Bubbling Brooks

Poor David Brooks. Nobody understands him. Or his President. There's just so much cynicism out there. It's all so unfair. Soooo UNFAIR!! Here we have an administration full of faithful, self-sacrificing public servants, men so noble that they were born with stigmata on their palms and stovepipe hats on their heads. You know, guys like "Landslide" George, Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, "Shotgun" Dick Cheney, "Leaky" Scooter Libby, Michael "Heck'uva Job Brownie" Brown, "Good Golly" Rumsfeld, Condi "Bin Ladawhatah's Determined to Strike in the U.S.?" Rice, and Karl "We Will Fuck Him Like No One Has Ever Fucked Him" Rove. You know, good guys you could sit down and drink a beer with. Butter wouldn't melt in their pretty mouths. And yet they're so very unpopular. Why doesn't the public get it? It must be Jon Stewart's fault. Cruel, cruel world, when will you stop tormenting us!! Oh, Fates, we are victims of your tragic and ironic wit. One day, one day they'll know. They'all know. Muuuahahahahaha.

OK, so you ask, what was that all about? I happened to catch a few minutes of David Brooks as part of an all-star journalist panel on the Chris Matthews Show last night as they were talking about Stewart's Daily Show and whether there was any place for anti-government cynicism in today's political discourse. I've posted on Brooks and his tenuous grasp of reality before, for example here. But I think that now he's totally lost it. He just couldn't even begin to understand why anybody would be cynical about the current administration. And so he gave us this gem (and I paraphrase from memory here): "You know, if you actually meet the people in power, you know that the politicians are better people--smarter, more serious, more selfless--than the journalists who write about them, and the journalists are better people than people who read them."

That whirring sound you hear is Tom Paine spinning in his grave. But if you think about it, this is a pretty good encapsulation of the press ethos during the Bush era. The government, as long as it's Republican, is good as a matter of a priori faith. No mere factual evidence can shake that conviction. Neither hurricanes, nor budget deficits, nor corruption trials, nor missing WMDs, nor body bags and suicide bombers can sway us from our dewey devotion to their benevolence. The job of the journalist is to convey that inherent goodness to the unwashed and unworthy masses, tutoring our inferior intellects. Brooks has always been something of a sociological mythmaker, and I guess we now know why. It doesn't seem to occur to him that journalists have an obligation to hold the powerful accountable to the public they were elected to serve. No, that's just too. . . too. . . plebian.

Which brings us to Brooks's latest NYT column, reprinted in yesterday's Tennessean, but sealed behind a subscription wall on the web. Here's his argument:

In all healthy societies, the middle-class people have wholesome middle-class values while the upper-crust bluebloods lead lives of cosseted leisure interrupted by infidelity, overdoses and hunting accidents. But in America today we've got this all bollixed up. Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutoctratic upper-class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class--devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disability payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football games.

Aha, so that's why we're so cynical! It's because Americans suck. The vast majority of us are lazy, whiny, good-for-nothing "slackers." Except for the rich people. (No drunken "hunting accidents" that I can remember!) They're the embodiment of all those good, old fashioned, hard-working, and "wholesome" virtues that used to be the sole domain of the middle class.

Brooks cites the great American progressive economist Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class to "class up" his pop-sociology, but, in the process, he's missed Veblen's fundamental point, which was that the values of the dominant class infuse society as a whole from the top down. In societies with widespread equality, where everyone works, labor is intrinsically valued and everyone works hard, embracing a spirit of trust and cooperation. By contrast, a society with great inequalities tends to follow the values of its ruling "leisure class": a predatory band that lives above the majority, working hard, not at "working," but at conniving, through force and fraud, to live off the work of the less fortunate. So by Veblen's theory, if you see a corruption in the values of the majority (or middle-class) look for your answers in the corruption of the ruling strata, who typically will be celebrated, ironically enough, for their violence, aggressivess, deceit, and wasteful excess. Sounds a bit like what Brooks has spent much of his time doing during the age of George Bush, Enron, Halliburton, and Paris Hilton.

Maybe next time David Brooks wants to know why America is going to hell in a handbasket he should look in a mirror.