The Mood Of The Times
One of the nice things about David Brooks of the NYT is his modest, benevolent demeanor. Brooks seeks the moderate and speaks in euphemisms but has hardcore convictions. It sounds like a slight thing, but if the arena is partisan politics, it is really, really welcome. Pretty, pretty, pretty good, as Larry David would say. You wonder how Brooks, with his personality, saw raucous politics as a good fit? I’m glad he did. He is one of the few who seem to be trying to tell the truth, or better, to be honest.
In this brief online discussion with Dick Cavett Brooks has become infected by the negativity in the air. He went on a trip across America, talked to “average” folks, and found everyone was down. They hate Washington and don’t feel the optimism of people in India and China. A small, anecdotal sample, but still.
Brooks says,
It’s true I see no way we will avoid a fiscal catastrophe, and I hear smart economists debating how bad the catastrophe will be: Rome or merely Spain? Can this be true? Is the nation of perpetual youth really on the path to old age?
The root of current despair isn’t the financial crisis, as Brooks seems to think. The financial crisis is a manifestation of a larger infection; the attitudes and ambitions of those who drove the financial crisis were derived from the value system we see all around us.
It does feel the system is broken, from many ends, and there are many in addition, who want exceptional America to not be exceptional at all. What do they think will replace the American presence in the world’s imagination and who will attend the pragmatic demands? Many who conduct the public life of America have forgotten basic values — they are too busy chasing money and status (awards). I’m not referring to Brooks here, but the media culture as a whole (movies, TV, celebrity culture, journalism, op-ed commentary, politicians) and its values, whose mindset we have adopted as early cultures believed in household gods.
Obama’s White House is hardly different than Jimmy Carter’s depressing administration—zero leadership. As an example, Hillary Clinton is “insulted” by the timing of Israel’s settlement announcement, but China in Tibet, Turkey in Cyprus, home grown terrorism pathologized and sanitized by the administration, making terrorists into the equivalent of drug dealers, all to honor politically correct defaults, and thereby, cluelessly, enabling the deplorable, have somehow escaped her grasp of what is truly an insult to intelligence and simple decency. Think of Iran’s jerking America and the UN around, while they oppress the protesters in Tehran—does that insult Clinton and Obama? True insult is volitional, not an awkward mistake.
The media have tainted the waters out of careerist motives, saying what has been said before, with alacrity. The media doesn’t present what is, fully, but seeks defaults, outlines, to fill in. And those outlines have been defined by the momentum of years of unbalanced presentation. The tag line for most newscasts is a reassuring aw-gee story that is meant to make the public feel good about itself. But everything that preceded betrays their hypocrisy—that is, the way the information is presented: the angle of the story, the shallowness of understanding, the poisonous, tendentious voice overs, the mind numbing slogans. “The mood in the White House, Brian, is…”
The sense of can-do hope and generous good will that is the best of America has been eroded badly. Brooks is right there. Freeman Dyson, as well, wrote in one piece sometime back, that he felt America was in decline. Not a dip, but a steady slip…downward.
