David Brooks, You Simpleton, You Clown
David Brooks, You Simpleton, You Clown
America's preening moralist-in-chief remains bummed out.
Brace yourself for a terrible sentence: David Brooks thinks Americans are jerks.
Actually, this isn’t a terrible sentence so much as a hilarious one. Brooks, the ur-pundit par excellence who actually taught an Ivy League course on humility, has a new essay out in the most recent Atlantic, devoted to the question of why people in this country are so gosh darned “sad and alienated and rude.”
If reading some six thousand words explaining that “we” used to be happy but aren’t anymore is something that appeals to you, well, that’s none of my business. But if you’re a normal person who values your time and brain cells, let me spare you the pain of reading sentences like “We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy.” (Not that sentence itself, though. You’ve just read it. Painful, right?) Here’s the tl;dr: Brooks thinks we’re all bummed out and pissy because they don’t teach morals in school these days and no one is a boy scout anymore either.
No, really, that’s about it. And Brooks’ solutions to this crisis are as weak as his diagnosis.
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