Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Fun Fact: "Nothingburger" Was Also The Name Of One Of Those Exotic Sammiches...


...that made David Brooks' unnamed (and possibly imaginary) high-school-degree-only neighbor's-babysitter he's trying to make "friend" run into the street and throw herself in front of a taco truck.
I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.
Which, in turn, caused "David Brooks" to trend at #1 on Twitter --


-- on a day when, among other things, Donny Junior mixed up two big-boy words -- "exonerate" and "implicate" -- and made the already-absurd job of his daddy's phalanx of stooges and shit-slingers super, duper ludicrous.


Funny old world.


UPDATE:  And just in time for the bulldog edition, The Restaurant at the End of the SAT Vocabulary List notes that its menus come with, y'know, translations (h/t @BilliardLentil) --


-- which, if you've been working this beat for awhile, should sound remarkably familiar.  From Sasha Issenberg in 2004:

David Brooks: Boo-Boos in Paradise

Wayne-bred David Brooks is the public intellectual of the moment. But our writer found out he doesn’t check his facts.

“In Montgomery County we have Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, Anthropologie, Brooks Brothers. In Franklin County they have Dollar General and Value City, along with a plethora of secondhand stores,” Brooks wrote. In fact, while Franklin has 14 stores with the word “dollar” in their name — plus one Value City — Montgomery County, Maryland, has 34, including one that’s within walking distance of an Anthropologie in Rockville.
...

Brooks, however, does more than popularize inaccessible academic work; he distorts it. Barone relies on election returns and public-opinion data as the basis for his research; Frey looks to the census. But Brooks takes their findings and, regardless of origin, applies to them what one might call the Brooks Consumer Taste Fallacy, which suggests that people are best understood by where they shop and what they buy.

Unfortunately, as with the Red/Blue article, many of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured.

I LOOKED AT ANOTHER of Brooks’s more celebrated articles, an August 2002 piece in the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard in which he discerned a new American archetype he dubbed “Patio Man...

Unfortunately, as with the Red/Blue article, many of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured...

Before publishing, Mr.  Issenberg contacted Mr. Brooks to get his reaction.  Here are a couple of excerpts

“That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end … ” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”...

I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being “too pedantic,” of “taking all of this too literally,” of “taking a joke and distorting it.” “That’s totally unethical,” he said...
A reminder:  this was 13 years ago.




Behold, a Tip Jar!

18 comments:

proverbialleadballoon said...

I don't know if Junior is trying to jump on the grenade for his father, or if he's just an unmitigated idiot with affluence. Either way he just Blew this story Up. There is No Way that Trump did not know about a meeting between his son, son-in-law, and campaign advisor with a Kremlin lawyer, in Trump Tower. It's staggering how stupid he has to be to do have done this, a completely unimaginable turn-of-events. Nothing is shocking anymore, we are all so inured. But "Trump's own son blowing a big hole in the side of the boat" .. it's crazy. Right?

Unknown said...

He probably should have forgone the foreign Mexican cuisine and stuck to the red blooded American Applebee's salad bar.

dinthebeast said...

Also in this same reporting they are making note of the fact that president four-year-old was in his tower that day, and that exact day was the first time he publicly said anything about "30,000 lost emails", so the "what did he know and when did he know it" question has become a bit more interesting.

-Doug in Oakland

RUKidding said...

How did DFB manage to locate the ONE ethnic lowly educated lowbrow citizen that Dame Peggity Nooners Hampshire contacts from time to time to lend a tone of verismilitude to her platitudinous highbrow intellectualisms?

Do Nooners and DFB pass that pleb around like a football whenever they feel they need for a heapin' helpin' of real 'Murkinisms??

Inquiring minds, yadda.

And finally: what an ever-f*ckingly condescending boorish PUTZ DFB is.

Unknown said...

hmmm,maybe David Brooks is making something up out of whole cloth and hoping that his readers (who have similar critical thinking skills as Trump voters) will believe it. Why would he risk such a potential embarrassment?

Oh, right...There are no consequences. I forgot....

Habitat Vic said...

Though I'm a little old to lurk on Twitter, I must forward this spoof (one of thousands, no doubt, growing as I type) of DFB's column (h/t @SimonMaloy):

"Recently I took of friend of mine with a giant nail in her skull out to lunch. We went to a fancy bistro with exotic menu items: chlorine tablets, noodle floats, extendable nets, and the like. It dawned on me that we were actually in a pool supply store, and there was no friend; the nail, it turns out, was in my skull. It was a parable of cultural decline."

Robt said...

Episode rerun of "I am Spartcus"

But,
reconfigured for heroics and patriotism.

"I am Col Jessup and you are damn right I ordered the code red.

No I am Col Jessup and your damn right I ordered the code red.

Just a combo platter of stupid using Spartacus and a Few Good Men.

bbraksick said...

+1 for the "Vanilla Sky" clip, which somehow manages to include both the awesome Tilda Swinton and "Good Vibrations!"

dinthebeast said...

Did you by chance catch this bit in the Miami Herald by Leonard Pitts Jr.? The one where he admonishes his peers to admit that the GOP has lost its mind?

http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article159712234.html

-Doug in Oakland

bluicebank said...

Where in hell is the copy desk at the NYT?

Because there are only so many bullshit "I met this guy" or "people come up to me" stories that even a weekly broadsheet would tolerate. Newspapers certainly have some "sacred cows," but lying isn't one of them.

Anonymous said...

I've been thinking lately that we must relegate the term 'nothingburger' back to wherever it came from- Stone? Manafort? They cannot prove a negative, ffs. And at the same time I think we should call out red herrings, strawman arguments, and tilting at windmills- for all we're worth. Bring them back into vogue. And gish gallup, flim flam, slam woww and slap choppy, etc., etc....

I am working on some excellent (if I do say so myself) bumper stickers. Super glue. Holographic. Blanket every WalMart from here to Galveston.

I have other ideas too.

dahlgren said...

I'm not sure if Warren Zevon ever finished high school but I'm sure he was more literate and better-read than David fucking Brooks. maybe your friend just wanted tacos and not overpriced cold cuts, David

Robt said...

Donny Jr now wants us to believe him when he says that the Russian lawyer he met with. Talk on about her desire for "Americans to be able to adopt Russian children" again.

Now why would this Russian lawyer seek Donny or his campaign over this.???

Her beef is with her own Russia leaser. It was Putin who banned Americans from adopting Russian babies.

Unknown said...

It hardly needs to be said, but David Brooks does not HAVE any friends with only a high school degree. This person is made up, and in a bizarre way actually proves Brooks's point about his own STAGGERING elitism that he thinks a working-class stiff would be intimidated by an Italian deli.

Unknown said...

Thank you Doug in Oakland

dinthebeast said...

From Princess Sparkle Pony's twitter:

Peter Huestis‏ @RealSparklePony Jul 11

David Brooks:
"I took my less-privileged friend to Ferragamo, but she was intimidated by the Italian shoe sizes. I felt awkward for her."


Peter Huestis‏ @RealSparklePony Jul 11

"I have a friend my mère would call 'the great unwashed.' I took him to Dover St. Market just to watch him writhe in pain. It was A HOOT."


Peter Huestis‏ @RealSparklePony Jul 11

"Quelle horreur! I took my grubby little friend to Barney's and she drank ALL the perfume samples."


Peter Huestis‏ @RealSparklePony Jul 11

"I showed my unsophisticated friend my mink capelet and she tried to feed it grapes."


-Doug in Oakland

Pablo in the Gazebo said...

We are this close to seeing DFB shaking hands with Chris Hansen.

Unknown said...

If, in the unlikely event that Bobo's lunch partner is real, she's probably a massage 'therapist' with an advanced degree in happy endings.