Our Mr Brooks
I was starting to sketch out a post last weekend that would look at the slow replacement of the idealized vision of the Iraqi war, that whole noble burden, gift of democracy thing. How it is slowly rotating out and being replaced by a more realistic, more camel's-nose-under-the-tent-flap reality check vision. By the Neocon Cheerleaders who so enthusiastically championed it a year and a half ago. Not that this would be terribly original, still it could be a voyage of discovery. Since there is more than a small portion of this "wilsonian idealism" in me, I mediate my sarcasm before the mirror of my soul. All the same I find Democracy the ideal and democracy the practice two quite different things. The latter a historical artifact - the outgrowth of particular histories and instituitions. Precariously joined with the former in constitutions of state. You can give the idea of Democracy to someone, but you can not give democracy. They must take the idea, if they choose, and make it themselves -from within their own culture and history. Still! Even after the cake-of-custom has been broken.
Towards this end I had assembled four or so David Brook's New York Times opeds on my desktop a triumph of tabbed browsering. Why Brooks? Because George Will started having second thoughts weeks ago, William Safire is still churning out columns on how we have wronged that beautiful man Ahmed Chalabi (Safire: talk about your bitter-enders). Krauthammer? Krauthammer is just plain mad. You'd learn more from a barking dog. So Brooks it is. Then Metafilter turns up on Sunday with a thread on Brooks revolving around Michael Kinsley's review of his latest book 'On Paradise Drive': Sociology or Shtick?. Between Kinsley and the attending MIFi'ers many of the observation. I would make about Brooks were laid out already. You have to read Brooks carefully, watch for turns of phrase, pry out the meandering central thread of his columns or you will miss what he is really saying, and what he is really saying is rarely as unobjectionable as the general tone of his columns.
I wish I had a prepared process for Brooks, some solution I could dissolve his columns into to which a catalyst could be added that would cause all the pleasantries and fellow "Bobo" feeling-moves to sedimentize and settle out. Leaving behind a pure Brooks at his purpose. Kinsley's review made me want to look through this book and his previous "Bobo's in Paradise" just to check if my initial impression is valid. The convergent American that Brooks is describing with these books: JR "Bob" Dobbs. How many people remember slackness and the church of the sub-genius? It was a 70's or 80's thing, I never understood it myself. I'm not sure it was supposed to be understood. More seriously Brooks seems to be describing the perfect regime man. I sense a resonant vibration to the sort of characters that peopled French and English novels of the late nineteenth century. Encased in a materialistic middle class like an insect in amber, a bourgeosie to which all the world flowed. Europe had all the money in the world in those days, much of what was built in this country was built with British money until about 1920. This is Brooks's man. The Roman man. Augustus Caeser will be proud.
11:37:34 PM  ;;
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