I Don't Mind a Reasonable Amount of Trouble

 -- Dashiell Hammett, author of "The Maltese Falcon".

While reading dorm-room-contact-high verbal wandering like this in Mr. Brooks' April 13th column:

In short, there’s only so much good you can do unless you are willing to confront corruption, venality and disorder head-on. So if I could, presumptuously, recommend a reading list to help these activists fill in the gaps in the prevailing service ethos, I’d start with the novels of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, or at least the movies based on them.

The noir heroes like Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” served as models for a generation of Americans, and they put the focus squarely on venality, corruption and disorder and how you should behave in the face of it.

I was reminded that the advice the old give the young is always instructive.  Because whether it's good advice or bad, it almost always reflects of the interior emotional state of the speaker.  Because in the act of wising up the younger generation about where the world's tiger traps and deadfalls are, the elder reveals much about their own, state of mind.

For example, in my youth my old man gave me lots of very bad advice, all most all of which came from his own wishful thinking about how the world ought to be: people ought to be reasonable; authority ought to be fair; if you accommodate someone enough they ought to eventually figure out what a sport you are; once you stand up to a bully, they should instantly begin to respect you and you will be surprised to find how much you have in common.

And so forth.

This advice was usually proffered late at night from deep within a nimbus of Salem cigarette smoke and modulated through his 3rd or 4th vodka and whatever.  Whether his advice was soundly based on the world he grew up in and which no longer existed, I do not know. Whether the folly of his advice was amplified by the nature of where we had come to live -- by the fact that our meek, bookish family had been immediately and irrevocably marked as outsiders by the hard-charging, dog-eat-dog, football-obsessed burghers of our community (and their kids) -- I do not know either.

I do know that teaching kids how the world should be is important, but teaching kids how to navigate the world as it actually exists is even more important (of course drivers should always be careful, but acting on that belief by running out in traffic will get you killed.)

I also know that, years later, the corrupt, affable superintendent for whom my old man worked summarily yanked him out of his job as a school principal (a job which, whatever his other defects might have been, he did extraordinarily well) and tossed him back in the classroom just in time to seriously cripple his pension.  I know that dad asked for and received a hearing at which I am told he mounted a very creditable case (after he died, I found the 3x5 index cards on which he made his notes.)

It is a hard thing to imagine my father at that "table before me in the presence of mine enemies", gone gray and bent in the service of his students and his school at time when he should have been planning his retirement in peace, being forced to beg for his job from men who despised him, armed only with the awful "bullies will respect you" kind of advice he had been handing out to me for years.

He lost, utterly, and it busted him up inside; his hard work had not paid off; the bully did not respect him; authority was not only not fair, it was openly rigged against him and laughed in his face about it.

And, finally, I know that his advice to me during his declining years became much more terse and defeated.

"There are a lot of bastards out there," he used to say, which is undoubtedly true, but it was delivered with fatalistic, verbal shrug that I now hear in own voice more often that I like.

All of which may seem a pretty dark and Raymond Carvereque place from which to jump into a David Brooks column, but the muse goes where she will and I just hang on for dear life, and this time the muse asks me to use my most humane imagination so that when I read this --

...
 If you attend a certain sort of conference, hang out at a certain sort of coffee shop or visit a certain sort of university, you’ve probably run into some of these wonderful young people who are doing good. Typically, they’ve spent a year studying abroad. They’ve traveled in the poorer regions of the world. Now they have devoted themselves to a purpose larger than self.

Often they are bursting with enthusiasm for some social entrepreneurship project: making a cheap water-purification system, starting a company that will empower Rwandan women by selling their crafts in boutiques around the world.

These people are refreshingly uncynical. Their hip service ethos is setting the moral tone for the age. Idealistic and uplifting, their worldview is spread by enlightened advertising campaigns, from Bennetton years ago to everything Apple has ever done.
 ...

-- I would not see a debased, middle-aged New York Times neoconservative grifter delivering hollow nonsense to today's eager young world-beaters in 2012...

...but instead strive to see a young David Brooks -- right about the same age as the do-gooding students to whom he is now offering his sage advice -- plugging away deep inside the library carrels at the University of Chicago just as the Reagan Era is kicking into gear, trying to figure out what the fuck he is ever going to do with a Bachelors in history.

To see young "liberal" David Brooks suddenly "coming to [his] senses" and swapping his ideals around 180 degrees after being offered short-cut to the good life by William Buckley.

To see Our Mr. Brooks settling into a long and prosperous career bashing Liberals at the National Review (that mudhole of snotty Conservative delusion, denialism and weekly racist-employee-going-away-parties currently presided over by the oleaginous Rich Lowry.)

To watch the now-middle aged Mr. Brooks parlaying his vitriolic attacks on the loyalty and sanity of the opponents of the George W. Bush's Operation Clusterfuck into a permanent position at the New York Times.  Then parlaying that into a very lucrative, establishmentarian cottage industry for himself as servant of power and the chief evangelist of the Gospel of mindless Centrism and Hippie Punching on which the entire Beltway Media depends for its daily bread.

Of course there is no point taking this little stroll down the gently downsloping road to depravity that is the arc of Mr. Brooks' life  -- from eager, young Buckley acolyte to aging, neoconservative warpimp, professional liar, toady to power and staunch defender of the traitorous Scooter Libby -- unless it throws a little contextual on the  flapdoodle that Mr. Brooks is handing out like candy to der kinder:

...  

In short, there’s only so much good you can do unless you are willing to confront corruption, venality and disorder head-on. So if I could, presumptuously, recommend a reading list to help these activists fill in the gaps in the prevailing service ethos, I’d start with the novels of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, or at least the movies based on them. 

The noir heroes like Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” served as models for a generation of Americans, and they put the focus squarely on venality, corruption and disorder and how you should behave in the face of it. 

A noir hero is a moral realist. 

....

And there it is, hanging like a turd off a dog's hairy ass: the contextual key to the understanding the interior state behind Mr. Brooks' dime store twaddle:

A noir hero is a moral realist. 

This is how he sees himself: a flawed crusader in a broken world.

And notice how conveniently and seamlessly Mr. Brooks' reflexive, self-absolving "Both sides are always equally wrong" Centrism fits into the "noir" equation as he has defined it:

He assumes that everybody is dappled with virtue and vice, especially himself. He makes no social-class distinction and only provisional moral distinctions between the private eyes like himself and the criminals he pursues. 

In the world of the "moral realist" (as Mr. Brooks defines him), no one can be accused of treachery or cowardice or fraud, because in such a world there are no heroes or villains.  There is no moral high ground.  There are only gray men, "dappled with virtue and vice".

But of course this is not quite true, in literature or in life.

Often set in the dirty corners of an America smashed flat by the Great Depression or drained of able men by WWII, the individual literary universe's of Hammett and Chandler may be stocked with is colorful casts of "dappled" people -- bent cops, gold diggers, adulterers (Sam Spade is having an affair with his partner's wife) and honorable grifters (Little Jonesy in "The Big Sleep" comes to mind) -- but there are also genuinely terrible men who do genuinely terrible things and all the shades of gray in the world cannot "dappling" away the moral acreage that separates, say, Harry Jones and Eddie Mars:

MARLOWE Well, a little man named Harry Jones told me. A funny little guy, harmless. I liked him. Came to sell me the information because he found out I was working for General Sternwood. How he found out is a long story. Anyway, Canino, your husband's hired man got to him first while I stood around like a sap. I was in the next room. Now the little man is dead. Eddie Mars didn't do that.

MONA You're lying.

MARLOWE Oh, no. Eddie Mars never kills anybody. He just hires it done.

MONA I don't believe you.

MARLOWE You think he's just a gambler, don't you? I think he's a blackmailer, a hot car broker, a killer by remote control. Anything that looks good to him, anything with money pinned to it...

And as disillusioned as Sam Spade may be, he makes it clear that however slippery the ground gets, there is still an Enemy and that he stands against it --

Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be. That sort of reputation might be good business, bringing high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy, but a lot more money would have been one more item on your side of the scale.

That his sliver of high ground is, in the end, enough to turn the woman he loves (maybe) over to the cops.

Back over in Raymond Chandler's world, the distinctions between good guys and bad can get ever brighter. Philip Marlowe is clearly a head smarter than everyone around him and given his connections and know-how there is no doubt he could easily bring himself up in the world by running some relatively low-risk criminal enterprise. Instead, he runs his tiny detective operation out of shabby offices because he is honest:

MARLOWE Good morning.

VIVIAN So you do get up. I was beginning to think perhaps you work in bed like Marcel Proust.

MARLOWE Who's he?

VIVIAN You wouldn't know him. A French writer.

MARLOWE Come into my boudoir.

VIVIAN You don't put on much of a front, do you?

MARLOWE There isn't much money in this business if you're honest.

VIVIAN Are you honest?

MARLOWE Are we gonna start that again?

Yes, he takes risks because "he gets paid to", but the risks he takes are almost always on the side of the angels and even as the risks to his personal safety mount and various characters try to beat or bribe him into stopping --

VIVIAN No. He asked me to give you a check.

MARLOWE I don't need any money yet.

VIVIAN He considers the case closed.

MARLOWE Oh?

VIVIAN It is, isn't it?

MARLOWE As far as Geiger's concerned, yes.

VIVIAN Then it's completely closed. I hope this is satisfactory.

MARLOWE Five hundred! Woo, that's a lot more than I expected but welcome just the same.

VIVIAN I'm very grateful to you, Mr. Marlowe. I'm very glad it's all over. Tell me, uh, what do you usually do when you're not working?

MARLOWE Mm. Play the horses, fool around.

VIVIAN No women?

MARLOWE Well, I'm generally working on something most of the time.

VIVIAN Would that be stressed to include me?

MARLOWE I like you. I told you that before.

-- he will not be deterred.

Chandler was famously outspoken about what a Chandler hero looked like:

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. 

Raymond Chandler, November 1945 

Yes, in the murky, fallen literary universe of the hard-boiled detective, shady, contingent bargains are often quickly struck (and just as often quickly violated) all the time between shady, contingent people.

God knows, there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking for life-lessons between the covers of books, or even finding a few by tagging along behind Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe, but however much Mr. Brooks may delude himself, building a career out of siding with monsters, stooging for the powerful and defending the indefensible, as Mr. Brooks has done, does not a "noir hero" make.

And no matter how dappled the lighting, the is no mistaking the clear lines between the "right guys" who (often reluctantly) end up taking the side of the underdog and fighting for something resembling justice against the deadfalls, stacked decks and moral chaos of the world they live in



and the scuttlefish, gunsels, greed-heads and cold-eyed killers whose first love is power

and who will chase that Black Bird so far down into darkness that they become the creators of the of the deadfalls, stacked decks and moral chaos


of the world they live in.

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