He doesn’t appear to possess empathy or good manners. Nor does he know when it’s best to say nothing at all. He was not brought up well. His parents failed us.
Mostly, he speaks for a whole stratum (I hesitate to call it “class”) of people who pay him to rationalize their stinginess to the “help” and make excuses for them in mainstream publications and TV for not wanting to be in any way responsible for their fellow Americans.
I find his presence as the spokesperson for the arrogant rich to be sickening and offensive to the rest of us. Judging from the way Brooks moralizes, one would have expected him to aspire to a career that benefitted humanity. Alas, this is not the case. Those lines of work do not pay well.
I am astonished at how well Brooks is paid for writing drivel a couple of times a week. Why, I do that on a daily basis and get paid nothing at all.
His tenure at the New York Times is making Judy Miller look good.
Oh, if we could only afford the opera…
Filed under: General | Tagged: David Brooks, lack of breeding, New York Times, opera |
The Confluence 
Why hesitate to call it class? Why not go all the way and call it a Social Class?
I don’t even know what the hell Brooks is talking about anymore. While he’s always been an apologist for the superrich, his arguments at one time were at least coherent. His columns don’t even make sense these days. You can get more clarity from Thomas Friedman. He’s supposed to be a conservative, you know limited government and all, but he says that our young children are now under-institutionalized. I guess that’s elite-speak for not having enough youngsters in jail. Or does it mean our educational system is not adequately preparing youngsters for adulthood? I doubt he even knows.
I think Mr. Brooks is running out of intellectual justifications for selfishness and cruelty, and he has yet to make the leap to call it kindness. We can look for that in future columns.
Who is David Brooks?
Sincerely,
Anyone living outside of the DC.
I don’t know if I should tell you. You’re probably in a far better place not knowing.
“I am astonished at how well Brooks is paid for writing drivel a couple of times a week. Why, I do that on a daily basis and get paid nothing at all.”
Exactly the point I’ve been making about you (and other writers I discovered via the Confluence) for quite some time. Except I don’t think you write drivel.
Then again, maybe I’ve been wrong to encourage (annoy) you to write professionally. A writer who wants a check never knows true freedom. Whenever you are forced to think of the audience or the publisher or the producer or the patron, censorship kicks in.
Ding!Ding!Ding!
Of course, if I were a white male Ivy League graduate or a female conservative, I could write any stupid thing I wanted and get paid a living wage. Penis years and objectivism trumps everything else.