David Brooks Dreams About Having a Lot of Money

One of the genres of bad fiction which The New York Times pays David Brooks' to write is "What if a buncha shit that will never, ever happen actually happened and it fixed all our problems?  Wouldn't that be cool!"

This genre includes such evergreen plots as Magical Third Parties, The GOP has Finally Stopped Being Crazy, Listen to the Wisdom of the Meatheads,  The Invisible League of Extraordinary Whig Gentlemen and, of course, Both Sides Do It.

It isn't science-fiction because (with some notable and canonically-accepted exceptions) science-fiction is the plausible "What If?" extension of some trend or technology.  And it isn't fantasy, because even fantasy has rules.  But whatever it is, House Sulzberger obviously believes it's worth paying Mr. David Brooks a large quantity of American money to extrude 800 words of it into their family's newspaper on a regular basis.

And so he has again today.

From The New York Times:

Giving Away Your Billion

Recently I’ve been reading the Giving Pledge letters. These are the letters that rich people write when they join Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge campaign. They take the pledge, promising to give away most of their wealth during their lifetime, and then they write letters describing their giving philosophy...

The letters set off my own fantasies. What would I do if I had a billion bucks to use for good?...

How would Mr. Brooks spend his nonexistence billion dollars?

First, he would lift subplot from Kurt Vonnegut's 1976 novel "Slapstick"

From Wikipedia:

The siblings created, among other things, a plan to end loneliness in America through vast extended families. Under the plan, all citizens would be provided with new middle names, made of the name of a random natural object paired with a random number between 1 and 20. Everyone with the same name would be cousins, and everyone with the same name and number would be siblings.

From David Brooks:

Thus, I’d use my imaginary billion to seed 25-person collectives around the country...

A collective would be a group of people who met once a week to share and discuss life. Members of these chosen families would go on retreats and celebrate life events together. There would be “clearness committees” for members facing key decisions.

And then, as Tom Scocca of The Twitter noted, the Acela Corridor's great Explainer of Real America to the Beltway elite would deploy his legions of "25-person collectives"...

The collectives would hit the four pressure points required for personal transformation:

Heart: By nurturing deep friendships, they would give people the secure emotional connections they need to make daring explorations.

Hands: Members would get in the habit of performing small tasks of service and self-control for one another, thus engraving the habits of citizenship and good character.

Head: Each collective would have a curriculum, a set of biographical and reflective readings, to help members come up with their own life philosophies, to help them master the intellectual virtues required for public debate.

Soul: In a busy world, members would discuss fundamental issues of life’s purpose, so that they might possess the spiritual true north that orients a life.

...to invent the 4H Club (from Wikipedia):

The 4-H name represents four personal development areas of focus for the organization: head, heart, hands, and health. As of 2007, the organization had over 6.5 million members in the United States, from ages 5 to 21, in approximately 90,000 clubs.[4] 

The goal of 4-H is to develop citizenship, leadership, responsibility and life skills of youth through experiential learning programs and a positive youth development approach.

So as long as we're using pretend money to invent things that already exist, may I suggest Mr. Brooks used his next imaginary billion to invent vaudeville, and the billion after that to create the Women's Christian Temperance Union (which still exists and is headquartered a few hundred feet away from where I used to work in Evanston, IL.) 

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the congressional leaders of Mr. Brooks' Republican Party still plot in secret to strip 22 million real Americans of their health care so that people like Mr. Brooks can enjoy the largest tax cut in history.

Also back in the real world, President Stupid continues to lay waste to everything he touches to the delight of the tens of millions of bigots and imbeciles who make up of the Republican Party's very own "clearness committee" and who think President Stupid is doing a fabulous job.