David Brooks has written another one of his “people are broke because they don’t go to church” pieces. It used to be that washing dishes at the YMCA was an ennobling experience that would pay for your college tuition. It used to be that Hollywood directors took the side of the masses and painted workers as the salt of the earth. What went wrong? How come the only way to have any status in our culture is to gain fame or fortune?
Here is where everyone who understands the first thing about the Reagan Revolution balls up their fists and punches Mr. Brooks between the eyes. Your first hint that Mr. Bobo is out of touch is that he’s talking about William James, Franz Capra, and Paul Tillich. We could be having this conversation in 1955 without changing anything.
And all this hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy. I’ve never seen a columnist so convinced that everyone else is as status-conscious as he is himself. What decade was it when we tried to decide as a nation that there was nothing icky about being rich?
That’s right. The 1980’s. Ronald Reagan time. When the Me Generation met the MTV generation and everything went to crap. When Alex P. Keaton turned on his idealistic parents and made it all about making a buck.
Weep for the country.
Words like character, which once suggested traits like renunciation that held back success, now denote traits like self-discipline, which enhance it.
Many rich people once felt compelled to try to square their happiness at being successful with their embarrassment about it. They adopted what Charles Murray calls a code of seemliness (no fancy clothes or cars). Not long ago, many people covered their affluence with a bohemian patina, but that patina has grown increasingly thin.
Now most of us engage in more matter-of-fact boasting: the car stickers that describe the driver’s summers on Martha’s Vineyard, the college window stickers, the mass embrace of luxury brands, even the currency of “likes” on Facebook and Reddit as people unabashedly seek popularity.
The only thing to do is to get thee to a nunnery.
Charles Murray, Bobo?
You’re quoting Charles Murray?
Charles Murray, the co-author of “The Bell Curve,” a book which claims it “proves” the intellectual superiority of white people?
THAT Charles Murray?
The one who’s basically saying black people should know their place, and stay there – and, probably feels the same way about women.
The only thing I’m wondering, is this some dog-whistle, a ‘tell,” or are you trying to be pretty blatant, but trying to put a patina of Libertarian “intellectualism” on that turd.
I suspect the only reason the insipid Bobo still has a gig at the NY Times, is that he must have some pretty graphic photos of his Editors engaged in either sex with children, or barnyard animals.
In conservative Bizarro-World Murray is still regarded as a serious scholar, with a permanent gig at AEI, and his latest book, which proves that some white people are just as stupid as black people because UNWED MOTHERS and so on, is a kind of Bible for Brooks in his current Tory incarnation.
In a sane world, Charles Murray would be taken to the woodshed and had his fingers slammed in the door multiple times so as to prevent him from ever typing another word for the remainder of his life after authoring such drivel and polluting the public discourse with it, and his other equally racist works.
In a sane world, that is…
Humans are not rational beings and Charles Murray is of the least rational among us.
“Many rich people once felt compelled to try to square their happiness at being successful with their embarrassment about it.”
The thing is, I don’t really believe the rich are all that happy with their success. That is why the derivatives geniuses on Wall Street had to find a new (borderline illegal) drug when the riches they were piling up wasn’t good enough. That spawned the derivatives game that brought on the crash. Everyone was winning so no one paid any mind to the legality or to what all of them knew was the likely outcome.
When you are always a winner in a game that is rigged for you to win, where’s the thrill in winning?
The rich spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convince themselves and those around them that they are “happy”. David Brooks is proof of that.
That’s the thing, isn’t it? The rich persons I’ve brushed against personally all exuded a distinctive mix of fear, anger, and ignorance that was unmistakable. We see less of the reality on tv, but watch some of the “executive” pandering shows and at least the ignorance shows enough to account for the fear and anger.
I wouldn’t despise the economic system the way I do if the rich were ever happy or content, because maybe somebody should be. But the gifts given to them are terribly wasted on crap, mindless competitiveness, and more greed than any low-class grifter could generate. And so the rich generate nothing for society, not even a little happiness, wisdom, or decency to uplift the average just a little.
“Most of us” brag about our summers on Martha’s Vineyard?
There’s your out of touch, right there. “Most of us” can’t even afford the salad bar at Appleby’s.
Last year this guy bought a $4 million house in D.C. This year he guest taught a course at Yale titled (wait for it) “Humility” (from the catalogue: “Traditions of modesty and humility in character building and political leadership. Contemporary understandings of character and character building. The premise that human beings are blessed with many talents but are also burdened by sinfulness, ignorance, and weakness. The concept of humility in works by and about Homer, Moses, Augustine, Montaigne, Burke, Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.”) Of course he is going to lecture us like a pompous ass: he’s been validated by success so incommensurate with his intrinsic worth that it must come naturally.
Ah, those glorious days when everyone wanted to be a rich upper class WASP like me, when brown folks were embarrassed and sorry and apologetic for not being white, and when “those people” were happy to shine my shoes for a nickel.
For free. The nickel was a tip happily scooped up.
This twit was formed in the crucible of a NYC private elementary school, Grace Church School, Radnor Township (white and affluent) public high school, and private university. He’s never known anything but privilege and then the economic privilege of only the latest Boomers and earliest Gen Xers. The age cohort with no lived experience and/or memory of the 1950s and 1960s, that weren’t crowded into classrooms of thirty-five or more students (with no teacher’s aides) and later to “hang from the rafters” in college classes, and didn’t have to watch as classmates and/or brothers were drafted to support an illegal and irrational war and returned as drug/alcohol addicts, psychologically damaged, or in coffins. The “preppies” for Reagan cohort. All too much like the previous “baby bust” generation.
Serial killers probably use that kind of bizarre logic. You can rationalize anything with it. Who you are or what you do its all covered. I’m a pig because there is not enough religion.
An Alex Keaton reference – brilliant!