 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
>> <http://www.salon.com/2013/09/15/david_brooks_was_wrong_on_iraq_and_afghanistan/> being
>> wrong about Iraq.)
>> By now the Columnist uses the word “modesty”
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14brooks.html> a lot,
>> as in
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/opinion/11brooks.html?_r=0>,
>> “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.
>> <http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/david-brooks-and-mark-shields-to-receive-inaugural-prize-for-civility-in-public-life-at-national-press-club-139689673.html>
>> 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
>> <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/david-brooks-defends-yale-course-on-humility.html> 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
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/opinion/brooks-the-empirical-kids.html?ref=opinion&_r=0> 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
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/opinion/08brooks.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1387314744-jNoatd6rS4AB1xQfymgpaA> 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,
>> <http://www.salon.com/2013/12/16/hack_list_no_10_malcolm_gladwell/> 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.
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/opinion/brooks-the-thought-leader.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=0> 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.
>> <http://web.archive.org/web/20050309041845/http:/www.csis.org/intern/kissing.html> 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
>> <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/what-the-hell-is-david-brookss-column-about.html>.
>> 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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