Our Mister Brooks Reduks: The Rich Are Different, etc.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to reading--okay; skimming--David Brooks (and just when I was despairing over Bill Kristol's exit from the New York Times, feeling bereft of a dependable source of right-wing dishonesty), the man known in our house as "that idiot" delivers one more piece of semi-knowing, para-amusing, pseudo-droll drek offering more proof, as if any were needed, that he still, when he grows up, wants to be Tom Wolfe.

It arrives in the form of today's offering, "Ward Three Morality," in which, tongue planted firmly in cheek and head stuffed tightly up ass, Brooks takes issue with how the standards and values of D.C.'s Ward Three ("...a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live.") are being foisted upon the nation's "rich people."

First, there were those auto executives who didn't realize that it is no longer socially acceptable to use private jets for lobbying trips to Washington. Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch washroom.

You see where this is going: "didn't realize," "socially acceptable," "humiliating." Brooks is pretending (or he actually believes) that public condemnation of corporate extravagance, when practiced by executives the effects of whose bungling, ineptitude, greed, and malfeasance are being ameliorated by public money, is--entertainingly, faux-tragically--simply a matter of changing fashion.

The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought this a sensible thing to do, then he could go ahead and do it without any serious repercussions.

But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.

"Rich people no longer get to set their own rules." Oh, David, you wag! This is like saying that, having been sentenced to a twenty-year bounce upstate for armed robbery, I find myself forced to endure the "lifestyle standards" set--arbitrarily, in my view--by some so-called "warden."

You have to wonder: Does it go on like this? Does it get worse? Yes. It goes on like this and it gets worse:

Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.

"Corporate learning retreats"--stop, you're killing me. Brooks thinks he's being amusing and, to the legions of right-wing sycophants, libertarian nitwits, daddy-worshipers, authority-catamites, Randroids, wing-nuts, and orc-conservative who embrace Social Darwinism but shun actual Darwinism, he may be. (One of these--go pretend to be surprised--is Jonah Goldberg, to whom Brooks' piece is "a great column with some real insights.") The rest of us wait, with saintly patience, for him come off it and admit that he has no real intention of devoting an entire column to a display of massive disingenuousness in order to pretend to be Christopher Lasch. Instead, we get this:

On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids' play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies).

Brooks probably knows one family with a Nordic Track in the basement, and that's good enough for him. (What? No Sub-Zero PRO 48 in the "renovated kitchen"? How hard can it be to do what I did--Google "Sub-Zero" and there's your telling detail.) But the brand-name hi-jinx is for the punters. The meat of the piece is, as always, in the psychological analysis:

In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can't afford full-time household help.

Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

In short, people in Ward Three disdain three things: cleavage, hunting and dumb people who are richer than they are. Rich people have to learn to adapt to the new power structure if they hope to survive.

How "bone structure" leads to "cleavage" is best left for a future discussion of conservative pathologies. Meanwhile, like the interminable set of a bad standup, it goes on and on in the same vein. As usual with Brooks, we get sober, nicely-crafted sentences conveying a message of stunning dishonesty. His point is that the "morality" of the jealous, bitter, self-pitying bureaucrats is being shoved down the throats of their well-meaning, if now temporarily incapacitated, betters. And, as with everything Brooks writes, it's half true. It is a moral issue.

In fact, we note with amusement, it's the inverse of Ronald Reagan's legendary, and probably apocryphal, "Welfare Queen," that stupid broad who supposedly used food stamps to buy booze, and in so doing embodied the moral turpitude of a) the welfare state; b) some, or really many, or really most, or probably all, poor people; and c) Democrats.

Here, see, it's the other way around: Rich people being bailed out by the government should--morally--still be allowed to indulge in whatever they want. It's their lifestyle, you see.

David Brooks is the sort of conservative pundit, discredited by the last eight years but who still has to make a living, who can write this:

People in Ward Three have nationalized extravagance and privatized Puritanism. Under their rule, the federal government is permitted to throw hundreds of billions of dollars around on a misguided bank bailout, but if a banker like John Thain spends $1,500 on a wastepaper basket then all hell breaks loose.

Got that? It's "Puritan" to think $1,500 for a trash can (or $35,000 for a toilet) is excessive, but "extravagant" to try to forestall a depression. Then again, maybe Brooks truly believes all the above. Of course, it's likely that at this point he doesn't know what he believes, but still: Maybe some shortcoming, either in his moral education or in the wiring of his brain, prevents him from seeing that, when your failures are being mitigated by other people's money, you owe it--to your benefactors, out of respect to their sense of what is appropriate--to modulate the indulging of your desire for luxury. That's what makes it "luxury" in the first place.

Of course it's all relative. Of course one person's idea of living it up is another's idea of barely getting by. But unless the exex under discush are complete sociopaths--and they might be--they know full well what's being asserted by the critics Brooks sneers at. Or does John Thain think he'd mind if, having loaned a niece or nephew ten grand, the child spent it on crack? "But Uncle John, I need it." How'd that be?

Welcome back, David. It's nice to know that, even in the era of Obama, you and your kind will still be there to inform, to instruct, and to provide me with something to write about.

Cross-posted at What HE Said

Comments

[dhfsfc]

This is just David Brooks' elbow in the ribs of all his rich "friends," (well, acquaintances, but he would like them to consider him more than a trained monkey), saying, "see, the petit bourgoise are trying to take away all your hard earned money because they're jealous! That's right, jealous! That is why they whine about our $1,500 wastebaske­ts."

Yeah, it's all a morality play straight out of high school. Never mind that people are losing their jobs daily (including his "friends"), and the world's economy has gone straight into the crapper thanks to their intellect and expertise.

No, it's all about the lawyers and bureaucrats trying to take the fun out of being rich!

And the NYT is dying. I wonder why?

[alumcreek]

Can anyone point out when David Brooks ever demonstrated any clear understanding of America's middle class or poor?

I'm sure when he gives a speech for money to people make every week as much as he makes every year, he feels suprior to them. He is a Rushpublican toady. He had several chances to out the Bush administration's felonious activities and never did so because he approves of GOP felonies till somebidy is caught and then he bemoans such activity even he knew of it months in advance of it being made public.

Mr. Brooks wants to be a majot author but it can't happen so long as he is a poor thinker, a rightwing lap dog and is blinded by ideology.

[peorgietirebiter]

Great column and hard to argue with unless you sort of like David Brooks, which I do.
I'm convinced it's a function of knowing him through television before I had much access to his columns.
He reminds of the smart, earnest kids on the block that you let tag along. Perfectly acceptable except on those rare occasions when they'd try a little too hard and they would wold from embarrassing to insufferable pretty quick. Apparently, W.F. Buckley Jr. hired Brooks after reading one the columns in some college newspaper. In it, he lampooned Buckley as sort of a 007 character in the satirical style we'v all come to know and loath. I'm guessing he longs to relive the taht head spinning moment when Mr. Buckley smiled down upon him.

[Donegal]

Great column! I think Mr. Brooks protests too much.

[happybandit]

I was so happy to see this post. I was sick this morning after I read his pathetic column. Bill Krystal was so egregiously offensive he made David Brooks seem thoughtful or at least readable by contrast. Now that Krystal is gone from the Times op ed page (thank you!) Brooks' column shines again as a mealy-mouthed attempt to please AND be cool while being a Republican.

[schatsie]

Look I don't mind the rich having their pekadildoe­s...what i mind is the they write them off their taxes as BUSINESS EXPENSES..­.How in the sam hill is a 1500 wastebasket a business expense? and why should I pick up the tax deficit created by this scam.... If it was my husband who bought a 1500 wastebasket, I would have to ask if SHE WAS GOOD IN BED....

[mommadona]

David's jealous.
He'd love to be rich.
He loves to hang with them.
Makes him feel rich.

I've heard prostitution comes in many forms.