Meme Alert: A New York Times Op-Ed Writer's Maiden Voyage

When a (male) writer uses phrases like this (at a time like this, when Ashcroft makes fun of librarians, and Rumsfeld and FoxNews PR hack Briganti equate debate with treason, and M'Ann Coulter raves about "girly men") what dichotomy is he focusing on?

"...really, darling..."

"...toughen them into paragons of manly virtue..."

"...a sense of chivalry..."

"...a knightly quest..."

"...stand above the carnage with a clear head and an unflinching will to win..."

"...virility, courage, self-discipline and toughness..."

Probably the most twisted essay I've read in a long time.

Check out the final paragraph first - it's a doozie! Try to backtrack in your mind and extrapolate what kind of essay could possibly build up to such a bizarre conclusion:

The Protestant Establishment is dead, and nobody wants it back. But that culture, which George Bush and Howard Dean were born into, did have a formula for producing leaders. Our culture, which is freer and fairer, does not.

And it's his début piece for The New York Times, I hear they're grooming him to be some kind of "Safire Lite":

http://www.randomdudes.com/bush/bush.html

Woops here's the correct link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/13/opinion/13BROO.html?n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/David%20Brooks

Is this guy actually trying to argue that legacy admissions favoring one ethnic group and colleges emphasizing "virility" and "toughness" produce better leaders than a modern meritocracy? Sounds to me like another frustrated fag à la Andy Sullivan wistfully wondering if the boys in Skull & Bones really do give it to each other up the fundament on initiation night.

Memo to Mr. Brooks: Go out and get laid once in a while (with the gender of your choice) or you're liable to turn into another Ann Coulter hysterically seeing "girly men" at every turn. Work out the kinks in your rich fantasy life on your own time so you won't be tempted to waste precious column-inches of The New York Times op-ed page proclaiming your synaesthesias and ethnophilias to the world.

I am so ready to cancel because of this. I am going to give it a few more weeks and see what kind of letters they are printing in response. But he is on the PNAC payroll and he has no business in the NYT. The first piece pretended to razz BushCO for reversing course on Iraq, but that was just a loss-leader.

"If you were to pick a presidential candidate on the basis of social standing — and really, darling, who doesn't — you'd have to pick Howard Brush Dean III over George Walker Bush. The Bush lineage is fine. I'm not criticizing. But the Deans have been here practically since Mayflower days and in the Social Register for generations. It's true Bush's grandfather was a Wall Street financier, a senator and a Yale man, but Dean's family has Wall Street financiers going back to the Stone Age, and both his grandfathers were Yale men.

The Bush family properties were in places like Greenwich, Conn., and Kennebunkport, Me., which is acceptable, but the Dean piles were in Oyster Bay, on Hook Pond in East Hampton and on Park Avenue, a list that suggests a distinguished layer of mildew on the family fortune...."

I was sure Dean was going to be hung out to dry for posing as a populist despite his life of privilege. But when I came to that ending: "The Protestant Establishment is dead, and nobody wants it back. But that culture, which George Bush and Howard Dean were born into, did have a formula for producing leaders. Our culture, which is freer and fairer, does not." ...I was ready to explode. :mad:

I take it back where I said they're grooming him to be "Safire Lite".

They're grooming him to be the "Gay Maureen Dowd."

But I don't get gay.

He wants to be the neo-con Maureen Dowd, but he lacks talent. And the agenda he's shilling is so egregious he won't be able to disguise it.

Did you see his last appearance on Jim Lehrer? He was arguing that the switch in Iraq policy was not a victory for Colin Powell against the neo-cons. In fact, he said, the Washington Post reporter, great as he usually is, got this one wrong, and Brooks knew absolutely that the reverse in course (going begging to the UN) was the "president's" idea. Came from the top down. It was so transparent a lie Brooks actually started stuttering as he told it.

POS

I don't know anything about Brooks except this essay. And I guess *I* too should be careful of seeing "girly men" at every turn.

There is a certain type of gay guy (I call them "Abercrombie & Fitch" types) for whom the quintessential definition of manliness is those (usually WASPy) athletes they worshipped when they were back in college. Clean-limbed rosy-cheeked preppy boys from good New England stock on an Ivy League varsity team.... There are other types of manliness - such as pulling yourself up by your bootstraps - but preppy-worshippers just don't have eyes for that kind of hardscrabble manliness, they only worship patricians.

I just get a weird vibe when a guy talks so much about "virility". Brooks does seem to obsess a bit on his strange definition of manliness and it does seem strange that he rates poseur Bush as manly - a cheerleader at Andover who muddled through Yale and the rest of his life on the legacy affirmative-action program and did a victory dance on an aircraft carrier in butch drag - but of course that doesn't necessarily mean Brooks is a gay preppy-worshipper. I do find it odd that Brooks sees a pampered AWOL weakling like Bush as being so tough - when there is another school of thought that sees Bush as born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Perhaps that's what he's trying to do here - perhaps he's afraid of Dean, and he's trying to taint him with the "rich spoiled brat" meme more properly attributed to Bush.

If you watched Charlie Rose during the Iraq War prelude, you became all too nauseated with his bullshit and really smart glasses.

I'm sure his latest article, entitled "Republicans for Dean," <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/opinion/16BROO.html?hp> will generate a few letters, but I fear few will be fit to print. I don't even support Dean, and I couldn't resist a shot across the bow.

was that Brooks failed to mention that Dean is a doctor, and has worked hard in that job--unlike the wastrel, Bush*. Interestingly, this was the point that all 3 letters to the ed published today complained about. (There were no letters in praise of Brooks.)

But also, this column was embarrassingly bad--the way one cringes for bad performers, even when it's a political enemy. Who in the world does he think his audience is??!! Just today I came across some writing of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) in which he expresses awe for the Viking invaders of chaotic 9th and 10th c Britain. He liked their strong leadership (as he saw it) in the distant past--and stood in fear of messy democracy threatening order in his own time. Carlyle got almost everything wrong--and argued his points quite badly. But I wouldn't be surprised if Brooks isn't a fan of his. UGH.

I'm just hoping that Krugman will be back soon (this is his 2nd vacation this summer--and I think maybe he's off on his book tour, but I worry that the nyt may want to drop him... I know, he has another job, and other outlets, but the times would have little cred left.)

David Brooks is an insidious conservative journalist. He is very good at cheerleading for GWB & C without giving the immediate impression of doing so. In this piece, for instance, he's trying to claim implicitly that, since Dean and GWB had some similarities in their upbringings then GWB=Dean. So, why not leave GWB there, is the implication. He forgets that the two men are radically different and so they reacted very differently to their environment. For instance, one became a drunk and had to embrace religion mindlessly (random example). I hope that Brooks' writings will annoy many people. -CV

Welcome to DU!! :toast: