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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / This is the end beautiful friend

This is the end beautiful friend

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It’s quite possible that David Brooks’ new book marks the end of our civilization, such as it is. That creepy New Yorker piece was just the beginning. You might want to sit down before reading this excerpt from the slavering starred Kirkus Review:

The fictional couple’s initial meeting spurs the author to personify the dynamics of attraction via their gender-specific “primitive passions” (“Rob was looking at cleavage, Julia was looking for signs of trustworthiness”), primal scents and cues that would anticipate a lifelong romance. Rob and Julia troubleshoot cohabitation blunders, carnal urges and the birth of son Harold, who, together with his wife-to-be Erica (introduced chapters later), ultimately becomes the focus of the author’s behavioral paradigm. Harold’s mental development proceeds from kindergarten to high school via cliques, phases and a taboo student-teacher crush.

Look me in the eye and tell me that you feel happy to be a human being right now.

I’m reeling from the primal scent thing, so I can’t write anymore. Here’s some good Bobo take-downs by Mtraven, Chris Lehmann (via reader JK), and Tom Scocca.

Reader Interactions

128Comments

  2. 2.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Voltaire, he’s not. Hell, he’s not even Stephen King. Perhaps he’s Jonah Goldberg?

  3. 3.

    DougJ DougJson

    @gogol’s wife:

    Don’t even kid about that. I would rather read the entire Ayn Rand oeuvre than a single page about primal smells and young overacheivers checking out each other’s cleavage.

  4. 4.

    General Stuck

    I’m reeling from the primal scent thing,

    Oh, that’s just Applebee’s aftershave

    Maybe this instead of “Atlas Shrugged” for the book club.

    I think Dougj may have scored some good dope

  7. 7.

    Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen

    You should have to read the entire book as punishment for your Atlas Shrugged suggestion.

    Look me in the eye and tell me that you feel happy to be a human being right now.

    I’m happy I’m not the human being who wrote that shite. In a few months, maybe a year max, the author will re-read it and hit himself in the face with a ball peen hammer.

  8. 8.

    David Fud

    One paragraph is all I needed. Thanks, but no thanks. I have a stack of books to finish and things to do, and a way-too-soft porn novel isn’t going to get any of that done.

    Maybe he missed his calling as a letter-writer to porno mags?

  11. 11.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Um, sorry, but it’s impossible to be an “overachiever” if you were born on third.

    I give you the classic example…George W. Bush.

    Other examples: William Kristol, Luke Russert, and the aforementioned Jonah Goldberg.

  12. 12.

    Jager

    If you want to know what primal scents smell like, go sniff the homeless. The rest of us, hopefully, have scrubbed them off.

  13. 13.

    srv

    Everyone, think of this as an opportunity.

    BJ needs to have a best Amazon review contest for this book. I think all the FP’ers should write one, and select the top five from commenters. This should go viral across the blogosphere.

  15. 15.

    burnspbesq

    He took a face from the ancient gallery and then he walked on down the hall.

    Well chosen song.

  16. 16.

    BombIranForChrist

    Oh boy, oh boy. I hope Brooks talks about his “throbbing member”. Maybe something like:

    “Bobo’s primal scent brought her closer to his throbbing member as he stroked her bosoms with a Lieberman ’06 riding crop.”

  19. 19.

    cmorenc

    Lots of supposedly smart folks have written incredibly bad works of fiction and didactic quasi-fiction, and civilization somehow survived the literary bomb. Whether David Brooks is a smart person who too often expresses sophomorically shallow ideas dressed up in superficially nice-looking intellectual clothing, or else a dumb person who learned to imitate the intellectual mannerisms of smart people without growing past sophomorically shallow ideas, isn’t really important. What’s important is how many other people he can convincingly seduce with his tripe; see e.g. Ayn Rand. Rand’s didactic fiction is much shallower and egregiously harmful to the future of civilization than anything that could possibly be in Brooks’ recent work.

  20. 20.

    DougJ DougJson

    @srv:

    Count me in. I can’t figure out how to comment on it yet. I may have to wait til it actually comes out.

  23. 23.

    jl

    Harold and Erica, huh?

    I think this sums up Brooks’ view, so why read anymore:
    “Rob was looking at cleavage, Julia was looking for signs of trustworthiness”

    Oh, yeah, I should be humble too. If some GOPer shouts nonsense on the teevee, I should be very humble and not do something about it. And we should always be poised on the edge of doubt, especially if a corporate flack says that some social decision to make lives better might cost him a few bucks. Who is humble me to say anything.

    Then, my friends, we will recover the Golden Age of American Greatness, where no one depended on the government, and people looked out for themsevles, gwarshdarnit.

    I dub this Brooks’ Promethean Prufrock thesis.

    I also read recently about research that the females of many species often feign submissiveness and interest in male trustworthiness, to cover their cheating with other males, in their search for ever better genes for their offspring. Which is a cool move if you have some male willing to help you take care of your kids, whoever the father happened to be.

    I wonder if that research found its way into the book? Let me know if it did, since then there might be at least one or two interesting scenes. Judging from the blurb, signs are not promising on that front.

    But then, the blurb said it was about Harold and Erica. But here is Rob looking at Julia’s boobs. Maybe Brooks threw in a foursome. Might be interesting reading if you skip the potted moral Brooks surely piled on at the end.

  24. 24.

    morzer

    @jl:

    Rob longed to be bipartisan, rather than merely bisexual. Julia was looking for signs of intelligence and principle, not to mention masculine ruttishness. She longed to be taken by a hard, dominant man, one who wore a purple tie to work and used words of more than five syllables. A man called David would be the quintessentiality of her American dream. She looked languidly over the crowd surrounding the Applebee’s salad bar, and her heart missed a beat, metaphorically speaking.

  25. 25.

    jl

    At least as far as Brooks’ take on the naughty men and lady bits, you still might find the Men Are from Mars and Wimmins from Venus in discount bins, so why shell out SIXTEEN BUCKS for this thing.

    BTW, I always thought that a book titled Women Are from Pluto and Men Are from Uranus would sell. Too bad I couldn’t think of anything to put in it, since the title says it all.

  28. 28.

    Ija

    The author expands his group with Erica, an ambitious, ethnically diverse girl raised in a poor public housing project.

    What’s this? A token non-white character to expand Brooks’ fan base? Does he think people are that stupid?

  30. 30.

    jl

    @TBogg: A vicious Tome Wolfe parody, ghostwritten written viciously by Tome Wolfe?

    If so, we need a blog pool for first one to figure out which character in the book is Brooks.

  31. 31.

    jl

    @Ija: hmmm, ‘ethnically diverse’? Does that describe her, or her tastes? Maybe this book is more promising than I thought.

  33. 33.

    Sly

    Somewhere in the world there is a person who will wake up the next morning, stretch, pour themselves a cup of coffee, and think to themselves, “I wonder what David Brooks thinks about (insert issue here)…” before sitting down to read the paper in the hopes of finding out.

    I really want to meet that person, and perhaps put them in a zoo so that others can look upon him or her with wonder and astonishment.

  36. 36.

    morzer

    @jl:

    As Julia’s genetically diverse viridian and hazel eyes scanned the scene like a Canon Duplex scanner methodically transforming a page into data, she recognized him, standing, casual yet masculine in a black leather jacket and purple tie, calmly perusing the arugula, with a certain epistemologically humble look in his eyes. So might Edmund Burke have looked as he made his great orations on India, but this man was more potent, in a mysterious, indecipherable way. He had the air of a man for whom lettuce was ultimately non-negotiable, for whom the Oxford comma meant more than life itself, a man who would never double-space inappropriately…..

  37. 37.

    Mark S.

    What the hell is it? A novel?

    Taking cues from Rousseau

    Oh.

    The author expands his group with Erica, an ambitious, ethnically diverse girl raised in a poor public housing project.

    I’m sure white-bread, never worked a day in his life Bobo will handle this masterfully.

  39. 39.

    Ija

    And of course when a white guy writes a book, the “ethnically diverse” person must come from a public housing project. God forbid they come from middle class or rich background. Because we all know that all those rich or middle class “ethnically diverse” people don’t procreate.

  41. 41.

    srv

    “I want you to know this.” He stood by the bed, dressed, looking down at her. His voice had pronounced it evenly, with great clarity and no inflection. She looked up at him obediently. He said: “What I feel for you is contempt. But it’s nothing compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved anyone. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I wanted you as one wants a whore – for the same reason and purpose.”

    I’m thinking Bobo as Reardon and Palin as Dagny Taggert.

  44. 44.

    Violet

    @srv:

    I’m thinking Bobo as Reardon and Palin as Dagny Taggert.

    Only in Bobo’s mind. In reality that’s backwards.

  45. 45.

    jl

    @morzer:

    Just tell me which salad dressing they used. I will check back later.

    Just think, we have to wait to March! How can we bear it? The suspense! We’ll have to make do with morzer’s version, which is probably better anyway.

  49. 49.

    Calouste

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    It is possible to be an overachiever if you’re born on third, but it is rather rare. FDR and Churchill are maybe the most recent examples.

  51. 51.

    fucen tarmal

    i know we are supposed to be toning down the rhetoric and all, but;

    can we chop mitch albom up into parts and rape bobo with them?

    seriously, these guys both suck at writting about kids, theirs and other people’s,they suck at developing characters, as evidenced by their shared attraction to people who’s character traits are the easiest to define.

    don’t let the columnists write roman a clef, i beg you, there is a reason they became columnists in the first place.

  54. 54.

    Bill White

    An uncommonly brilliant blend of sociology, intellect and allegory.

    This quote from Kirkus belongs in the Lexicon, IMHO.

  58. 58.

    Scott

    Will this be eligible for the Bulwer-Lytton contest?

    Also too: this crap gets published, and I can’t even get magazines to send my submissions back to me.

  59. 59.

    Ija

    @freelancer:

    I think the word he’s looking for is mixed race. But maybe Bobo just wants to mock liberals for valuing diversity, hence the awkwardly constructed “ethnically diverse girl”

    Or maybe it’s not Bobo’s fault and the phrase doesn’t actually appear in the book, but is the Kirkus Review reviewer’s phrase. Frankly, I’m not too keen on giving Bobo the benefit of a doubt. Guilty until proven innocent for him.

  61. 61.

    Nellcote

    @Ija: @Ija:

    A token non-white character to expand Brooks’ fan base?

    Who describes a PERSON as ethnicaly diverse? That’s just weird.

  63. 63.

    Violet

    @morzer:
    It’s also what they toss in the salads they serve at late August garden parties. When someone asks about the dressing they say, with an offhand Meryl Streep-like wave, “Oh, it’s nothing. Just a little oil and balsamic that my neighbor brought me as a thank you for watching her house while they were in Tuscany.”

  64. 64.

    KG

    that drivel just can’t be worth reading any more of. at all. speaking of drivel, I’m about a quarter of the way through Decision Points, still no insight, but this line I find kind of funny given the topic lately, “the toxic atmosphere in American politics discourages good people from running for office.”

  65. 65.

    morzer

    @Violet:

    First pressing, of course, from a little boutique oilery owned by a dear friend, the Conte XXXX, although of course since those dreadful liberals took over he hasn’t used his full title in protest….

  66. 66.

    forked tongue

    It’s quite possible that David Brooks’ new book marks the end of our civilization, such as it is.

    Oh phooey, Brooks would like to think he’s important enough to signify the end of our civilization, but it takes more than an audience of a few thousand Upper East Siders to do that.

    The twilight of American civilization, at least, will be called by historians the Reaganozoic era.

  67. 67.

    Tom Levenson

    The New Yorker piece was the single worst piece of science writing I remember reading. (My friend, science writer Jennifer Ouellette, offered Gregg Easterbrook on physics, at which I proposed a cage match between Brooks and Easterbrook with the winner gaining a lifetime subscription to Homeopathy Digest.)

    I knew this book was coming, and I feel I ought to read it and write about, but I may just have to ask the good FSM to let this cup pass from me. I just don’t think I could take Brooks at book length.

  69. 69.

    andy

    I think I would rather tuck into Atlas Shrugged- that at least makes me want to break things. This shit Bobo pushed out just makes me want to die…

  71. 71.

    freelancer

    @Tom Levenson:

    I don’t get why you’d accept Brooks musing on cliches and playing pop-psychologist to spew a bunch of drivel if you were The New Yorker. I couldn’t get through three ‘graphs. What, was Carrot Top not available?!

  73. 73.

    JGabriel

    @DougJ DougJson:

    I would rather read the entire Ayn Rand oeuvre than a single page about primal smells and young overacheivers checking out each other’s cleavage.

    And you can tell them apart, how?

    (Studies description intently.)

    Oh. It’s the primal smells. Rand is more rapey than smelly. Got it.

    .

  74. 74.

    Violet

    @morzer:
    Back when the children were young, we spent a lovely fortnight at his estate. David, Jr. has such fun climbing the olive trees during the harvest. Of course this was before olive oil became so..well known.

  75. 75.

    Uloborus

    Thank you, David Brooks. You’ve lowered the bar for publishing another half-inch. I and other aspiring writers like me feel a profound sense of gratitude for your sacrifice.

  78. 78.

    JGabriel

    @Tom Levenson:

    I knew this book was coming, and I feel I ought to read it and write about …

    Life is too short. Find a book you want to read instead.

    Unless someone pays you to read it.

    .

  79. 79.

    Uloborus

    @JGabriel:
    Oddly, I give Rand WAY more points here. Rape fantasy is at least common. This? I do not recognize this as human thinking. It’s like he took a college evolutionary behavior class and a bible studies class and that’s it, that’s his entire understanding of human sexuality.

  80. 80.

    JGabriel

    @Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen:

    In a few months, maybe a year max, the author will re-read it and hit himself in the face with a ball peen hammer whine about all the remainders and how the marketing department didn’t push it hard enough.

    You make the mistake of assuming Brooks will develop self-awareness.

    .

  81. 81.

    JGabriel

    @Uloborus:

    I do not recognize this as human thinking. It’s like he took a college evolutionary behavior class and a bible studies class and that’s it, that’s his entire understanding of human sexuality.

    Tsk, tsk. Are you saying David Brooks never got laid? Whatever happened to civility?!

    .

  82. 82.

    Wile E. Quixote

    Hey, fuck all you haters! This book is going to be great! And do you know what’s even better? Brooks has already signed a contract for a sequel, which will be co-written with Thomas Friedman. Hold onto your hats, because If you think that Ayn Rand knew her way around a sex scene you ain’t seen nothing yet!

  85. 85.

    pragmatism

    is this the book with “don’t tease the panther” or was that some other flim flammer? i get confused ’cause they have the same job.

  86. 86.

    JGabriel

    I just want to remind people that I have been pointing out for years that Brooks was the Times worst op-ed writer. Even during the period when Bill Kristol was there, because at least Kristol knows he writes for an audience of rabid conservatives with the emotional maturity, and vocabulary, of 10 year olds, and keeps his language simple, stupid, straightforward, and blatantly offensive. Brooks hides his offensiveness in bland, mediocre, mediocre, mediocre writing in the most tediously boring language possible.

    Frankly, I don’t know how anyone ever gets through more than two paragraphs of it.

    .

  88. 88.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @fucen tarmal:

    can we chop mitch albom up into parts and rape bobo with them?

    What, you’re not looking forward to Tuesdays at Applebee’s with Morrie and the Five Bourgeois Bohemians You Meet in Heaven? Dude, it’s going to be awesome! Thomas Kinkade, the painter of light, is going to be illustrating it.

  90. 90.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Drouse:

    @Wile E. Quixote: What? They have a three way with a cab driver in Applebee’s?

    It’s an ethnically diverse cab-driver from a public housing project in the Middle East, and it’s going to be tastefully illustrated by Thomas Kinkade, the painter of light.

  92. 92.

    Ija

    @JGabriel:

    Meh. I’d put Ross-permissive-sexual-culture-led-to-priests-raping-children-Douthat ahead of Bobo. At least Bobo is not puritanical and sanctimonious. He just fancies himself a sociologist.

  93. 93.

    Suffern ACE

    Maybe Erica is actually ethnically ambiguous. Or amorphous. She can then be whatever ethnicity is needed situationally. Today, she’s telling harold about how her grandmother spent months weaving a blanket in Arizona to sell to tourists on their way to the Grand Canyon. Tomorrow, her other grandmother lived in the barrio while her grandfather was known as the mayor in the hood. Her parents met in Hell’s Kitchen at a dance thrown by the police department to to address juvenile delinquency in the Puerto Rican and Italian communities.

  95. 95.

    Nellcote

    @pragmatism:

    is this the book with “don’t tease the panther” or was that some other flim flammer?

    1. Rule number one is: “Don’t tease the panther”

    Noah and Molly find themselves in bed together early in the book after a harrowing experience at a Founders’ Keepers rally. They agree to sleep in bed together because Molly is too scared to sleep at home, but Molly insists that nothing sexual will take place. Noah agrees, on the condition that she “not do anything sexy.” She presses her cold feet against his legs, and Noah responds:

    “Suit yourself, lady. I’m telling you right now, you made the rules, but you’re playing with fire here. I’ve got some rules, too, and rule number one is, don’t tease the panther.”

    from Beck’s “Overton Window” via Media Matters

  97. 97.

    scav

    He somehow manages to combine skimming Sociology for Dummies with the sexual elan of John Ruskin, express it in terminally bloodless and arch prose, rearrange said verbiage into what so far seems to be a narrative flatline and get it published.

  99. 99.

    racrecir

    Hey, how about Rand and Brooks, read in parallel, for the book club? And the discussion threads can contribute to a collaborative authorship of a scholarly paper. I’m thinking the title of the paper could be: “Transgressing Hermeneutics: Composure in a Galtian Wilderness of Pain”

  102. 102.

    freelancer

    Holy shit, anyone else watching the Aussie Open? What this Czech girl just did in her first set agains Venus Williams? That was inspired.

    ETA: Shit, Williams pulled something. Dammit.

  104. 104.

    sukabi

    good grief… is this what happens when sociopaths try and connect with regular people? Between this crap and the Ayn Rand crap, it’s become clear to me that we aren’t even in the same species with these folks… ugh.

  105. 105.

    BGinCHI

    This is what happens when nobody either pokes him on FB or responds to his desperate pleas on Match.com.

  106. 106.

    Anne Laurie

    @srv:

    I’m thinking Bobo Sarah Palin as Reardon and Palin BoBo as Dagny Taggert.

    No way David Brooks is a “top”, even in his fantasies. Probably especially in his fantasies.

  110. 110.

    morzer

    @Anne Laurie:

    I suspect they involve tight black leather trousers, admiring co-eds and the intimate friendship of Richard Milhouse Nixon, possibly at the same time.

  111. 111.

    Ija

    @morzer:

    But the main question is, will Bobo lose interest when the admiring coed who looks like Reese Witherspoon reveals that gasp! SHE IS ON THE PILL. Oh the atrocity.

  113. 113.

    bjacques

    @wasabi gasp:

    Join ethically and polymorphously diverse Erica on her journey of sexual awakening from Aspen to TED to Davos. In the movie version, for that authentic 1970s soft-porn look, the Davos interiors are a cross between Blofeld’s clinic atop Piz Gloria and that hotel in whichever Pink Panther movie had Claudine Longet in it. And it has Claudine Longet in it.

    You and me are just Composure Class mammals. So let’s do it like they do on the TJ Applebees channel.

  114. 114.

    nitpicker

    Just heard Tina Brown praising Bobo’s book and calling him the “consummate intellectual” on NPR this morning. These are dark days indeed.

  116. 116.

    aimai

    @Ija:

    I’m late to this brilliant comment thread but, really, a character is described as “ethnically diverse?” Ethnically diverse is itself a euphemism for ethnic situations that are too complex to be described exactly–more than two racial or ethnic heritages. When race itself is too hot button to be used and the writer wants to soften the issue by pretending he is talking about “ethnicity” instead of Race. There’s no way that any given individual can be described as “ethnically diverse.” The proper terms are either biracial,tri-racial, mutt, heinz 57 or just to pretend for five seconds that your characters aren’t completely defined by their racial component and their position in your novel.

    aimai

  117. 117.

    ChrisNYC

    I don’t hate David Brooks. I affirmatively like that he insists on going on television when he is clearly and completely wracked with self-consciousness on camera. But I can’t read him or watch him anymore. He gives me the feeling that the reason he does what he does is because his heart would break if he ever had to confront the possibility that his somewhat adolescent version of America and our culture is not reality. All of it sounds like a needy, desperate plea. Turns me off.

  118. 118.

    bob h

    Shouldn’t we hope that Brooks turns to novel writing full time, and gives up his NYT, NPR, PBS gigs?

  120. 120.

    Tom

    I don’t get all the Brooks hate. I really don’t. I read this piece and there’s some interesting stuff in it. Yes, he’s inventing characters, but so what? The hook of the piece is that he’s taking studies and actual data and applying them to a fictional couple. The people are made up, but points he makes about them are not (at least, not any more than any other study findings are).

  121. 121.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Oh dear. I saw the byline and wondered if it was the David Brooks. I read the whole thing (Yes! having to read chapters of differential equation textbooks does wonders for one’s ability to read anything!) and decided it wasn’t worth figuring out.

    @Tom gets it. I figured this out early on while reading and kept wondering why Brooks thought this would make for interesting reading. It’s a tour de force of sorts, the kind of thing I might try for one blog post. But the weakness is that Brooks doesn’t really tell us what’s in the studies, just takes them at face value, and another New Yorker article, a week or two back, told us that we can’t do that.

    And he keeps it up for a whole book. Imagine that.

  123. 123.

    scav

    well, there is the slight problem that the text has all the thrills of a white water ride on the lower Mississippi.

  125. 125.

    BenTheTipsyBear

    @someofparts – yeah, where’s the DG links?
    Re: this book, there’s http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/01/even-greater-gatsby.html

    And the most important point – David Fucking Brooks is not just banality incarnate, he’s the enabling mechanism for the Right, who can rely on DFB (and Cokie Roberts) to falsely equate the latest insanity from the leaders of right fringe to something the left did 40 years ago or in a blog-comment or in their imaginations.

    We need to challenge “but the other side does it to” whenever and wherever it happens.

  126. 126.

    asiangrrlMN

    Yeah, OK. This is supposed to make me enthusiastic about trying to get published? Yeah, not so much.

    @Tom: ‘Coz he sucks at it, all his characters are patently fake, his thinking is shaky, and his conclusions are shitty. Plus, what he writes says more about his inadequacies and issues than on anything he’s about which he’s purporting to theorize. And, he sucks.

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