David Brooks’ previous sestina about the road to character can be found here.
I think we will all agree that bad relationships
cause poverty.
Also, not acting like someone in the Jane Jacobs book, and not having a “code.”
It is certainly not caused by rich people
owning almost every single thing
including money that others might potentially need.
Of course I understand that we all have needs.
But it’s so important for the have-nots to get that troubled relationships
to both people and things
are principally at fault for their level of poverty,
and I truly believe that if these people
could somehow get the keys to a very wonderful code
that middle class people intuitively know, this code
which once understood is all anyone needs
to become useful Jane Jacobs neighborhood cut-out hero-people,
it would all be fine! Of course our relationship
to poverty
is such a pesky thing
that we’re always reworking and just, well, a thing
whose mysteries, whose unsolved code
I myself am secretly grateful for because poverty
and other forms of social instability are problems I desperately need
to be the smart one, and the paid one, in all my relationships.
Intractable problems let me be the voice this country’s upper middle class people
listen to when forced to come to grips with those other people
who – how to put this – maybe just don’t have as many things,
lack that an enviable Jane Jacobs balletness in their relationships,
and finally, who lack the code
mentioned earlier, that they would need
to extricate themselves from the death-grip of poverty.
Have I ever experienced poverty?
No, probably like not like most poor people.
I mean to do so I would really need
to get rid of a lot of things
and maybe publish my house alarm code
So that I could be robbed by someone with whom I have no prior relationship
In conclusion, if you feel like you need something –
like, say, money – but you’re suffering from poverty, know that we as a people
are getting ready to help you learn a code and develop better relationships.
Tags: beauty, david brooks, poetry, poverty, sarah miller, sestinas
This is everything. Kickstarter so that Sarah Miller’s fulltime gig can be translating David Brooks into sestina form.
That settles it, David Brooks should retire to a secluded cabin and devote himself to poetry. He’s much better at it than punditry.
This is gorgeous and hilarious and sad all at once, thank you! I’m a big fan of the Jane Jacobs balletness but am pretty sure she would have slapped David Brooks upside the head for that piece.
Oh God, does David Brooks really talk about Jane Jacobs and how she’d totally agree with him?
That gives me such an angry-sad. 😛
oh, no. [sits on hands to prevent inadvertent clicking on actual Brooks column]
In his first book, Bobos in Paradise, he apparently wrote of Jacobs as a predecessor of his, yeah. I don’t know how much it’s recurred in his later output, though.
I hope Jane haunts his soul by perpetually staring down from a heavenly balcony in disapproval, occasionally telling him in a ghostly whisper to pipe down and go home already. GHOST EYES ON THE STREET WHICH IS THE PATH OF GOOD INTENTIONS THAT ARE LEADING YOU TO HELL DAVID BROOKS
I love these so much.
David Brooks is one of those people that, even though I disagree with him about… well, pretty much everything, I can’t help but find him kind of adorable. He’s also quite funny on NPR.
I’ll never forget this hilarious photo of him that ran in the NY Times. His co-columnist, Gail Collins, said it looked like he was calling her to warn her that Newt was coming:
David Brooks is your personable but stealthily quite conservative uncle. Where else besides Thanksgiving dinner and the NYT Op-Ed pages can you find this formula:
amusing anecdote
semi-reasonable claim
semi-reasonable claim
rationalization that sounds a little off but you can’t quite put your finger on why but you forget quickly because here’s another
amusing anecdote
wildly conservative conclusion
I regret that I have but one vote to give this comment. He also specializes in the Louis CK “of course/but maybe” line of pernicious argument: “OF COURSE poverty is a bad, bad problem and we need to solve it. BUT MAYBE if these women had more moral character and stopped having promiscuous sex and too many kids, they wouldn’t be so poor.”
“I’m sorry to hear you’re poor. Have you considered developing moral character? Then you will be not-poor.”
“I’m sorry you’re poor, now I will go write thinly veiled columns about my own divorce and yet never consider the hypocrisy there in”
This is the only form in which David Brooks is at all palatable.
I woke up on Sunday to an enraged email from my mom about that poverty column. She is particularly incensed by David Brooks because my dad, a middle-aged white dude, sometimes falls prey to Brooks’s whole “why can’t we just DISCUSS things RATIONALLY with LOGIC” smokescreen of dog-whistle bigotry and it (rightfully) drives her up a wall.
Ugh, yes, I don’t understand how anyone can use the phrase “discuss [x] rationally with logic” unironically? Maybe I can’t discuss this issue productively because your opinions are resting on unexamined and faulty assumptions, guy! Maybe your framing of the issue with your side as the “rational” one indicates that you are hardly coming at this from a place of clear-headed neutrality?? (I MAY ALSO HAVE A DAD QUITE LIKE THIS) ((I do often enjoy debating with him, also!!))
Also, being the calmest or least emotional person in a discussion doesn’t mean you automatically win because you’re some sort of paragon of rationality and logic, it just means you’re an old white dude with no personal stake in the issue and you fail too much at empathy to understand why someone who IS personally affected might get a little worked up.
i wonder if he really thinks that rich people in their penthouses and middle class folks in the suburbs are known for their calm, stable relationships with their loved ones and neighbors.
I mean, it is admirable how the rich are able to put aside their differences and work together to fuck the poor. Heartwarming, really.
His younger years were in the heyday of Updikian suburban white male dysfunctional family angstbooks so I can’t see how he can possibly think these things.
Whenever Updike comes up, I have to insert David Foster Wallace’s remark, which he attributes to a friend, that the author is “just a penis with a thesaurus.”
Thank you for that. I’m posting it!
He’s basically the living avatar of fatuity.
Meanwhile, Gail Collins is out there, leaning back in her executive chair, feet on desk, giving a sideways glance to him from behind her sports pages.
In my NYT imaginings, I picture Gail, Paul Krugman, and Friedman having margaritas and ribs at Bob Tedeschi’s house.
This is the only way I will ever read David Brooks, henceforth.
I mean, it is admirable how the rich are able to put aside their differences and work together to fuck the poor. Heartwarming, really.
In his first book, Bobos in Paradise, he apparently wrote of Jacobs as a predecessor of his, yeah. I don't know how much it's recurred in his later output, though.
“and I truly believe that if these people
could somehow get the keys to a very wonderful code
that middle class people intuitively know,
( … ),
it would all be fine!”
But, if middle class people “intuitively” know this magical code, why is the middle class shrinking? It’s certainly not moving up.
Clap. Trap.