I hate David Brooks

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I’ve written about David Brooks before. He is a toffee-nosed middle-of-the-road sort-of-conservative social commentator for the New York Times. He is priggish and frequently clucks his tongue over our decadent society. His preferred society would, I think, be a cartoonish Eisenhower-era America, with everyone living in a little white house and going to church every Sunday, in a rocket car (because David Brooks is a great believer in progress).

Seriously, people like this kill me. They long for the days of Big Religion, when everyone went to church except the really bad people. People like Brooks often whine about how society has suffered without Religion as a Unifying Force.

O yes indeedy, it’s a unifying force, all right. Go ask all the Lutherans and Catholics who died in the Thirty Years War, back in the seventeenth century, about how powerfully they felt about their religion as a unifying force.

But religion is also a civilizing force! the David Brookses cry. Music! Poetry! Art!

(They overlook all the music and poetry and art that’s been created without benefit of religion.)

Which is why this passage, from a recent Brooks NYTimes.com editorial in which he describes Charles Taylor’s book “A Secular Age”, drives me batty:

“. . . What I most appreciate is [Taylor’s] vision of a “secular” future that is both open and also contains at least pockets of spiritual rigor, and that is propelled by religious motivation, a strong and enduring piece of our nature.”

This gives me a splitting headache. First of all: “pockets of spiritual rigor”? Does Christian fundamentalism, or Muslim fundamentalism for that matter, constitute a “pocket of spiritual rigor”? If so, in what way do they add to the value of their respective cultures?

And why would a “secular” future be “propelled” by “religious motivation”? This baffles me completely. I’m a non-believer myself. Can I somehow “propel” myself with “religious motivation” that doesn’t involve believing in a particular religion? Or do I just sideline myself, and allow my culture to be “propelled”?

I don’t know why people read Brooks seriously. I only read him to reassure myself what a completely fatuous bore he is.

Now excuse me while I propel myself into the secular future.

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Goodbye, New York Times

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The only newspaper to which I subscribe – in the sense that there’s actually an ink-and-newsprint newspaper outside my door in the morning – is the Financial Times.  I began buying it some years ago because I liked the crossword puzzle.  Then, gradually, I found its dry British take on world politics far more appealing than the MacWorld version offered by American news sources, and its business coverage was intricate and mysterious.  I don’t know much about economics, but I have always been intrigued by the subject, and I always feel, when I read FT articles about the future of the Euro or the BRICs or Emerging Markets or black swans that I am trembling on the edge of recognition and understanding. 

 

 

Also, I like the salmon-tinted paper it’s printed on.  (Somebody on the bus asked me once: “What’s the matter with your newspaper, mister?  It’s a funny color.”)

 

 

Then, of course, there is the New York Times. 

 

 

I have been a faithful follower of the NYT (both print and online) for many years.  It has nourished me in many ways.  I like its rhythm: world news, national news, local (meaning New York City) news, op-ed, culture.  It’s unabashedly liberal, and I welcome its confirmation of my beliefs and prejudices (as do we all).  And the writing is generally excellent.

 

 

A little less than a year ago, the NYT announced that its website would no longer be free.  For full access, you have to cough up fifteen bucks a month.  (That’s just digital access, mind you.  A lot of porn sites cost less than that.  Don’t ask me how I know.)  You can still read twenty articles a month for free; you can also access the Times through search engines, etc.  But if you want to romp around on their websites – culture, videos, travel, food, movies, editorials, all the things they do so well – you have to pay.

 

 

Hm, I thought back in February 2011, and prepared to do without.

 

 

Then, for no apparent reason, the Cadillac division of General Motors (with which I have no real connection) gifted me via email with a nine months’ online subscription.

 

 

It expired on December 31.

 

 

Goodbye, Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins, both of whom I read consistently, and often laughed aloud as I did so, and quoted their nastier/funnier lines to my friends.  If I were a conservative (shiver!), I would probably find them strident and silly, kind of like the way I actually feel about Rush Limbaugh.  But I agree with them.  So nyah nyah!

 

 

Goodbye, David Brooks and Ross Douthat.  The former is a cheesy social critic who plays Edmund Burke, but not very well; the latter is the token-conservative editorialist, who takes a topic – like, let’s say, Ron Paul – and finds something to like in him after all.  Also, Ross is Catholic (but then again, in his columns, he almost always reminds you of that). 

 

 

Goodbye, Bill Cunningham, bicycling around New York and taking photos of people and their outfits.  May you live forever.

 

 

Goodbye, Mark Bittman.  You got a little Hollywood over the past few years, but your writing is excellent and your recipes are very good. 

 

 

Goodbye, Frank Bruni.  He used to do restaurant reviews; now he does general (and often political) commentary, and does it very well. 

 

 

Goodbye, Seth Kugel, the Frugal Traveler, so much better and more entertaining than the guy who was the Frugal Traveler before him.

 

 

Goodbye Nick Kristof and Paul Krugman, for cheerfully leading me into the coming political / economic apocalypse.  You’ve both been right consistently.  Keep at it.

 

 

And all the rest.

 

 

I’ll still be checking in, maybe twenty times a month, or maybe more.

 

 

(Is $15/month too much to pay?  Maybe.  We’ll see.  I may start jonesing for Gail and Maureen and Paul and Frank in a few months and give in.)

 

 

But for now: goodbye, my dear and lovely friends, goodbye.

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Flocking hilarious

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David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a sort of middle-of-the road conservative social critic / political analyst.  He has a way of dealing with issues that I think of as the Brooks Method:

• Define a social issue or trend (either significant or insignificant).  For example: “People are certainly eating a lot of salad these days.”
• Throw a lot of tsk-tsk analysis at this trend, like this: “People didn’t eat much salad when I was young.  And the Founding Fathers didn’t eat salad at all.  Where is this trend leading us?”
• Come up with a spoofy / belittling neologism or catchphrase to encapsulate the trend, e.g.: “This new Salad Socialism is taking us down a new road.  Is it a better road?  I don’t know.”

It’s really pretty formulaic after a while; I think a machine could do it.  Come to think of it, he’s kind of shiny-looking in his Times photo; maybe he is a machine.

He recently wrote a column about the “new” television comedies like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Cougar Town.”  For Brooks, and for Neal Gabler of the LA Times, these are – wait for it – “flock comedies.”

Do you know how, when someone comes at you with a squirt gun, you scrunch up your face in anticipation?   That’s how I read a Brooks column.  I prepare myself for the inevitable squirt in the face when he hits me with his catchphrase.

So.  “Flock comedies.”  Let me grit my teeth and get through this.

“Flock comedies” are comedies that revolve around a group of friends.  They are depicted as spending a lot of time together – eating, socializing, watching TV, generally interacting.  I’m thinking “Friends,” “Seinfeld” –

Whoops.  Recent?  How about “Mary Tyler Moore”?  “Dobie Gillis”?  “Gilligan’s Island,” for God’s sake?

Anyway, this “trend” reflects our changing attitude toward friendship.  Virtual friendship a la Facebook has made us long for the real thing.  So we like watching people sit around dorm-room style and chat and argue and fight.  What a shame! Brooks and Gabler say.  It doesn’t reflect our real lives at all!

(Any show that reflected my real life would have to depict a fiftyish man lying on the couch reading a magazine, and getting up to go to the bathroom every ten minutes or so.  It would not do well in the ratings.)

The Brooks/Gabler argument is old-fogyism disguised as social commentary.  A television program has to be propelled by something – dramatic situations, funny dialogue, something.  You can do it around a dinner table, or a bar, or on a couch.  You can do it in a family setting, or a workplace setting, or a casual setting like a bar or living room.  You can’t really do it without depicting people interacting with people.

But! Brooks and Gabler say.  The quality of friendship has changed!  Living in our hurry-scurry World of Tomorrow (see blog title, above), we have sacrificed Real Traditional Friendship!  Statistics show that we have less friends than we used to, and that we are less likely to form dyadic one-on-one friendships. 

Gabler (whom Brooks calls “apocalyptic”) says that the intimacy portrayed on TV is “phony.”  Hmm.  Now why would situations presented in a half-hour comedy program be “phony”?

Brooks and Gabler both say that this ersatz TV “friendship” is wish fulfillment: it depicts the way we wish our lives really were, full of “deeply intimate” friends.  (I don’t know about you, but I’m glad I don’t have either Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory” or Kramer from “Seinfeld” living across the hall.)

Neither Brooks nor Gabler seems very comfortable with talking about family relationships in this context.  Gabler says “Modern Family” is “incomparable,” but then tut-tuts about the unreality of its depiction of family togetherness.  Brooks says that “young people” live in “diverse friendship tribes” (squinch!  I didn’t see that one coming!), but he really doesn’t talk about the family aspect at all.

Gabler isn’t just apocalyptic; he’s post-apocalyptic.  According to him, we are already completely deracinated by our television viewing.  It has gotten into our heads, made us unhappy, made us depressed, taken all of our friends away, etc., etc.  We wander the streets desolately, looking for another video injection to soothe our existential heartache.  (Evidently he subscribes to my “television makes your head explode” theory, which you can read about here.)

Brooks is more tragic than apocalyptic.  He acknowledges, somberly, that friendship – one-on-one, buddy-buddy stuff – still exists, but is being replaced by the Facebook model: cool virtual friendships that don’t really amount to anything.  Brooks thinks that TV is presently showing us our true selves: lonely, emotionally inept, willing to replace real friendships with friendships of convenience. 

Oh, my.

It makes me want to run right down to the coffee shop and tell Ross and Rachel all about it.

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