From the above article, I learned several interesting things - perhaps the most fascinating being that, when he was a child, Brooks owned two turtles, one named Disraeli and the other named Gladstone. I think this fact goes a long way toward explaining Brooks' perpetual swinging-pendulum, split-the-difference political posturing. And there's this:
Brooks says that, overwhelmingly, human decision-making is not rational but unconscious.Like Brooks' decision to write another book, for example.
'Overwhelmingly'...
ReplyDeleteBut not absolutely. Well, there you go. blah blah blah, flubh flubh flugelhorn c'est la. Can I have a Pulitzer prize please?
Alert: major emitter of carbon dioxide pollution found. Perhaps we can launch all these wafflers and wafters into space where they won't damage the planet.
(I had a precocious friend in high school who made it to subeditor on a major Murdoch rag then gave it away for religion. As a teenager he named his 2 cats Pushkin and Ptitsin. Talent!)
Yays, another door stop from David Brooks. Or an emergency supply of toilet paper.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a fun family. Family members probably took turns reading out of Blachstone's Commentaries at dinner.
ReplyDeleteMy high school friends knew all the words to Hotrod Lincoln. Does that count? I would have named the cats Push-kin & Shove. Bada-bing! When push comes to shove...get it? Back to my meds.
Hmm "Blackstone" perhaps. A thousand pardons and rivers of sorrow.
ReplyDeleteNo, a rational decision would be decidin you've read as much David Brooks as you need to.
ReplyDeleteMy psychological diagnosis of the confusing Mr. Brooks is he desperately needs people to perceive him as "smart." And his strategy is to use a lot of words to cover every side of every issue. He cares not about being "effective" as far as actually influencing anyone with "rational" (i.e. intellectually consistent)argument, which is why he's perfectly comfortable as the NYT hot house "conservative."
ReplyDeleted(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
Yojimbo, I'm embarrassed to sound so uppity - we maybe had similar background to you. Working class inner city Catholic in our case. My friend was tenement poor before he got the Murdoch job. I guess we wanted to escape from all that by reading dostoyevsky. I hate all this 'more intelligent' crap they go on with now. People were wiser then.
ReplyDeleteBut I think there was a lot more optimism in the 1950's/60's American working class than there was on our more repressed more British side.
Hence much more than that. Brooks, though a 49-year-old Canadian-born, suburban New York-raised, Chicago university-educated and now so much of a stellar New York Times columnist that the White House sometimes rings him to ask what he's planning to write about, is deeply Anglophilic.
ReplyDeleteGood God. The man is a Victorian (the era, not the Australian state). No wonder he has nothing useful to say to the 21st century.
Bruce: Nah, had nothing to do with your friend. Famous American saying from my era, "When push comes to shove." I couldn't help myself with the Pushkin reference. Most times I'm too esoteric for polite society.
ReplyDeleteNot Victorian at all, possibly Georgian. His soon-to-be NYT bestseller sounds as if much will be cribbed from "Voltaire's Bastards".
ReplyDeleteCheers