Whose morality is he extolling? Is Brooks suggesting that young people look to those community oriented paragons of ethics and morality who favor torture, unprovoked war; manipulation of public opinion; aggrandizement of the wealthy; elimination of the social safety net; vilification of racial and religious minorities, the poor and the politically and economically powerless; the apotheosis of guns over public safety; and the exploitation of homeowners?
Role Models?
Whom should those young people emulate? Grover Norquist? Eric Cantor? Jamie Dimon? Newt Gingrich? If so, kudos to those immoral, empty young people for choosing a different path.
If Brooks had any sense of intellectual honesty or political courage, he’d apply his analysis to the grownups who ran this country into the ground, and who are itching for another crack at it.
As for rabid consumerism, puh-leeze. That’s the backbone of this economy. Where’ve you been? The problem we’re having is that people aren’t spending enough on stuff. After 9/11, Bush told us to go shop. I don't recall hearing any acceptance of personal accountability by anyone in the Bush administration for all their failures and missteps.
But 18 year olds are held to a higher standard? Hoo-kay, then.
He a Smart Feller!
This is a classic Brooks column in another respect: its pretentious catalog of references to (mostly) obscure academics and researchers. I counted nine:
- Christian Smith
- Kari Christoffersen
- Hilary Davidson
- Patricia Snell Herzog
- Allan Bloom
- Gertrude Himmelfarb
- Alasdair MacIntyre
- Charles Taylor
- James Davison Hunter
Nine citations? In a 15-paragraph column? OK, we get it: You read a lot. You're smart. You like abstruse stuff. You're recondite. But all these citations constitute the mark of a writer who develops his material by reading others’ stuff instead of doing his own living and reporting. It reads like a college term paper.
Nice Boy, Long Way From Home
David, you’re probably a very nice person. But you’re wildly out of touch and in over your head as a social thinker.
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