David Brooks, All-American: A Reader
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats
Like Donald Trump and his Stepford Wives sons, David Brooks embodies much of what is wrong with the good ol’ U.S. of A. and the hollow failure that is the mainstream media, notably the floundering Wizard of Oz known as the New York Times.
In short, and while I originally read this about Newt Gingrich, Brooks is what ignorant, ill-informed, and/or simply stupid people believe smart people are.
Brooks matches what the white male ruling elites have sold the American public counts as authority: suit and tie, glasses, haircut with the proper part on the side (although even his hair knows to abandon the ship of his thick and possibly hollow skull).
However, and most importantly, Brooks is a white man who holds forth on everything with a genial authority, and he has acquired a bully pulpit mostly because he is a white man who holds forth on everything with a genial authority.
The schtick here is that Brooks is doing his All-American service by making really hard ideas accessible to the much less sophisticated American public.
It is what stand-up comics have done for decades, but Brooks, especially, David Brooks, All-American: A Reader | radical eyes for equity:
