David Brooks does it again

David Brooks frequently strikes gold in his columns, especially when he's mocking the set of people with whom I tend to identify. The pleasure I receive when reading his Lunch Period Poli Sci op-ed is endless, even though I've read it probably too many times. I was going to drop a blockquote in but it's just too good to hash like that.

Today's column, Ward Three Morality, just added to my love. For those who can appreciate what this means, Ward Three encompasses Tenleytown, Klingle, Cathedral Heights, Chevy Chase, Cleveland Park, Forest Hills, Foxhall, Friendship Heights, Glover Park, and Woodley Park. AKA these are the folks who patronize 2Amys and Politics and Prose, who embody the future I probably want one day. Knowing many of those folks, and self-mockingly considering myself an amateur of their ranks, I couldn't help but crack up at this hilariously on target dig: 

The good news for rich people is that people in this neighborhood are very nice and cerebral. On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies).

I know that Brooks is being cheeky here but he is also imparting some serious shots at both sides. I'm not going to lie, it pleases me that these Ward Three folks are calling the shots now. Maybe I shouldn't feel so happy about that. Brooks is really right when he says Under their rule, the federal government is permitted to throw hundreds of billions of dollars around on a misguided bank bailout, but if a banker like John Thain spends $1,500 on a wastepaper basket then all hell breaks loose. (I am again reminded of Nietzsche. These drab upper middle class folks embody the bourgeois values Nietzsche loves to hate.) Like Brooks, I suspect this will be a prominent theme in economic crisis America and a continued criticism from the old right to the left. 

I similarly delight in his long-form Atlantic piece about high-acheivers in my generation, The Organization Kid. I think some of his insights are a bit off, and some clearly embody what I mock about Princeton and Penn, but much of the article is eerily true. I was thinking about it just yesterday when I was reading an American Scholar op-ed called The Disadvantages of Having an Elite Education. The beginning of the Scholar article, which is quite long, was both rather engrossing and also uncomfortably accurate.

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

I experienced something very similar, to my complete dismay, when I was hanging out with a friend of a friend at a hardcore show. While I have some disagreements with both Brooks and Deresiewicz -- for instance, I know many people my age who are not econ majors heading for careers in investment banking -- there is much credence to their perspectives.