Ezra Klein suddenly notices after this column:
I think it was Abraham Joshua Heschel — after he broke off with Reinhold Niebuhr and formed Jefferson Airplane — who observed that though the ancients counseled, “Know Thyself,” in 87 percent of actual cases, profound self-knowledge is not transforming. It’s just disappointing.And this is never more true than when the beach self takes over. There is a boardwalk game near where we vacation where you roll balls into holes to try to get your mechanical horse across a track faster than your 11 opponents. You pay a dollar a game and if you win you get a stuffed horse worth 75 cents. My beach self has played that game for 15 years, and I have never once gotten up without secretly wishing I was playing again.
In my heart, I’d be happy to play that game 11 hours a day at the cost of several thousand dollars, and the only thing preventing me is that the Slovakian girl behind the counter might conclude that American men are pathetic.
I question the economics, there; I'd guess the horse is worth more like 2 cents. But it is certainly true that a life without funnel cakes and salt water taffy is not worth living.
Actually, I too had just noticed Brooks being exceptionally funny, in this review of Drew Westen's book:
Westen urges Democratic candidates to go for the gut, and includes a number of speeches that he wishes Democratic candidates had given. He wishes, for example, Al Gore had hit George Bush harder for being a drunk. He wishes Gore had interrupted a presidential debate and barked at Bush, “If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn’t a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father’s own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings.”At another point, he imagines Gore exploding: “Why don’t you tell us how many times you got behind the wheel of a car with a few drinks under your belt, endangering your neighbors’ kids? Where I come from, we call that a drunk.” If Democrats would go for people’s primitive passions in this way, Westen argues, they’d win elections.
This thesis raises some interesting questions. First, why did someone with so little faith in rational inquiry go into academia, and what does he do to those who disagree with him at Emory faculty meetings, especially recovering alcoholics?
Of course, perhaps this is not fair: who couldn't write a funny review of a book by a man who thinks that the way to make an emotional connection with people is to make fun of recovering drunks? But it was rather wittier and more acerbic than I generally think of Brooks as being.
Update A reader argues that Westen's response makes this piece sound considerably less funny. I haven't read the book, but I have heard the good professor interviewed on NPR, and after listening to him for an hour, I have to say that he, and his thesis, came off as exactly the painfully parochial, self-unaware, thoroughly risible parody that David Brooks presents him as.
Maybe it's still too early on a Friday morning, but David Brooks still isn't funny. Abraham Heschel and Drew Westen, on the other hand, are funny. David Brooks has always struck me as one of those guys who constantly tries to be funny and rarely, if ever, succeeds.
God, I don't know if anybody here read Why I Turned Right (it's new, I think it came out this year), but in David Brooks section he comes off as such a tool. His whole entry amounts to "boy those hippies were crazy! And some of them didn't seem totally committed to their political agenda! So I became a conservative."
So the thesis is that politicians aren't negative enough? I'll read that book, right after I win the lottery.
Bring back duels.
What a guy like Westen doesn't grasp is that you go to an election with the candidate you have, not the one you wish you had. Politically talented people like Bill Clinton and and Ronald Reagan can say things that get Al Gore and both Bush's skewered because Clinton and Reagan are just flat out better at connecting with people. Yes, the lesser candidates can work hard at getting better, and avoiding behaviors which are harmful, like how Westen describes behaviors which Edwards should have been trained out of, but national political candidates are a lot like major league hitters; there is a base level of talent, or lack of talent, which simply cannot be overcome, no matter how much work is put in.
People thinking that David Brooks is funny leads to Bob Saggett getting an HBO special. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Maybe one reason Al Gore, Jr. didn't accuse Bush of being a recovered drunk is because Al Gore III is an unrecovered drunk. Not that Bush would be rude enough to point that out, but others would.
The American Prospect put up what I assume is Westen's chapter on gun control as an article back in June.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=guns_on_the_brain#comments
It was just astonishingly bad.
Westen does another of his "imaginary responses" of what the Democrats should have said after the Virginia Tech murders last spring. Rather than just offering condolences to the families of the slain - party leaders should have blamed the Republicans for the murders because:
"the Republican Congress had let the Brady Act, which banned the sale of semiautomatic weapons, sunset in 2004"
This is wrong is so many ways on so many levels.
1. The Brady Act didn't sunset and didn't ban the sale of semiautomatic weapons. The Brady Act set up the background check routine and is still in effect.
2. The Assault Weapons Ban must be what Westen was thinking of as it did sunset in 2004. But it didn't ban the sale of semiautomatic weapons either. Just a few mean-looking assault weapons with large clips.
3. Neither of the two handguns used by the VA Tech killer was banned under the Assault Weapons Ban.
Westen shows amazing ignorance of firearms law and even firearms technology. Any Democrat who followed Westen's idiotic advice would have been quickly evicerated and rightly so.
If Westen is this lame on such a high profile topic I have no use for any of the rest of his advice.
Only someone who thinks Ayn Rand is an inspiring writer could think David Brooks is funny.
Only someone who thinks Ayn Rand is an inspiring writer could think David Brooks is funny.
1. Even if that weren't a pointless and misdirected ad hominem,
2. telling people that something they think is funny isn't funny simply demonstrates a lack of a sense of humor on your part, and
3. the statement is stupid, since the point of this post was that Ezra Klein -- not exactly a fan of Rand -- thought Brooks was funny.
Look at this...