The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

David Brooks, Brutally Spanked

Posted on | March 10, 2011 | 19 Comments

My apologies for neglecting my regular “David Brooks Fisking Day” duties for several months. Perhaps I’ll have to start outsourcing this task. The NYT’s house “conservative” has published a pretentious new book, The Social Animal, which gets completely dismantled by Will Wilkinson at Forbes:

Brooks supplies neither drama, high emotion, nor the mindbending metaphysics of aging without time. He serves up instead a shapeless story of ruling-class, Davos-goers so tedious, so lacking in passion and intensity, one begins to hope Harry and Erica will be pursued by proletarian lynch-mobs, revealed as rubber fetishists, or at least stranded at sea one ominous afternoon on a friend’s yacht, just so one may be sure these cardboard cutouts have functioning cardboard hearts. . . .
It’s easy to see the appeal of a spoonful of human interest to make the medicine of science go down. And it would be easy to forgive Brooks the insipidity of his characters and the tedium of his tale if he really delivered on his promised synthesis of the paradigm-busting sciences of the mind, but he delivers only a muddle. . . .
The story of Harold and Erica does not really illustrate a new, coherent, science-based theory of human nature. It is a bowl hammered from Brooks’ philosophic predilections into which a jumbled stew of scientific anecdotes is poured. And it is not good stew. . . .

Read the whole brutal thing, which is nearly enough to make me regret having previously urged the arrest of Wilkinson, a “scofflaw dopehead” whom my confidential sources suspect of having commited fornication with Kerry Howley. 

Despite Wilkinson’s obvious criminal tendencies, however, I think we can agree that a man who despises David Brooks can’t be all bad. So when America’s law-enforcement community finally awakes to the looming menace of reefer-crazed libertarians — after a joint task force led by the Iowa City SWAT unit raids Wilkinson’s home, tasers him, and hauls him away to jail — I hereby offer to testify as a character witness at Will’s trial.

Category: David Brooks Fisking Day

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