A take-down within a take-down: on David BROOKS.
Tip: Anybody interested in what's going on here needs to click the whole link and, also, read or at least skim the BROOKS column at the end of this piece. The "
Ha-HAH!1)"s within the excerpt are my added ha-HAH!1s.
This could be a motto for my local radio wingnut talk show hosts: "giving ... accurate information (is) 'just something you'll mature beyond.' "
Wingnuts must be really, really mature.
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http://deadspin.com/the-david-brooks-problem-1039691285 (via Gawker)
[font size=5]The David Brooks Problem[/font]
Tim Marchman
.... ...a lesson in the perils of self-preoccupation.
I think of this because I read a stupid column David Brooks wrote about Alex Rodriguez’s suspension from baseball through the 2014 season. Judging from the outside, the rest of us are pikers of self-preoccupation next to Brooks. When you read one of his exercises in Lehreresque fabrication or tedious propagandizing for discredited ideas, you see a man who seems to be manufacturing his own persona, disingenuously crafting a series of behaviors designed to look right.
When he writes a column, he doesn’t seem like a man writing a column. He seems like a man giving a performance of writing a column. Even his off-the-page life—buying a $3.95 million house, preposterously teaching a course on humility at Yale, the syllabus for which of course features plenty of his own scribbling—leaves the impression that he is always observing himself, and measuring to see if he lives up to the image of a superstar.
Brooks was a sheltered twit from his earliest years. He attended a fancy day school in New York, a fancy high school in the wealthy Philadelphia suburbs, and the University of Chicago. From there he moved on to comfortable sinecures at propaganda mills like National Review, the Hoover Institution, and the Washington Times. After a stint at the Wall Street Journal, he moved on to the Weekly Standard, where he worked under editor William Kristol, who damaged whatever chances Brooks had of becoming a normal human being. .... (ha-HAH!1)
By the time Brooks joined the Times Op-Ed page as their token conservative, he was the marketing facade of Brooks Inc. His first book appeared to have been largely contrived, with nearly any point you cared to fact check easily refuted by publicly available information or basic reporting. Asked about it, he scoffed at a young reporter, and called the idea of giving readers accurate information "just something you'll mature beyond." (ha-HAH!1)
Of course, this sort of egomaniacal behavior alienated him from his fellow writers, isolating him in the zone of his own self-concern. He was always one of the most talented propagandists around, able to argue for the murder of foreigners or the enslavement of the working class at home with an air of real thoughtfulness, but never a leader. He developed a reputation for caring more about his own reputation than any particular cause. ....
One of the mysteries around Brooks is why a wealthy propagandist capable of scoring cushy gigs at Duke and Yale would risk his career to apparently just make shit up. ....
BROOKS, "The A-Rod Problem" (NYT) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/opinion/brooks-the-a-rod-problem.html?_r=0
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