David Brooks Calling It Like It Is

For the last six months, in column after painful column in The New York Times and in appearance after tedious appearance on PBS and NPR, David Brooks has undertaken the Sisyphean task of attempting to salvage some small piece of the “supply-side” ideology that he has spent his career promoting from the devastating empirical test provided by the Bush administration. For Brooks, the task has been made all the more daunting by present economic realities as well as by the relative intelligence of his audience, factors which need not concern fellow shills like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Brooks, thus robbed of the usual right-wing over-reliance on jingoism, has struggled. He has hemmed and hawed, leavening every grudging concession to what previously had been considered liberal heresy with mild criticism. Watching his pained expression on the Lehrer News Hour or on Charlie Rose as the likes of Alan Greenspan and James Baker called for the nationalization of the country’s biggest banks, I got the impression that even he was tired of his own bullshit.

But at long last, Brooks has come clean. In his column in today’s Times, he stripped bare the pretense and unwittingly exposed the ideology of Ronald Reagan and progeny as the romantic, anti-intellectual drivel that it always has been. Thus, with the global economy in free-fall, unemployment at near-record levels and with millions of our fellow citizens without homes or health insurance, Brooks uses his precious space on the op ed page to publish a nostalgia piece for the Town and Country set that would have made Herbert Hoover blush. With characteristically keen cultural insight, Brooks reflects that:

“It has been odd, over the past six months, not to have the gospel of success, as part of the normal background music of life. You go about your day, taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs, and only gradually do you become aware that there is an absence. There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around.”

Huh!? Is this the op ed page of The New York Times or The Onion? It’s the Times, and the very same issue that is reporting that our nation’s largest insurer had been paying someone $1 million a month to invest in worthless securities and had used (or was about to use) taxpayer bailout money to fund $220 million in bonuses to executives in this very same, spectacularly unsuccessful, investment unit.

Of course, it’s not surprising that Brooks notices that the background music he finds so soothing is missing. Benjamin Barber, the author of “Consumed,” an insightful critique of American consumerism and capitalism, makes the point that if one were to be bombarded by messages from morning to night - on radios and television, on billboards and on the internet, etc… - and the messages were of a political nature, most Americans would rightly equate that with totalitarianism. However, when the messages are commercial, rather than political, in nature, the same Americans call it freedom.

But who these days other than Brooks can spend their days “taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs,” and who but the likes of Brooks would respond to the breathtaking level of corporate skullduggery afoot by bemoaning the fact that there are a lot of “lawyers and academics, but almost no businesspeople” in the Obama administration? Considering the state of the country, even the dumbest kid in the class should have learned something from the past administration.

In the course of his eulogy for the loss of the “maniacal appetite for wealth” that is so part of “our cultural DNA,” Brooks illustrates that his literary insights are on a par with his cultural ones. Brooks’ slavish devotion aside, works such as Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth,” Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia,” Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” sermons, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” are bad literature and examples of social Darwinism which deserve to be read as cautionary tales rather than sacred texts. (Surprisingly, Ayn Rand - whose awful novels most outgrow by high school but which are currently enjoying a mild uptick in sales - didn’t make Brooks’ parade of horribles).

Brooks illustrates the peculiar form of economic “elitism” hatched by the Dr. Frankenstein (Karl Rove) who mixed “The Gipper” with Jerry Falwell. The resultant monster has the intelligence to seize upon every tax loophole and market trend while at the same time opining over cocktails that we would be better off if Donald Trump and Jim Cramer could take over for socialists Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. And who but this peculiar type of “elitist” would suggest that Walt Whitman - that bi-sexual, humanist, pacifist, poet of the common man who never had two cents to rub together - would share a nostalgia for the good old days when the rich were rich and getting richer and the poor were supporting the very economic policies that would guarantee they would get even poorer.

In fact, not surprisingly, Brooks has completely misread Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” which was published in 1871 - 18 years prior to Dale Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth.” Whitman, bitterly disappointed by his country and particularly horrified by the gross materialism that had dominated the post Civil War years, made the following observation in “Democratic Vistas” which suggest that he had little in common with the depressing world view espoused by Brooks:

“In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining today sole master of the field.”

Thanks for being so honest, David, albeit unwittingly.

Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.