Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Every day Vance writes another chapter in the book called “Worst VP Pick Ever”.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Let there be snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

The frogs are rarely mistaken.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Consistently wrong since 2002

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

No Justins, No Peace

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Bogus polls are all they’ve got left. Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls a year from now.

You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / The quality of money is not strained

The quality of money is not strained

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Bobo in the New Yorker this week (you can thank me for not excerpting the weird sexual second paragraph):

After the boom and bust, the mania and the meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.

[….]

A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes).

How many doctors and lawyers got own-your-own-plane rich via the gentle snow of wealth? No, don’t give me “maybe he means a two-seater”, you know that’s not what he means, and, no, making it by representing OJ Simpson or via a biotech IPO doesn’t count as count as “gentle snow”.

I’m not sure why he’s doing it, maybe to reinforce the notion of the deserving rich.

Update. This is weird and unintentionally comedic, but it didn’t creep me out as much as the paragraph about male lower bodies and female upper bodies, so I’m sharing it:

The server came to their table and took their orders. The restaurant seemed to specialize in hard-to-eat salads. Erica, anticipating this, chose an appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t require cutlery expertise. But Harold went for a salad, composed of splayed green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without brushing salad dressing on both of his cheeks. None of it mattered, because Harold and Erica clicked. Most emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are a language that we use not only to express our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state. Harold and Erica licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting. Erica did the head cant women do to signal romantic interest, a slight tilt of the head that exposes the neck. Then, there was the hair flip: she raised her arms to adjust her hair and heaved her chest into view.

Reader Interactions

91Comments

  1. 1.

    schrodinger's cat

    I wonder what grades Bobo got. He seems to be very well paid for writing such drivel.

  2. 2.

    Svensker

    Thank you for this, DougJ. It was exactly the comedic relief necessary after a rough weekend. I’m crying here.

  3. 3.

    mistermix

    Thanks for mentioning it though, because I had to go read it out of prurient interest.

    It’s good to see Brooks keeping his marriage alive by sublimating his urges via his writing.

  4. 4.

    burnspbesq

    Longtime partners at a handful of top-tier law firms can actually accumulate wealth if they don’t live like their hedge-fund clients. That’s probably less than a thousand people at any point in time.

    Bobo incoherent again. Quell surprise.

  5. 5.

    Morbo

    (you can thank me for not excerpting the weird sexual second paragraph)

    Dammit, man, if you had just not mentioned it I wouldn’t have had to go read it… Do we have a profile for Senator thigh-toucher now though?

  6. 6.

    superking

    Screw that, Doug, I think people need to read it:

    You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

  7. 7.

    scav

    One can rather see him on the ground, quivering desparately, pleading “pet me! pet me! take me home wid you” while attempting his best stab at cute puppuh dog eyes.

    yeaggehh

    OT, but BP’s got some more leakage going on too, in absolute amts possibly small but in taking out a pipeline, nicely located for maximum effect. I prefer the Guardians take for certain details but here’s the NYT version too.

    ETA: Oh great, now I’m stuck with the image of his quivering lapping at handout bowls of cream beneath slender and elegantly formed calfs to deal with. Not to mention his pleadings to be crushed like a rock.

  8. 8.

    J

    The second paragraph is well worth a glance–Bobo is backing down from his famous observation about Michelle Obama’s biceps.

  10. 10.

    Violet

    @scav:

    One can rather see him on the ground, quivering desparately, pleading “pet me! pet me! take me home wid you” while attempting his best stab at cute puppuh dog eyes.

    So true.

    This is laughably ridiculous. Well, it would be if David Brooks weren’t someone held in esteem for his insights and thoughtfulness. How can that even be possible?

  11. 11.

    Paris

    Maybe he meant to submit this to Penthouse Country Club Forum and it ended up in the New Yorker on accident.

  14. 14.

    Violet

    @scav:

    Oh great, now I’m stuck with the image of his quivering lapping at handout bowls of cream beneath slender and elegantly formed calfs to deal with.

    From the first page of the article:

    As a newborn, Harold, like all babies, was connecting with his mother. He gazed at her. He mimicked. His brain was wired by her love (the more a rat pup is licked and groomed by its mother, the more synaptic connections it has).

    Bobo’s all about the licking.

    Shudder.

  15. 15.

    dr. bloor

    Just once, I wish Bobo would follow up one of these “Brooks was here” specials by, you know, actually hanging himself.

    What an odd man.

  16. 16.

    danimal

    It’s funny how many of us felt the crushing need to read that second paragraph just because it was withheld from us.

    DougJ, did you want to drive up Bobo’s hit count?

  17. 17.

    Superluminar

    Erica, anticipating this, chose an appetizer that could be easily forked

    some people sure do have weird preferences…

  18. 18.

    mike

    I didn’t read the article (too soon after breakfast) but let me guess: It’s accompanied by a picture of a virile young man with massive calves, wavy hair and chiseled features. He’s ripping the the low-cut top off of the ample bosom of a beautiful woman with a thick mane of red/blonde hair cascading over her shoulders.

  20. 20.

    superking

    I get the feeling that Bobo had to throw that “asexually” in before “handsome” in order to hide some feelings from himself.

  21. 21.

    Athenae

    Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.

    See, it was NICE. Rich people are so nice. Unlike those filthy poor people, who don’t merit pages of bloviation in the New Yorker.

    Rich people. Shapely. Want to pet them.

    HE IS SUCH AN ASSHOLE I CAN’T STAND IT SOMETIMES.

    A.

  22. 22.

    WereBear

    Is it me, or is poor Bobo perhaps a gay man driven so deeply into the closet he might not even know it?

    No straight guy describes another guy’s legs like that, methinks.

    And all his women observations are… off.

  24. 24.

    dmsilev

    I got as far as this:

    In the evenings, they will traipse through resort-community pedestrian malls licking interesting gelatos, while passersby burst into spontaneous applause.

    before my gag reflex kicked in.

    I propose “licking interesting gelatos” as this year’s replacement for “hiking the Appalachian Trail”.

    dms

  25. 25.

    cmorenc

    If you didn’t know from his other writings that Bobo is trying hard here to mainly make serious analytical points, you might presume he wrote this piece while serving as fellow NYT columnist Gail Collins’ understudy. This piece is the kind of material Collins regularly hits out of the park for home runs, except her hyperbolic portraits of people are much cleverer.

    Actually, Bobo is deliberately attempting to humorously draw light caricatures of today’s hyper-successful striving professional class (the “concerned”)…it’s just that you can tell he also takes his caricatures as seriously accurate portraits worthy of serious sociological analysis, rather than the sort of analysis-by ridiculous caricature that pokes devastatingly accurate holes in people’s hyper-inflated balloons which Gail Collins is so brilliant at.

  26. 26.

    Superluminar

    @ dr bloor

    Just once, I wish Bobo would follow up one of these “Brooks was here” specials by, you know, actually hanging himself.

    not only are you hereby nominated for a Moore Award, you also prove that, in the case of political violence, both sides are just as responsible.

  27. 27.

    Xenos

    A few top lawyers, doctors, accountants and so on can clear more than a million a year for 20 years or so. After taxes, and the cost of living a very upper-middle class lifestyle they can retire with 5-10 million $ and a nice pension if they save well and and are lucky with their investments. This is tremendously successful, but in a day when certain bankers can clear 3-15 million bonuses in a single year, it is obvious that they are not the seriously wealthy among us.

    And Brooks is perfectly aware of this. Tool.

  28. 28.

    uila

    Somebody is jealous of all the attention to Chunky Bobo. Very well, I dub thee “Asexual Douthat”.

  29. 29.

    DougJarvus Green-Ellis

    @WereBear:

    I agree. He always makes his men more beautiful and alluring than his women. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  30. 30.

    guster

    @WereBear: I dunno about gay, but I agree that his observations of women are bizarrely off. His descriptions reminded me of nothing so much as the scene in 40-Year-Old Virgin, where the Carell character says, “You know how when you grab a woman’s breast, it feels like … a bag of sand.”

  31. 31.

    mr. whipple

    Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.

    Non-wealth settles on me like a gentle golden shower.

  36. 36.

    Phyllis

    This may be tmi, but I wear a G-cup bra and I have never once ‘heaved my bosom’ into view. Never had to-the damn thing makes itself apparent with little help from me.

  37. 37.

    policomic

    @WereBear: Reading this makes me think of Arrested Development’s Tobias talking about not being able to hear over the “clatter” of his wife’s breasts while he was “busy making sweet love on her.”

  38. 38.

    scav

    That shit just reeks of voyeur rather than anything resembling actual practice: male, female, lettuce, he’s on with the licking dressing.

  39. 39.

    Short Bus Bully

    I had to go read the whole thing. WTF IS HE WRITING ABOUT?

    The only thing this article does is creep me the fuck out about what David Brooks fantasizes about when he rubs one out. This is the worst porno I have ever read. The punditocracy is failing badly. David Brooks needs to be heavily medicated.

    On the other hand this thread is full of winsauce.

  41. 41.

    Phyllis

    A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes).

    So do the rest of their necessities get tossed into brown paper grocery sacks? My parents’ luggage of choice for years, btw.

  42. 42.

    dr. bloor

    @Phyllis:

    This may be tmi, but I wear a G-cup bra

    Heh. Douhat is now dialing 1-900-CONFESSMYSINS and Bobo is trying very hard to think about mens legs.

  45. 45.

    Barb (formerly Gex)

    @DougJarvus Green-Ellis: It could be simply misogyny. There are plenty of men who despise women but aren’t gay. It works okay if you can convince your woman that she’s supposed to just make babies and submit to you.

  47. 47.

    DougJarvus Green-Ellis

    @Barb (formerly Gex):

    But how many of these men also rhapsodize about Mitt Romney’s shoulders, John Thune’s sun-chapped prairie good looks, and random Composure Class guy’s low body fat?

  50. 50.

    Barb (formerly Gex)

    @DougJarvus Green-Ellis: That’s true. So basically what I am beginning to suspect is that if a bunch of homos on the right weren’t so fucked up about it, we’d be dealing with a completely different GOP. Every issue gets viewed through the lens of manly-manliness for them.

  52. 52.

    AuldBlackJack

    (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes).

    Bobo, in sucking-up mode again, displaying his ignorance.
    Just as with “Applebees salad bar” personal private jet ownership at the level he suggests exist only in his imagination.
    Private jets are frequently chartered.
    Private jets access can be purchased in (roughly) 25 hour increments (small metal starting at about $125K).
    Private jets are available as 1/16th shares.($250K+ annually)
    Private jets are purchased and maintained by some corporations as required by insurance companies assigning policies on their CEOs against kidnapping (think Big Pharma).

    But the idea that people who simply “got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms” fly like this all the time is a joke.

  54. 54.

    negative 1

    Has anyone checked to see if his editor is still alive? Maybe Bobo tied him up and stuffed him in his closet? BTW this is seriously screaming out for an intervention. I know Taibbi has claimed he’s on sabbatical on ripping apart pundits, but maybe he could take this one on for the good of the country…

  56. 56.

    Ross Hershberger

    Ick. Where does writing like this come from, and how can we get it to stay there forever?

  57. 57.

    RobertB

    Put me in the ‘strangest goddamned thing I’ve ever read’ category. I stopped after the first page – I like myself too much to want to read the next five.

  58. 58.

    Ross Hershberger

    BTW, the rest of the headline quote is revealing:

    Portia:
    The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
    It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
    Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
    It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

  60. 60.

    scav

    @negative 1: There’s certainly no evidence of editorial control because the abject cringing fetishizing detail has nothing whatsoever to contribute to the purported topic of the piece. Or is that what the New Yorker has become? but one half-pennyworth of subject to this intolerable deal of suckuptitude!

  61. 61.

    WarMunchkin

    My gut hurts from laughing so hard. And to think. This guy has a column at the New York Times.

  63. 63.

    miwome

    I gotta say, I read most of that–at least before the first section break–as deliberately comedic. I mean, there’s no way this:

    A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes). Once there, they play with hundred-and-sixty-pound dogs, for it has become fashionable to have canines a third as tall as the height of your ceilings. They will reflect on the genetic miracle they have achieved. (Their grandmothers looked like Gertrude Stein, but their granddaughters look like Uma Thurman.) In the evenings, they will traipse through resort-community pedestrian malls licking interesting gelatos, while passersby burst into spontaneous applause.

    Can be written in all seriousness. Spontaneous applause? Come on.

  64. 64.

    scav

    @PeakVT: Bind your jaw to prevent self-harm: this is all from a piece pretending to be on “How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.”

  65. 65.

    georgia pig

    He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another.

    It seems that Bobo’s self conscious about his cottage-cheese thighs and spare tire – I do notice that he goes for the slimming effect of pinstripes, but the suits he wears still make his butt look big. Maybe this is just a veiled cry for help with his body image issues. Call Oprah.

  66. 66.

    Short Bus Bully

    Let’s see:

    1) Flaming latent homosexuality. CHECK
    2) Fapping over wealth and status (especially as it relates to latent homosexuality). CHECK
    3) Egregious and nonsensical segueways between pseudo-science and fapping over Don Draper imaginings and wealth fetishism. CHECK

    Is this really the checklist Bobo goes through for his articles?

  67. 67.

    mrmcd

    Related Links- Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Brooks about the composure class on Thursday, January 13th, at noon E.T.

    I’m torn between wanting to sign-on and laugh at the awkwardness of this, and not wanting to be eye raped on through my computer screen by David Brooks on my lunch break.

  68. 68.

    DougJarvus Green-Ellis

    @miwome:

    I have to say, that part bothered me. I don’t like that much emphasis placed on women’s physical appearance or the idea this is a genetic miracle.

  69. 69.

    gypsy howell

    I started reading it, but couldn’t make much sense f it by the time I got to the bottom of the page, and then I realized with horror that there were 5 more pages of whatever the fuck it is he was trying to make a point of.

    My main question– was there a reason the New Yorker felt the need to publish this? Didn’t they used to be a good magazine?

  71. 71.

    superking

    @Short Bus Bully:

    Yes, that’s his checklist, but you forgot

    4) inventing people and events to make a point.

    After the first page, the article is all about a person he makes up and names “Harold.”

    This is really David Brooks at his peak. It is almost the perfect embodiment of a David Brooks article. It may be missing a part where he takes a small issue and blows it up into a philosophical turning point that Burke would disapprove of. I say “may,” because I couldn’t keep reading it.

  72. 72.

    RobertB

    I guess I don’t like myself after all, and I read the next five pages. I’m not sure what Bobo is driving at here. If it’s satire, it’s too subtle for me. But it can’t be dead serious either.

    That quote on page 5 is pretty good – he must’ve stolen it.

  73. 73.

    jinxtigr

    What the hell is the matter with him? Was there a point? It’s not really twisted enough to be Burroughs unless the people started eating each other, or eating some Vietnamese busboy O_O

  75. 75.

    JohnR

    @superking:

    Womanly men and manly women. Isn’t there some sort of psych write-up on that sort of thing? Bobo’s drifting into deep waters and starting to list badly.

  76. 76.

    Kat

    My take: These are the types of shallow “insights” and bizarrely-inappropriate examples you get when a relatively high-functioning sociopath tries to write an article about human nature.

    He can’t even manage to contain his contempt for the subject.

    How to spot signs and symptoms of serial bullies, sociopaths and psychopaths including the sociopathic behaviour of the industrial psychopath and the corporate psychopath
    http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm

    After reading a bit about the characteristics, scroll to the bottom for links to several very good news articles on the subject.

    I’m a psychopath! BBC presenter Michael Mosley’s shocking discovery thanks to a revolutionary brain scan.

  81. 81.

    SFAW

    1) Youse guys [sic] got it all wrong – he’s gunning for the Bulwer-Lytton Prize (since they won’t nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature). In fact, if the judges read this, they may declare him the winner on the spot.
    2) mr. whipple: After your comment, I went looking for “Your Majesty is like a stream of bat’s piss” in Brooksie’s ramblings. So, damn you for getting me to read more than what DougJ excerpted!
    3) Somewhere, I hope, Pinch is reading this and going “WTF?”, and then calling his business manager to see if Matt Taibbi would be willing to write a column for the NYT.
    4) I wonder if EJ Dionne will mention this the next time they’re on NPR’s )mumble mumble( show . That, as Shakespeare doubtless said, “would be cool”.

    I have a pretty strong stomach, but this thing really skeeved me out.

  82. 82.

    Citizen_X

    @mr. whipple:

    Non-wealth settles on me like a gentle golden shower.

    LUCKY BASTARD!

    Because non-wealth “settles” on most of us in a more, uh, scatalogical way.

  85. 85.

    jake the snake

    @uila:

    Somebody is jealous of all the attention to Chunky Bobo. Very well, I dub thee “Asexual Douthat”.

    I agree. I think Bobo must have finally ready Douthat’s chunkier Reese Witherspoon piece and decided he needed
    to write something ever more creepily misogynist.

  87. 87.

    RobertB

    I don’t know if that piece is misogynist so much as it is weird as hell. About 3/4s of it looks like it was written by a Martian.

  88. 88.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Phyllis: Right there with you, sister. I have a pretty large rack myself, and believe me, I do no heaving of the bosoms. Yet, still, they get noticed. So, if there are bosoms heaving, the bosoms must not be so big in the first place.

    I can’t read the whole piece. Just reading the excerpts makes me want to take a shower. Ew.

  89. 89.

    Phyllis

    @asiangrrlMN: I did tell a guy on an elevator one time that as far as I knew, the ’72 dolphins season was not playing in a continuous loop across my chest and to stop being a creepy bastard by staring at it. He fled at the first opportunity.

    Topic: Bobo doesn’t have issues, he has major subscriptions.

  90. 90.

    Hann1bal

    Alright, this had to be said: I, for one, welcome our new composed overlords.

    (Also, too: Can Asexual Douthat get any more ridiculous than this? I was literally LOLing while reading it, particularly the “spontaneous applause” part. I just hope he doesn’t take my question as some kind of challenge.)

  91. 91.

    HyperIon

    @mrmcd:

    I’m torn between wanting to sign-on and laugh at the awkwardness of this, and not wanting to be eye raped on through my computer screen by David Brooks on my lunch break.

    don’t worry. DougJ will prolly sign on.

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