Zoo Station
Jon Friedman wonders, with some justification, whether the New York Times is doing its readers a service by hiring Bono to write for its op-ed page.
I have no idea whether Bono will do a good job, but hose readers already have to put up with the columnar stylings of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd twice a week, plus supposed economist Ben Stein every other Sunday. While I doubt that Bono is making it to the op-ed pages on his journalistic merits, how could adding him to this stable make it appreciably worse?
Labels: Ben Stein, Bono, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, New York Times, op-ed columnists, stupid publishing tricks
Just Wondering
David Brooks had 4 days between his column on 28 December and his column today on Willard Mitt Romney and his amazing technicolor PowerPoint candidacy.
His own prescription for pundits is very clear:
One of the best pieces of career advice I ever got is: Interview three people every day. If you try to write about politics without interviewing policy makers, you’ll wind up spewing all sorts of nonsense.
Therefore Brooks had times to interview 9 people in the three days that he had to prepare his latest column for publication. How many of them did he allude to in that column, let alone quote?
We find several references to polls and history, but only vague allusion to Republican "leaders"—not quite the policy makers one is supposed to be talking to.
The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn.
Labels: David Brooks, stupid pundit tricks
Most Idiotic Paragraph of the Year
And the award for the most idiotic paragraph of the year to appear in an opinion column in an America newspaper goes to... David Brooks!
One of the best pieces of career advice I ever got is: Interview three people every day. If you try to write about politics without interviewing policy makers, you'll wind up spewing all sorts of nonsense. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote an entire book on the Israel Lobby without ever interviewing any of their subjects.
There are hundreds of newspaper reporters and columnists who write about politics on a regular basis, and thousands of academics who write and talk about politics as well. And there are bloggers, students, and just plain folks who write and say things about politics as well. Are they supposed to "interview[] policy makers" before they write anything down? Do "policy makers" have nothing to do all day but sit down for interviews?
If one is trying to write a book about the folkways of congressional committees, or trying to fathom how the Office of Management and Budget has changed in the past generation, then, yes, interviewing those who make policy is important, because only they know the quotidian aspects of the subjects in question.
But many, if not most, political discussion involves policies per se, and the voluminous output of modern government is more than adequate for that sort of thing.
It says volumes for the vacuousness of modern political conservatism that David Brooks is one of its most visible representatives.
Labels: David Brooks, stupid pundit tricks
Our Mister Brooks
David Brooks, supposedly a smart fellow, has tried yet again to take the pulse of cultural America. And yet again he has no idea how to do it. His latest screed purports to show how today's popular culture in America is so unlike that of decades past.
If you've been driving around listening to pop radio stations this spring and summer, you'll have noticed three songs that are pretty much unavoidable, and each of them is a long way from puppy love....
When Americans face something that's psychologically traumatic, they invent an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero who can deal with it. The closing of the frontier brought us the hard-drinking cowboy loner. Urbanization brought us the hard-drinking detective loner.
Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don't get married until they're past 30. That's two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn't a transition anymore. It's a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.
The three songs with these "Lone Rangers" are by Carrie Underwood, Pink, and April Lavigne. All three tell no-good, low-life men to sod off. This surely scares someone like David Brooks to pieces, for if women can tell their boyfriends to stop sleeping around, then gay marriage has to be next.
But the best part is Brooks's assertion that angry women getting revenge on their unworthy partners is something new:
If you put the songs together, you see they're about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song 10, let alone 30 years ago.
Baloney. Here's a three-part long-distance dedication from Tim in Massachusetts to David in New York.
- The first is from 1995 (that's 12 years ago), in which Alanis Morrisette bitterly tells her ex-boyfriend just how upset she is. And her attitude was hardly "socially unacceptable" in 1995—even without being released as a single, it was all over the airwaves then, and was the most recognizable song on an album that sold over 14 million units in the United States.
I want you to know, that I'm happy for you
I wish nothing but the best for you both
An older version of me
Is she perverted like me
Would she go down on you in a theatre
Does she speak eloquently
And would she have your baby
I'm sure she'd make a really excellent mother
- The second is from 1979 (that's 28 years ago), when Pat Benatar lashes out at her cheating partner. One might say that she is "like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who's had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette." Indeed one might. "Hit Me With You Best Shot" sold over 1 million singles and hit the ninth spot on the main Billboard chart.
Well you're the real tough cookie with the long history
Of breaking little hearts, like the one in me
That's o.k., lets see how you do it
Put up your dukes, lets get down to it!
Hit me with your best shot!
Why don't you hit me with your best shot!
Hit me with your best shot!
Fire away!
- And the final one goes back to 1966 (that's 41 years ago), in which we find that the kind of revenge that Carrie Underwood is plotting in 2007 was certainly part of pop culture in previous generations. It was, however, a a bit more pedestrian and a bit more metaphorical. With her Number One hit in both America and the United Kingdom, here's Nancy Sinatra.
You keep saying you got something for me
Something you call love but confess
You've been a'messin' where you shouldn't 've been a'messin'
And now someone else is getting all your best
Well, these boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you
But here is the best part. The Wikipedia entry on Sinatra's song tells us that "Nancy Sinatra was encouraged by Lee Hazlewood to sing the song as if she were a sixteen-year-old girl giving the brush-off to a forty-year-old man. And here is Brooks decrying the bitterness and anger that today's culture creates:
[The character in these songs is] disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She's also, at least in some of the songs, about 16.
One of these days, some male columnist will write what women have known for millenia. Some men can be brutal, nasty, and swinish. Some of them prey on young women. It is not a bad thing—indeed, it is a very good thing—to call them on their misdeeds.
Just because David Brooks just noticed this sort of thing happening on the radio does not mean that it is something new. But perhaps he would have noticed if he were not so afraid of women speaking their minds.
Labels: Alanis Morrisette, angry women singers, April Lavigne, Carrie Underwood, David Brooks, Nancy Sinatra, Pat Benatar, Pink
Proof that Nobody Pays Attention to David Brooks
On Tuesday, 16 March, David Brooks wrote in his column that the Spanish voters who booted the conservative government out of office last weekend, were just a bunch of weak-willed appeasers. Included in his simplistic screed was this little gem:
If a terrorist group attacked the U.S. three days before an election, does anyone doubt that the American electorate would rally behind the president or at least the most aggressively antiterror party? Does anyone doubt that Americans and Europeans have different moral and political cultures? Yesterday the chief of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told Italy's La Stampa, "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists." Does he really think capitulation or negotiation works better? Can you imagine John Kerry or George Bush saying that?
Besides the specious argument that a government that had failed in its duty to protect the populace would necessarily be rewarded in the polls, this paragraph had a major problem. Prodi didn't exactly say that.
To his credit, Brooks tried to make amends. On Saturday, 20 March, David Brooks appended a correction to his column:
In Tuesday's column I quoted the European Commission's president, Romano Prodi, telling the Italian newspaper La Stampa that force was not the answer to terrorism. I was relying on an Agence France-Presse translation, which was incorrect. Prodi actually said force should not be the only answer to terrorism. He said terrorism would not abate until the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was resolved.
And, today Cathy Young penned a column for the Boston Globe in which she heads toward the fanciful notion that a plurality of Spaniards preferred the social democrats to the conservatives that lied not only about the 11 March bombings but also about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. She even cites a libertarian, writing in the same libertarian magazine that employs her, who dispels the notion that the spanish voters were just appeasers.
But she finds that the oft-trod path of sliming Europeans was just too compelling. then she drops the ball—and cites, you guessed it, the original quote that Brooks did.
Poor David Brooks! Even the columnists in the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times, can't be bothered to read his columns!
Labels: Boston Globe, Cathy Young, David Brooks
