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a set of sharp and cogent notes

Stuff We Like

  • F for Fake

    This is Orson Welles's masterpiece, a virtuoso performance of sound and video editing that co-opts the documentary but is not one. It is the rare postmodern text that's laugh out loud funny, steeped in the relativism of the post war period but not held hostage by it. He appears as himself, sheared of doubts and humanity, in full possession and knowledge of his genius, but he is not the subject (excuse my language) of the film. It's a "film about trickery, fraud and lies," and about two great exponents of those arts, Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. The film is not much watched by people from any generation, met with cold critical reception on release, how can it be Welles's masterpiece? But it is, and is neglected due to its translation from the dross and palaver of our late capitalist society in which relativism extends mainly to the comparison of ledgers, a number of hard, unpleasant truths about meaning, about value, and about our modern oracles, the experts. Or as Welles says of art (or anything): "How is it valued? The value depends on opinion. Opinion depends on the expert. A faker like Elmyr makes fools of the experts, so who's the expert? Who's the faker?"

  • Ferret-Legging

    Ferret-Legging

    The ferret goes in your pants. Your pants are cinched to prevent its escape. Then you stand there while a scared rodent scratches, bites, and generally freaks the fuck out in the vicinity of your manly-bits. He who endures the longest wins. There you have the “sport” of ferret-legging, a Yorkshire coalminer practice now revived at the Richmond, VA Celtic Festival. While I cannot speak for the rest of the Plasma Pool team, I have not personally experienced the joy of ferret legging – nor do I have any desire to do so in the future. But what should be Liked about this particular Stuff is not corporeal, but rather its statement about the competitive nature of man such that he would trap a ferret in his pants for over five hours for no reward but the knowledge that he did what no other man could do. There exists in each of us a compulsion to strive for greatness, and in the course of this pursuit we are capable of unimaginable sacrifice in the name of achievement. Today humanity faces new and difficult challenges, but what drives these semi-sane “athletes” is the same that drives those in more noble fields to cure diseases, create art, and improve humanity in countless other ways. So, thank you ferret-leggers. Just keep that animal away from my junk.  -- Donny Bridges

  • Reactions to the OJ Simpson Verdict

    OJ Simpson Verdict

    Without getting into any kind of commentary about the trial itself or its place in pop culture memory, this video of the OJ Simpson verdict is stunning. Pay attention to 1:24, 2:10, 3:30, 3:59. The camera pans over a near-complete spectrum of emotions, almost oblivious to the murmur of the verdict while the faces hang on to every word. The calm voice at the end advises to "expect the worst." For me, the bizarre essence of the clip is that some idea of "justice" is located somewhere in the physical and conceptual space between the rows of silent faces and the implied source of the unseen voices. The mass of bodies tenses and contorts as an articulation of the disembodied speech of the justice system. I am reluctant to give a reading of all this beyond this cursory description, but one final thing to consider is that our detached gaze is nearly embedded in the perspective of the invisible jury, who sits at the center of the verdict.  -- Scott Coomes

From the Vault

Things that died in 2008.

Our president pledged as primary candidate to staunchly defend individual civil liberties and curb the domestic intelligence abuses of the Bush Administration. As the Democratic candidate, he hedged. As president-elect, he made stunning about-faces, notably on immunity for telecommunications companies who cooperated with Bush's illegal requests. Now, as president, he's continued as many of Bush's abuses as he's curtailed. Also, there was a time when John McCain wasn't an unprincipled, dishonorable bigot. He was quite the man, when he was a man. Then came a succubus to hasten his by then inevitable decline.

David Brooks’s Intellectually Naïve Pessimism

Kevin Hilke

On November 3, 2008, the day before Barack Hussein Obama was elected president of the United States, David Brooks of The New York Times uses his column to remind Obama’s supporters that, Hey, guys, just because He’s probably gonna win, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to handle the opportunity history has handed you. In fact, you probably can’t. We “smart young liberals,” Brooks warns, are about to “meet a stone-cold scarcity that [we] do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.” Brooks’s pessimism about attempting massive reform in the midst of an economic disaster has been widely discussed and dismissed, largely because it offers no substantive alternative solution to the problems America faces. As a young economist who works in a U.S. department directly confronting the economic crisis puts it, “Brooks seems to disregard the fact that this moment of falling back to earth is exactly the time to embark on the next set of big domestic plans—health care, new financial architecture, energy independence”—which are, of course, the precise things Brooks himself argues that we must, as a country, immediately address. Brooks never acknowledges, much less offers any sort of explanation for, the myriad contradictions of his outlook.

Nonetheless, as popular, nationally syndicated, conservative political columnists go, Brooks is perhaps as intelligent and rational as it gets, sentence-to-sentence, reliably crafting smooth, logical arguments that tend to hang together well and avoid the paranoia, politicking and intermittent sociopathy that characterize the diatribes of many of his conservative colleagues. His friendly PBS NewsHour sparring with left-leaning syndicated columnist Mark Shields is informative, insightful, and refreshingly impartial. All of this is good and rare. Brooks is truly, in many respects, a credit to his profession.

His arguments, though, too often collapse under their own grandiose weight, unsupported by the evidence he presents, if he presents any. In his column of November 3, for instance, only a single piece of hard evidence even purports to undergird his claim—and it’s a tangentially relevant truism: “As Robert J. Samuelson writes in his forthcoming book, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, ‘Already, Americans face far more claims on their incomes than can be easily met.’” Brooks really needed to cite Samuelson for this? This isn’t common knowledge? Furthermore, how, precisely, does a blasé economic prognostication (one that could have been made just as well by a little girl whose father suddenly stops buying her a Snickers bar every Friday) serve as evidence of young smart liberals’ ineptness?1 Before and after this bit from Samuelson Brooks offers a parade of truisms of his own, reminding us first that reform is difficult, then that the economy is in trouble and will get worse:

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest. [...]

In the next few years, the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future.

Most of this, with some nips and tucks, is, like Samuelson’s statement, quite true. But in what way, precisely, is it evidence for the notion that “smart young liberals” will be unable to cope with American challenges? At best, this is a list of estimations of the performance of particular economic metrics in an ambiguous, abstract future. It’s not an argument for anything. It could be an argument, but Brooks hasn’t done his work. He’s pointed some stuff out, then, later, made some (probably pretty good) guesses about what that stuff might do later.

We find a similar lack of attention to intellectual detail in the way Brooks conceives of and formulates his (accurate) claim that “smart young liberals” don’t have “a plan.” Of course they don’t. “They” have, instead, many interrelated, overlapping, and competing “plans,” most of which probably don’t exist yet; plans that will, one hopes, coalesce their architects into the beginnings of productive progressive political coalition. A plan of the sort Brooks wishes for is a pipe dream—especially a plan from the left, whose leading minds, as Brooks knows, tend to disagree far more so than those of the right, thanks largely to institutional structures that discourage or prohibit conservative dissent.

Brooks also makes no attempt to explain why smart young conservatives, should McCain have won, would so assuredly have been able to successfully confront the challenges he says will cripple liberals. Indeed, he exploits the near-certainty that Obama will win to avoid addressing young conservatives at all; had the election been predicted to be closer, Brooks could not have easily spent his column the day before laying out liberals’ doomed prospects with such certainty, in the future tense, without addressing his exclusion of smart young conservatives, who presumably would still have wanted a crack at governing, should McCain-Palin have won. Perhaps Brooks leaves this unaddressed because he takes for granted that the smart young conservatives of a McCain-victory future would have been guided by Brooks’s own Burkean, small-government, pragmatic conservatism, rather than by the corporatist and religious fanatics currently directing the American conservative movement—and so, in Brooks’s mind, would be likely to do just fine, and thus would require no mention.

But as Brooks well knows, should McCain have won, conservatives would have had to “grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices” and “make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession” as surely as liberals will have to. And although McCain’s “promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, [and] pass an expensive health care plan” were not as extensive or strident as Obama’s, had McCain won and not delivered, young conservatives and their ideological descendants would have eventually had to wrestle with those problems, too, either through bureaucratic politics, or—should they have waited too long to address healthcare, the dying planet, and an economy plagued by systemic inequality—through natural or human violence, or both.

Brooks offers, indeed, no evidence whatsoever to support thrust of his argument on November 3. He makes no attempt to explain how or why young liberals are supposed to be so thoroughly unprepared for the grave tasks that lie before them. Brooks’s arguments could be made with tangible evidence, but Brooks chooses not to make them. Predictions of failure or difficulty are fine, but they must be either solidly premised in fact or accompanied by a convincing argument for why, despite the lack of an argument based in fact, we should consider the author’s words worthy of our attention in the first place. For Brooks to wag his metaphorical finger at we upstart liberal gen-X, -Y, and -Zers for a supposed lack of rigorous thought while himself making a shoddy argument is hypocritical, condescending, and naïve. He ultimately deals too much in generalization and speculation dressed up as analysis for us rely on him for much more than his felicitous column-writing and his measured, often astute political commentary. Running on a paper’s op-ed page does not relieve him of the responsibility to support his opinion with facts. Who does Brooks think he is, George Will?

***

1. I mean no offense to Samuelson, whose book I am acquainted with only through Brooks.

Category: Policy and Politics, Thought and Society

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4 Responses

  1. Christopher Hitchens (you wish) says:

    It seems you are the one being intellectually naive. Obviously Brooks cites Samuelson’s book in order to promote its forthcoming release–conservative (or, for that matter, liberal) kin, after all, support one another.

  2. Kevin Hilke says:

    Good point about why Brooks chose Samuelson over others–thanks. Not sure how that makes a point about anything other than the vast diversity and frequency of release of books containing generic economic prognostications, though.

  3. [...] further illuminates the consistent pattern of faulty, unjustified assumptions in the work of our friend David [...]

  4. [...] that just doesn’t exist”—or won’t until Republicans are in charge, anyway. As we often say, David Brooks is a [...]

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