By Russ Smith
mug1988@aol.com

It’s quite probable that David Brooks, the wishy-washy New York Times op-ed columnist, who allegedly provides a dash of conservative balance to the Bellevue-bound Paul Krugman, limp comedienne Maureen Dowd, politics-as-an-extension-of-pop-culture expert Frank Rich and master of repetition Bob Herbert, has taken on the task of instructing younger employees of the paper in the art of proudly letting their nerd flag fly. On occasion, as in his July 6 piece last year about revisiting the Chicago tourist attraction, the Billy Goat Tavern—once frequented by that city’s literary celebrities like Mike Royko—Brooks cops to his flabby youthful rebellion resume. Although Brooks begins by saying that as a youngster he went to the Billy Goat “to drink like a reporter,” I think that’s a stretch. Considering Brooks’ track record over the years as an utterly benign sociologist, it’s hard to believe that he ever closed the joint, asking the bartender for just one more boilermaker.

And indeed, though more in hubris than sorrow, Brooks writes: “It’s not completely wrong to say I went into journalism because of the ghosts I thought I felt at the Billy Goat, but it turns out that I, a soft-drinking college grad, was part of the wave of cultural change that buried what was created there.” The core of Brooks’ elitist view, however, one that infects the Times from the news to editorial to style/arts pages, is found in the following arrogant words. “America’s cultural tone is no longer set by aspiring working-class novelists who grew up above a tavern. It’s set by globally savvy college grads, who, even if they visit the Billy Goat from time-to-time, see the world from a different vantage point.”

I think that angry blogger Kos (who’s far more influential than a septuagenarian in spirit like Brooks), Matt Drudge and some of the writers at the Gawker websites would disagree with that assessment of the country’s “cultural tone”—and they’d be correct—but it’s not particularly harmful if Brooks harbors such illusions, as long as he doesn’t tutor colleagues at the Times. Before moving on to one of the grand pundit’s possible victims, a few more examples of how out of touch Brooks really is.

Although he was born in 1961, thus escaping the “Ozzie and Harriet”-drenched United States that Rich often bitterly alludes to, Brooks made an absurd diagnosis last summer (Aug. 6) about the progression of conformity. First he says, quite outrageously, that the 1970s was “a more innocent decade than the 1950s,” as if the Beats, left-wing academics, jazz clubs and Elvis, no matter how vilified by the mainstream, compared in any way to what occurred very openly just 20 years later. Mind you, the ’70s were fine by me—I was a college student and young adult and certainly enjoyed the relaxed mores of the time—but it was a decade where drugs of every kind were commonly available and celebrated in pop culture, wife-swapping was a fad in Hollywood and elsewhere, violent crime far more rampant in cities and generational alienation the norm. That’s “more innocent”?

Completing his trilogy of gibberish, Brooks tackled the original subject of tattoos on Aug. 27 last year, apparently noticing for the first time that tats were no longer confined to veterans, bikers and cons. Where was he in 1990? Even then, writers speculated that tattoo removal cosmeticians had a bullish future. Brooks wrote, perhaps with Billy Joel in the background: “What you get is a culture of trompe l’oeil degeneracy. People adopt socially acceptable transgressions—like tattoos—to show they are edgy, but inside they are still middle class. You run into these candy-cane grunge types: people with piercings and inkings all over their bodies who look like Sid Vicious but talk like Barry Manilow. They’ve got the alienated look—just not the anger.”

Had Brooks been soiling journalism in the late ’70s, perhaps he’d have noticed that long hair—which 10 years earlier had driven a wedge between warring cultural factions, so much so that even bangs that dripped over a young man’s eyes could get him barred from a restaurant or motel—had suddenly become the norm.

Now, it’s just a guess, but it wouldn’t be surprising if Times editorial board member Nicholas Kulish, who writes editorials about economics—presumably tax giveaways to the rich (like his bosses) and the perfidy of Wal-Mart—has an occasional glass of wine with Brooks on nights that they’re in the same city. Kulish is a relative squirt, but at about 30, he possesses the perfunctory Times pedigree: He joined the daily’s editorial board in 2005, after graduating from Columbia and working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

After reading Kulish’s March 17 piece about The Pogues, a nostalgia act after vying with The Smiths in the 1980s as the most vital U.K. band, it’s clear that he’s one of Brooks’ “globally savvy” cultural arbiters. He begins: “The other evening I was doing a very grown-up thing, ironing an oxford cloth shirt for work, when my youth reared up and punched me in the mouth.”

On the tube was a Cadillac commercial that used a Pogues song in the background, and that “punch” caused the budding middle-aged journalist to reflect on his glory days in the suburbs. “For better and quite often for worse [doubtful],” Kulish writes, [Pogues’ frontman/alcoholic Shane MacGowan] “this man was my role model from junior high through college. His powerful songs—the more grotesque are the lyrical equivalent of Francis Bacon paintings—were my soundtrack … When [Kulish’s band] recorded our own music on a four-track cassette in the basement, we chain-smoked cigarettes in the boiler room in a vain effort to gravel up our choir-boy vocal chords to sound more like Our Shane.”

Please. As Kulish would say, for better and quite often for worse, I’ve smoked off and on since I was 14, and my voice doesn’t have a hint of gravel in it. And while I believe that the Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash was a Top Five ’80s record, there isn’t a lot of Francis Bacon in even MacGowan’s finest lyrics. Furthermore, in a Brooks-like statement of fact, Kulish says, “To steep yourself in the Pogues requires you to read James Joyce and Brendan Behan, to listen to both the Clash and the Dubliners, and to take up some, but, I hope, not all, of the legendary bad habits of our latter-day Baudelaire, Shane.”

I haven’t seen a Pogues show since 1990 (pretty ragged), but attended half a dozen in the ’80s, from very small clubs to Roseland, and while it’s fairly certain most of the crowds were familiar with the Clash, a college term paper on Joyce was never required to gain entrance.

But, for better and even better, most of us rock ’n’ roll fans haven’t benefited from the personal wisdom of David Brooks.