Days when David Brooks doesn't suck

It's true, David Brooks often sucks. It's not just his politics, but the weary, impatient sighing. He resents people for caring more than he thinks they should, whether the topic is Scooter Libby, science, logic or supple male torsos. He disagrees with ideas, but he has a special contempt for unchecked passion.

Even so.

Occasionally he hits perfect pitch. Six years ago, before his Times gig, he published a great long article in The Atlantic called The Organization Kid, which prescribed everything that had gone badly wrong with my classmates and with myself. The article was a personal revelation. I read it and re-read it, forwarded it to my grad-school classmates, none of whom seemed to understand why I was so enthusiastic.

For a conservative man who's probably led a very cautious life, Brooks certainly hates structure and conformity. Four out of five of his Times columns read like soft, center-right bluster. On the fifth he lets loose with something surprising or insightful -- and occasionally with something incredibly odd. He did good in today's column on Jack Kerouac and the 50th anniversary of On the Road:

But the real secret of the book was its discharge of youthful energy, the stupid, reckless energy that saves "On the Road" from being a dreadful novel. The delightful, moronic, unreflective fizz appears whenever the characters are happiest, when they are chasing girls or urinating from a swerving flatbed truck while going 70 miles an hour.

Those parts haven't survived. They run afoul of the new gentility, the rules laid down by the health experts, childcare experts, guidance counselors, safety advisers, admissions officers, virtuecrats and employers to regulate the lives of the young. They seem dangerous, childish and embarrassing in the world of professionalized adolescence and professionalized intellect.

True, the paragraph that follows is itself childish and embarrassing -- apparently Brooks felt compelled to beef up his argument with a flight of fancy about things that don't exist in real life -- but the rest of the column is a keeper, worth printing, folding up, and sticking into your beat-up paperback copy of On the Road.

A lot of conservatives romanticize 1950s suburbia. Brooks doesn't. It's something more complicated -- he dislikes structure and thinks achievement is overrated. Brooks's utopian vision seems to consist of eating a heavy dinner, pissing from pick-ups, chasing skirt and conversing about Plato for a couple hours. At some point he'd probably want to smoke a bowl.

While his typical schtick is to condescend to Wal-Mart critics and Prius buyers, are there any other figures with his kind of profile who use valuable column inches to encourage "delightful, moronic, unreflective fizz" and "stupid, reckless energy"? It's why, even when he pisses me off with something glib and condescending, I find him hard to hate. There's a restless, lazy 17-year-old guy inside of him, and this communicates in weird ways that occasionally approach genius.

Gilded Age II: Liquid-coal-powered bugaloo

I've kind of assumed for the past couple of years that we're living in one of those ages that students generations from now will struggle to wrap their heads around. I find myself at idle times wondering exactly which part the high school students of the 2060s will find the most mind-boggling.

So here are the guesses of one dumbass as to the questions of American teenagers in a future U.S. history class while reviewing for the unit on fin-de-siecle America (the one with George W. Bush, not Theodore Roosevelt):

• So everyone just bought stock that had anything to do with the internet? Jeez.
• He told everyone to go shopping?
  
• Wait, so what did Iraq have to do with it?
• So did he actually think we won then, or was he just trying to convince everyone? And it worked?
• Wait, so they re-elected him?
• So let me get this straight: The White House had thrown people in jail without cause, tortured people, suspended habeas corpus for the first time since Lincoln, was spying on its own citizens, established secret prisons around the world and tried to turn the Department of Justice into a nest of loyalist apparatchiks and it was the plots of the previous night's TV shows in the newspapers?
• Oh yeah, her too. Who was she again? Why did people care?
• Seriously? No wonder ...

The stupidest fucking people on the face of the Earth

Fox News.


It's not scientific, you see.



The rich: sorely fucked, or fucked sorely?


I blame The Simple Life.

This post doesn't have an argument

I have a friend. I've known him for a long time. I lived with him after college. From college through present, I've shared houses with more than 30 people -- at one point I did a census but I've since lost count.

That three-bedroom apartment was the most fun. We were all pretty close. I know their families and I've stayed in their houses.

It wasn't until his wedding that I learned one of his college housemates committed suicide in spectacular fashion -- enough that I remember reading about the event in the news. At his wedding reception, I was seated with his college housemates. They talked about it fairly openly. When the best man gave his toast, he referenced what they "all went through together" at the time.

I'd known my friend for years but he never talked about it.

***

Seung-Hui Cho's roommates talked. The video is available on CNN's website. These two guys, they're so normal that you want to be friends with them, so laid back that their account of living with this guy made it sound like any other awkward-roommate scenario that happens at college.

You're struck by how goddamn nice these two guys are. They lived with someone who refused to speak to them and woke them every day with a terrible Collective Soul song. They went about their lives with their friends and their classes and came home to this person. The whole time they acted with compassion and concern, like they were doing their best to reach out to this guy and integrate him to the world.

That's the kind of thing that makes you crazy. The more you read, the more it seems like good people were reaching out to him. There's a natural preoccupation with blame and attribution, sure, but it's kind of extraordinary how good people were to this guy.

Details you might have missed:

• He told a roommate that he had an imaginary girlfriend named Jelly. She is a supermodel. She called him Spanky.
  
• He woke up every morning and played the horrible Collective Soul song "Shine" on his laptop.
  
• His sister graduated from Princeton (Princeton!) and works in the State Department, where she helps facilitate aid to Iraq.
  

***

Right. One reason this feels so absorbing is that this craziness happened in the middle of lives that were content and familiar. I grew up in a college town. It was in the middle of nowhere. I drove by at least two gun stores on my way to high school every day. My dad and almost all of my friends' parents taught at the university. I mean, by comparison, Blacksburg is Paris and Virginia Tech is the Sorbonne, but I remember the kind of low hum and insularity of these places, where the professors knew each other for decades and you were far away from any metropolitan area or easy air travel. Towns like these, they're in their own worlds.

The other reason it's so absorbing is this weird funk of pop-culture effluvia. The pictures reminded me of Taxi Driver, but one, apparently, was drawn from Oldboy. And the dude's plays -- Jesus Christ. I mean, they're not worth reading for any purpose aside from morbid curiosity (although the former classmate's descriptions are worth glancing) but "Richard McBeef" reminded me of the fake sitcom embedded in Natural Born Killers. The one with Rodney Dangerfield as an abusive, molesting father. If I read his plays cold, I'm not sure whether I'd recognize them as lousy, or whether I'd think that they were supposed to be ironic satires.

***

Do not read this.

***

Hey, I haven't thrown around words like "news judgment" since I was in college, when we cared about things like that and treated them like they mattered. I remember reading about how newspapers agonized over whether to publish the Unambomber's manifesto. They feared that publicizing it would function as an encouragement.

I remember learning that you don't necessarily cover suicides, because it might encourage likeminded people.

NBC's wall-to-wall coverage of this guy's suicide propaganda is unforgivable. It's the worst, most irresponsible media transgression, like, probably, ever. There is no news value to this, nothing of relevance that hadn't already been reported -- only a lightly edited spotlight, giving him the last word and all of the attention that he wanted. These pictures of him, posing all Travis Bickle-like with his goddamn guns, ranting into a camera about Mercedes and vodka -- NBC has given him all that he wanted and more than he deserves. NBC news has defined "irresponsible" and "salacious." This is as bad as airing the martyr tapes that suicide bombers make before they go out for their last runs.

I resent the hell out of this. I worry that in the minds of likeminded people, this attention is perceived as a reward: if you don't have anything left to lose, might as well go out in a blaze of glory. And I resent the hell out of myself for lapping it up.

***

On Monday, a couple of college football blogs that I frequent (and love) posted heavily about the events at Virginia Tech. At the time I thought that this smacked of grandstanding -- as in, who the hell are they to inject themselves into something of this magnitude.

When I listened to the Tuesday convocation in my office, streaming it into my office computer via NPR, I changed my mind.

Virginia Tech is a football school. Among college football fans, Virginia Tech is the kind of place that only an alumnus could love. I've never heard anyone speak well of its team. Marcus Vick and Frank Beamer don't inspire admiration.

Then Nikki Giovanni spoke and I understood. College football people love their universities. You can divide college graduates into those who think that college was the best part of their lives and the others, who think of it as a place where they got a degree. I'm condemned to be in the first category, and I'm going to guess the same is true of the football guys who blogged about this. So you hear Nikki Giovanni's lines ("We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness. We are the Hokies. We will prevail. We will prevail. We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech.") and you think about your own school, and you think about how much VaTech means to these people, the same way that your school means to you.

And then you think to yourself how great it is that there are institutions and communities like this all over the country, and how lucky some people are to have that and how sad it is that not everybody does. There's something different about these places that distinguishes them from the rest of life. Nikki Giovanni's remarks jumped out of my speakers. I understood what she meant. The college football bloggers recognized right away what it took me a day to process.

Nikki Giovanni was already famous. I've never read her poems, but I love her. There's a lot to be said for righteous indignation. Here's what she told the Associated Press: "I know that there's a tendency to think that everybody can get counseling or can have a bowl of tomato soup and everything is going to be all right," she said. "But I think that evil exists, and I think that he was a mean person."

The Rude Pundit

This is one of those times when I like him better as a straight man than as a vulgarian.

We're so filled with stories, local crimes and small incidents, celebrity lives and deaths, animal attacks and house fires, that it's hard to discern anymore when something really matters. For everyone that the Rude Pundit saw in that fast food dining area, it was more of the noise of information. They had places to be. They had cell phones and Blackberries and GPS systems, and all of that technology told them that their lives were more important, always more important, than the lives of others.

Surely, when they arrive at their homes or hotels, they will be told to feel sorrow by the news networks. And maybe they will allow for something like sympathy, an approximation of emotion, the simulacrum of grief, to creep into their hearts and minds. After all, we will be told, we are a nation in mourning.

But mostly we are a dead-souled country, so inured to horror that even when something of incredible violence occurs on our soil, well, heck, we've been reminded of 9/11 so often that anything lesser hardly seems worthy of time in our Palm Pilots.

The Rutgers women's basketball team owes Jon Corzine an apology

Cranks will be cranks. They'll call basketball players nappy-headed hos and they'll call John Edwards a faggot.

It may not be pleasant. You don't have to like it.

Their goal is to whip you into a frenzy.

In the future, let's all please agree to ignore these things.

I have a soft spot for Ann Coulter

Today was a great day to be a partisan Democrat.

Right before lunch, one of the architects of the Iraq War and a great villain of our time was found guilty of four felonies.

Elsewhere, a Senate hearing unmasked the Bush Administration and its cronies as the world's highest-profile organized crime syndicate. The Democrats' Congressional takeover no longer felt like an academic exercise or a win for the team. It feels like a redemption for democracy.

And yet I like Ann Coulter.

That's not me on the right.

This remark was her most recent offense:

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I—so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards.

Via the excellent Digby's Blog, here was a typical response from my team:

Coulter stepped over the line because she used a bad word. But nobody on the right and most people in the media don't blink an eye at the implication of what she said. All this Claude Rainsing among certain rightwing bloggers and the press is just a little bit overdone, if you ask me. Being a "faggot" in common braindead GOP locker room parlance simply means being a Democrat and everybody knows it.

Point taken, but this is melodramatic response to a hyperbolic comment.

At its most basic level, Coulter was doing something that I, my close friends, most other people I know, and everyone I would like to know do at least once a week: saying something extremely offensive and over-the-top solely for the sake of saying it. This behavior is not the hallmark of statecraft or maturity. But it's part of the fun of being a person who likes to chop it up.

The best way to confront it isn't a lot of pansy-assed concern about what this means for America's political culture or media narratives. The best way to confront it is to be like Rude Pundit, who writes posts with titles like "Why Ann Coulter is a Cunt (Faggot Edition), Part 1." Much more fun and effective than impotent finger-wagging, and a legitimate excuse to write both "cunt" and "faggot" in the same sentence.

Second, and more seriously, Coulter was going to something a little more subtle than using a fourth-grade slur against John Edwards. As noted by Jack Schafer on Slate, "Coulter was probably riffing off actor Isaiah Washington's recent — and calculated — entry into rehab after he called one of his Grey's Anatomy co-stars a 'faggot.'" (Don't ask me how I already knew this, but somehow I did.) Absurditywise, this Grey's Anatomy development was on par with weeping over Janet Jackson's nipple: right-wingers are upset by boobs, left-wingers are upset by words. To give Ann Coulter more credit than she probably deserves, at some level she was decrying excessive sensitivities, and the response by serious people on the left has been excessively sensitive, not unlike a kindergartener crying at being called a crybaby.

Ann Coulter avoids some pie.

The Slate article linked above recites more of Coulter's greatest hits:

"[Clinton] masturbates in the sinks."—Rivera Live, Aug. 2, 1999

The "backbone of the Democratic Party" is a "typical fat, implacable welfare recipient"—syndicated column, Oct. 29, 1999

"Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores."—Salon.com, Nov. 16, 2000

(I don't know a thing about Patricia Duff, but, in fact, before Pamela Harriman was made ambassador to France, her ascent to power was possible only because of an extensive history of romantic entanglements with extremely powerful men. Blame it on the era of if you want.)

If these kinds of comments make you outraged (outraged!) the following might hit you differently:

"Donald Rumsfeld masturbates in the sinks."

The "backbone of the Republican Party" is a "typical fat, implacable, over-religious NASCAR fan."

"Women like Harriet Miers and Elizabeth Dole are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores."

Not the kinds of remarks that will go down in the annals of discourse, true, but pretty much on par with the kind of language used on left-wing blogs every day, and more demure than what I said at lunch yesterday.

I can never figure out how she hits the nerves that she does. I find her comments so bombastic, immature, and over-the-top that they're impossible to take seriously. More often than not, she's mildly amusing, and the real fun comes when her adversaries unleash their confused sanctimony. As the Rude Pundit seems to recognize, the fun comes from swinging back on her level. People who allow themselves to feel outraged let her win.

I'm pretty sure that I'd love to get drunk with her.

There are, of course, a couple of problems.

First, I wish her delivery were a little less self-important. If she uttered her statements with more of a wink, she'd be a right-wing Bill Maher. Instead, she straddles some weird gray area of disgraced public intellectual, right-wing folk hero, and left-wing booby-trap.

Second, any public official is fair game for verbal bullying of any type at any time, but there's no honor in going after little guys. Like 9/11 widows.

Maybe it's that, despite all of the coarseness that goes on in major media, everyone is more sanctimonious and delicate than ever. It's always fun to see a shiv stabbed into this sanctimony, even when the sanctimony is your own.

Maybe it's the same impulse that made me like fighting with my high-school principal or showing up my bosses. It's never not fun to see people in power squirm.

Or maybe I just think that crude bitches are fun.

The most trusted name

(Click to enlarge, but only if you're a sucker.)


It's 1:30 a.m. and cnn.com (no link thru -- not worthy) features the following:

• 4 Anna Nicole Smith headlines
• 3 Britney Spears headlines
• "Two clowns shot dead"
• Baptist sex abuse
• A mom throwing ice
• "Gay hip-hop artist tries to take back f-word"
• Desperate Housewives star
• An autistic woman who "voices own language"
• Clinton-Obama sissyfight
• An Iranian (a pro-American one, thank balls)
• Iraq (a story about rape)

By contrast, nationalenquirer.com features:

• 6 Anna Nicole Smith headlines
• 2 Britney Spears headlines
• Desperate Housewives star
• Diaper astronaut
• Posh Spice
• An apology to Cameron Diaz

Just take a look at the condition of that kettle, would you?

Yesterday, The New York Times saw fit to consult Bill Donohue as an arbiter of civility and religious tolerance.

Since that's how they've decided they want to roll, here are some future offerings we can look forward to from the nation's most respected daily newspaper:

• Sunday front-pager about the dangers of soaring divorce rate in the United States, with expert analysis from Larry King, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.
• Op-Ed decrying the role of lobbyists in our legislative system and proposing good-government and ethical reforms. Co-authored by Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff.
• Plangent letter to the editor from Pol Pot calling for immediate world action to halt the killings in Darfur.
• Week in Review piece on the importance of due process, habeas corpus and civil liberties, by Alberto Gonzalez.
  
• In the 2007 college football preview, Ohio State coach Jim Tressel explains how to stop Florida's spread option.
• Mario Batali writes in the food section about simple meals you can make at home, with just some simple extra-virgin olive oil, a wild boar tenderloin, fresh Po valley sour cherries, and house-made pecorino romano.
• Sunday magaizine story about the imporance of public figures accepting accountability for their actions and retaining credibility consults Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, Ohio Reb. Bob Ney, Florida Rep. Mark Foley, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, President George W. Bush, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Mel Gibson and O.J. Simpson.
  

Goodbye to a shining lone star

If you're a corrupt, asshole politician with a sensitive soul and/or relatives in the Bush family, you can rest easy, homes: Molly Ivins will skewer you no more. The legendary Texas columnist died today.

When I was first waking up to the political world, I was probably about 11 or 12. I used to read The New York Times at the kitchen table and Newsweek on long car trips, sometimes refusing to stop reading, even though I knew it would make me carsick. Although I remember following the 1988 presidential campaign to some extent, my political sensibilies came into being during the time of George H.W. Bush, a president I didn't particularly care for.

Which is probably why I liked reading Molly Ivins so much. I was introduced to her by my mom, who always made sure to point out Ivins' work to me whenever she came across it. We would read aloud passages that just absolutely gored Bush's ox in a way no other writer would, hooting and laughing and wondering why no one else understood things the way Ivins did.

In hindsight, it's obvious that Ivins was absolutely fearless when it came to speaking truth to power. Growing up you think all journalists are ready to cross swords with politicians, but it's not so, especially now.

I can't claim to be a devoted reader of Ivins'. I don't own a single book of hers, and I never made a concerted effort to seek her out. But every so often, I'd come across something she wrote, something so blistering and wonderful, sparks might as well have been coming off the page. I'd read it and think: Oh, yeah. I forgot how awesome she is.

It was my loss that I never made her a must-read. Now it's America's loss that her voice will be heard no more. I don't know about the rest of you, but I know what my plans for tonight are.

Why you are the person of the year

Excerpts taken from Time Magazine's online defense for naming you Person of the Year.

What Time Wrote: The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

What Time Meant: This article was written by a man with a liberal arts degree. As he learned in college, the first thing you do in an essay is cite an authoritative source, preferably a European intellectual. Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are the best choices, but we thought we'd mix it up a bit. This way, we sound serious and credible. Follow this rule, and you can write whatever you want but still sound impressive.

What Time Wrote: A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

What Time Meant: Holy shit this is a seriously tragic messed up world and man alive don't we know it. Wow we are just all tiny meaningless specks in a cycle of hatred and violence that never will abate but it doesn't really matter because global warming will lead to planetwide remigration and famine and drought.

OMG, Playstation 3!

What Time Wrote: But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

What Time Meant: A professor at San Fernando Community College once wrote an article in Funky Chicken: A Journal of Ideas. It was about how the internet democratizes our understanding and redefines conventional boundaries of community, and argued there is no meaningful difference between the self and the world. It's weird, because up until then, we thought the internet was just about furtive masturbation and buying Star Trek figurines off E-Bay. Here at Time, our understandings have evolved. Wikipedia is highly reliable -- also, cosmic (i.e., it has a lot of stuff). YouTube has funny videos of cats doing silly things and freshman boys lip-synching to Taylor Dayne in their dorm rooms. MySpace has allowed Rupert Murdoch to mediate our most basic relationships.

We are all equals.

What Time Wrote: You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

What Time Meant: People don't clean their room. Some people have toys in the basement. We know that you're a pack of douchelords who watch too much televsion in the first place. And it's important, what you're doing -- to see the dirty bedrooms of others, to see toys in basements. Obviously.

What Time Wrote: And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped.

What Time Meant: We secretly masturbated to every cast member of The Brady Bunch. We were sweet at Dungeons & Dragons. We ate whole sticks of butter -- butter tastes good. You know that baby cage you built using chickenbones? We call it folk art.

No, really. Tell us more. We're not patronizing. We're serious. This is a think piece -- Thomas Carlyle and whatnot.

What Time Wrote: Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed.

What Time Meant: We've all given up. (This is underscored by our use of passive voice.)

What Time Wrote: Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

What Time Meant: We don't want you to think that we're exaggerating or anything. Let's keep this in perspective.

What Time Wrote: There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion.

What Time Meant: There are fewer than 6 billion ants and mosquitoes.

What Time Wrote: But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.

What Time Meant: Also, about that Lebanon thing? Wouldn't have happened if Israel and Hezbollah became MySpace friends.

Reason 532 not to get married

Because I don't have a little Captain in me. If my wife goes out of town for the wedding of her cousin the bitch, and I don't want to go, I'll refuse to lie about being sick. But if I do lie and end up at a bar with friends, I don't want to be in a situation where fellow bar partrons join me in an elaborate ruse to deceive my wife into believing that I'm watching TV. I will not allow these strangers to impersonate newcasters, commercials and sitcoms, just so the lies that I tell my idiot wife may amplify. Honey, what's that smell? It's not the smell that happens when Jimmy tries to cook a turkey in the dishwasher. It's the smell of a failing marriage between two dysfunctional adults, you dumb, rum-drinking drunks. It's the smell of a terrible spiced rum (the actual smell of which does, in fact, make me want to boot, due to the rum-related nightmares of my late teens) that ruins every liquid it touches. Do I want a little Captain in me so that I can authenticate the unnecessary lies I tell to my dumb wife? I politely decline.