Tag: David Brooks

Originally a comment by Steven on The mix of condescension and entitlement is stunning.

Brooks has nothing to say.

He writes two paragraphs of sharp criticism of Clinton (one at the beginning; one near the end). But rather than support his criticism with evidence–you know, things she’s said, things she’s done–he fills out the rest of the column with a paean to grace.

Reading this stuff is painful: both tedious and cringe-inducing. I skimmed it the first time through; later I circled back and read the whole thing, mainly out of a sense of duty. (I read Brooks…so you don’t have to.)

What is striking on a careful read is that the column is virtually content-free. It is grounded in no facts; no analysis; no narrative; no personal experience–nothing at all. It is just barely above lorem ipsum.

And yet, Brooks himself seems to think that writers should do better than this. In 2005, he wrote a column arguing that Harriet Miers lacked the qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice. He began

Of all the words written about Harriet Miers, none are more disturbing than the ones she wrote herself. In the early 90’s, […] Miers wrote a column called ”President’s Opinion” for The Texas Bar Journal. It is the largest body of public writing we have from her, and sad to say, the quality of thought and writing doesn’t even rise to the level of pedestrian.

He continued with 5 direct quotes from Miers’ writing that very much support that assertion, and concluded

I don’t know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers’s prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided. It’s not that Miers didn’t attempt to tackle interesting subjects. […] she presents no arguments or ideas […]

Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Miers’s columns provide no evidence of that.

I don’t know how Brooks went from calling out others for empty writing to becoming his own poster child for “the relentless march of vapid abstraction”.

I do know why the New York Times continues to publish his column: it is marginally less embarrassing than filling the op-ed page with lorem ipsum.

Via Facebook, a takedown of David Brooks’s patronizing advice to Clinton, by someone who wants to remain anonymous.

Brooks:

If you interpret your life as a battlefield, then you will want to maintain control at all times. You will hoard access. You will refuse to have press conferences. You will close yourself off to those who can help.

If you treat the world as a friendly and hopeful place, as a web of relationships, you’ll look for the good news in people and not the bad. You’ll be willing to relinquish control, and in surrender you’ll actually gain more strength as people trust in your candor and come alongside.

Response by anonymous genius:

Her political life IS a battlefield, you oblivious, sanctimonious, selectively amnesiac, self-pleasuring shitgoblin. She’s running against Donald Trump and his brigade of white nationalists while Republicans are already laying plans to impeach her, the press salivates for the one Clinton scoop that will bring her down (there will ALWAYS be more probing, more invading, more accusing), and people with zero idea of her record or accomplishments shout “Lock her up,” “Trump the bitch,” “Hang her,” and “Kill her.”

Yes, it’s the perfect time to prioritize “grace,” relinquish control and surrender to the goodwill of the populace, who only want the best for her. Why so serious, Hillary? SMILE!

There’s a subtle but raging cruelty embedded in opinions like these. They’re not only ignorant of the real experiences of ambitious, revolutionary women — they’re ignorant of their own ignorance, unaware of their hypocrisy in recommending empathy while practicing none. In Brooks’ formulation, her secrecy is the result of being a paranoid, distrustful shrew who just needs to relax, let down her hair, leave her door unlocked and trust that everyone wishes her well, rather than a sensible, seasoned professional who’s been a target for over a third of her life and knows her enemies better than they know themselves. The mix of condescension (“Let me help you, honey”) and entitlement (“We’ve shit all over you and demonized you for 25 years, why won’t you get vulnerable with us? “) is stunning. It’s an argument I’ve seen a thousand times — the world would be nicer to women if only women were nicer back.

And there’s an implication here that’s even more insidious: the instinct to survive and thrive on one’s own terms is less important than the obligation to please. It’s more important to make David Brooks feel good about you than it is to campaign effectively and win. It’s more important to make him feel good than for YOU to feel good.

Smile!

Actually, if you’re a man reading this, do not ever make a clown of yourself by instructing women that the world is safer, fuzzier, and more welcoming than they think it is, that their fears are silly or that they have an overactive imagination. And I say this as a woman who is brave as hell, tough as hell, has done considerable work to overcome her fears, and is, despite everything, an optimist. If you make light of women’s anxieties about their place in the world, if you talk more on this topic than you listen, you’re advertising your ignorance. If you feel yourself about to do it, put something in your mouth.

How pleasant for David Brooks that his positive, sunny approach to life yields positive results. Maybe he should retire from writing editorials and try running for office.

I’ll just repeat one favorite bit for emphasis:

In Brooks’ formulation, her secrecy is the result of being a paranoid, distrustful shrew who just needs to relax, let down her hair, leave her door unlocked and trust that everyone wishes her well, rather than a sensible, seasoned professional who’s been a target for over a third of her life and knows her enemies better than they know themselves. The mix of condescension (“Let me help you, honey”) and entitlement (“We’ve shit all over you and demonized you for 25 years, why won’t you get vulnerable with us? “) is stunning. It’s an argument I’ve seen a thousand times — the world would be nicer to women if only women were nicer back.

Nailed it.

Dayna Evans responded to David Brooks’s terrible, talentless, lazy “opinion piece” the day it appeared (last Friday).

Some writers are bad at writing, while others are good. But being good at writing is often not enough: One must also be gracious when writing about female presidential candidates. The best writers in the world are able to turn good writing into great by calling upon graciousness and intelligence in the face of an anti-intellectual world.

David Brooks — who today published “The Art of Gracious Leadership,” a musing on why Hillary Clinton is not, unlike “Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela and Dorothy Day,” a gracious leader — is not one of those writers.

Good writers, just like the subject of David Brooks’s latest spaghetti-at-a-wall op-ed, are “humble enough to observe that the best things in life are usually undeserved”…

As David Brooks’s entire career is undeserved. He’s a bad, lazy writer who simply states the obvious or conventional in the least interesting words available. He’s not good at writing and he’s not good at thinking either. There is no there there.

David Brooks writes for a living, but he does not seem to be transformed by the act of it. When writing about a female presidential candidate, he seems to make the same mistakes he’s been making as a writer for nearly two decades. His posture is “still brittle, stonewalling and dissembling.” David Brooks’s columns are all the same.

All the same platitudinous nothing.