Today In David Brooks...

Today Mr. Brooks wrote about friendship in the modern world.

It wasn't particularly controversial or insightful, but it left me feeling rather sad.

Sad, because I realized that, in the long line columns that stretch out behind him, virtually all of David Brooks' work has ultimately been entirely forgettable. A concatenation of cold, dead mile-markers of contractually prescribed lengths pegged into the dirt at contractually prescribed intervals. Yes, the collective weight of their biases and dishonesties have horribly deformed the political landscape, but from a strictly writerly point of view, can anyone remember, for example, any startlingly good opening lines?

Any closer that made you go "Wow!" or at least want to kick a bastard in the ass?

Any sentence that ever leaped out and knocked you off your log?

A single, laser-cut phrase that Mr. Brooks has hewn from our cultural granite which -- whether you agree with it or not -- you could at least admire for the shapely turn it took as it came off the lathe?

A single chord that sounds like no other?

Truth is, there is nothing much human about his words on the page.

Once upon a time (before it all blew up in his face) Mr. Brooks used to be able to get up a full head of sneering condemnation for Iraq war opponents, and these days, like a dry fever, he occasionally musters a kind of dissipated, viperish contempt for some massive individual or institutional failure...which he then obsessively cuts down the middle and apportions to both sides of the argument equally because he dare not call his demons by their true names.

But today, on a subject as monumental and as overflowing with primal grief and joy as that of "friendship", Mr. Brooks has managed to yet again extrude an entire column without a whisper of blood in its veins: an entire work of public art (because whatever else it is, or however well or poorly it is done, writing is damn well art) on this ancient and bountiful topic for the nation's newspaper of record...which read like an executive summary of the finer, technical points of network packet switching interlaced with an alien zoologists report of the social habits of human "flocks".

No hint of exuberance, or terror, or swagger, or loss. Just...nothing...which I find artistically wasteful, spiritually mingy and ultimately just fucking sad.

And so, rather than take up your valuable time reading the thing, here are seven minutes and 16 seconds of much, much better writing on the same subject.