Tuesday, July 20, 2004

David Brooks Still Needs to Get out of the House

David Brooks, in an attempt to brand himself as something other than "the liberal's favorite conservative" (myself, I still prefer William Safire, who knows that a column is about having a schtick and few choice facts), has been writing on the political polarization of this country. This is appropriate since Brooks himself is a beneficiary of this same polarization. Every other columnist for the Times has made their name in some other field of writing. The only notable thing Brooks had his resume was writing opinion for the Weekly Standard and being a fellow of the right-wing (and Iraq interventionist) New American Century foundation. In other words, he made a name for himself based his opinions, which then lead to the facile book about middle-class's adoption of certain markers from hip (and hippie) culture, Bobos in Paradise.

Brooks is not an idiot or part of the looney-tunes fringe (those figures, who if you strip them of their humor, sound basically like John Birchers). And he can be funny, if shallow, in a way that recalls satire. But the fact that he would include a word like "bobos" in a title indicates that (1) he is no poet, since it is an ugly word; and (2) despite what he says about civility, Brooks' "satire" often comes down to no more than name calling. His humor is really not that far from the country club crowd that gets tickled by the very mention of words like "lesbian." It's the dark side of Mencken's bombasticism, this almost scatological reliance on nicknames, except that Brooks doesn't have Mencken's range of reference from Nietzsche to Shaw to the use of the English language. But a little learning is a dangerous thing, indeed, as Brooks has been able to coin his act of juxtaposing unlikely opposites into a fairly prestigious position with the newspaper of record. We will not see the last of him for some time, unless the plagiarism virus at the Times catches up with him too.