Towards An Even Greater Gatsby

The Eloi Are Unhappy...Perhaps !Science! can help.

File under: Are you a Gattacan or a Gattacan't?

After gazing for a long. long time through his breakfast nook window David Brooks has framed out a parable describing the life cycle and mating habits of his suburban Betheda neighbors:

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison.

Packing every corner of his introductory paragraphs with brand-names-as-cultural-signifier insulation as aggressively as any graduate of a Bret Easton Ellis creative writing workshop --

...Clinton Global Initiative
...Doctors Without Borders
...support bracelets.
...Council on Foreign Relations tote bag
...Uma Thurman.
...resort-community pedestrian malls
...gelato store...cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate selections

-- Mr. Brooks then spends much of the six pages "The New Yorker" handed over to him writing what more-or-less reads like the Reader's Digest version of "The GR8 Gatsby 2.0", updated with all the modern conventions and conveniences.

Rather than picking up the story in medias res like they lar'ned me to do up at the Big City Writing Classes I once took (and taught), Mr. Brooks instead follows Tom Buchanan 2.0 (Harold) from the womb (where he learns German inflection and to keep his calves toned)...

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God... and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

..through his meet-cute with Daisy Fay 2.0 (Erica, who is also the child of affluence, also deeply invested in a Good Cause, and has quadriceps with which you can zest lemons)

"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it ... high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

and onward into a life of privilege that would be unimaginable to 99.99999% of all humans who have ever walked the Earth.

And don't worry, for its intended audience of global capitalist Mommies and Daddies, this "Gatsby" has a happy happy ending. Because as they sally forth to battle the forces of ennui and unseriousness, instead of dressing the Children of Wealth in the tragic togs of alcohol and acquisitiveness

"Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table... They weren't happy... yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

Mr. Brooks gladrags his upgraded versions in neuroscience...and stuff.

In case you ever wondered how the tepid Mr. Brooks is able to maintain his privileged sinecure at the apex of the American Media machine, it is because these people are his clientele. He is the obsequious griot in their global court; telling the noble tale of the wealthy to the wealthy (and the wealthy wannabe) in their own vocabulary, punctuated with their own consumer products and indented with their own biases.

The few thousand Davos globetrotters whose life and times Mr. Brooks adoringly caricatures want a calm and orderly world, and in column after column Mr. Brooks delivers it to them: a world where Very Serious Centrists stand stoic guard over a great and good Establishment, and where the kookie demands of loud, fictional Dirty Hippie rabble on the Left perfectly cancel out the loud, real, paranoid, eliminationist-tweaked Teabagger mobs on the Right.

It is a safe, well-appointed global Panic Room, full of good schools, civility, discretion, concierge doctors on 24-hour call, fingertip technology maintained by the family IT team, personal assistants and private security, and built on a mythology about what really goes on beyond the palace walls that "journalists" like David Brooks make a very make living professionally interpreting, intermediating and often just fucking inventing.

As I wrote last year:

...
For the most part, the American ruling class no longer has even the slightest sense of national pride or patriotic attachment to the United States: the average plutocrat is now so far removed from the trials and tribulations of the rest of us that they see us no differently than they see the inhabitants of Rio's slums or Haitian cholera wards -- faraway, unsanitary, shithouse-dwelling failures. Public bus/Public school/Free clinic losers useful as interchangeable meat-cog labor, but otherwise wholly disposable.

Every now and then as they raze the American Dream further into oblivion, the ruling class hits a vein of unusually persistent liberty-nostalgia or a particularly intransigent outcropping of constitutionalism that requires them to kick the wingnut killdozer into a higher gear and the grinding sounds of their momentarily-overt, teeth-bared racism or outright contempt for democracy temporarily freaks out the Moderates and Conservative expatriates.

These freak-outs never last: they splutter along for a day or two and then are aggressively paved over with thick, David Brooks-flavored Centrist sludge. Alleged Liberal elitism is widely and angrily mocked, nonexistent "traditional" Conservative virtues are sermonized, and Moderates and Conservative expatriates all dutifully slide back into their "both sides do it" comas.
...

There is something hilariously ironic in the fact that, having heroically led his fictional charges through the Fire Swamp of Arrogant Indulgence and past the Rodents of Unusual Selfishness, the Conservative Mr. Brooks tumbles into a temperate glade and finds that the virtues and values that seem to lead to the greatest levels of happiness are those traditionally Liberal values of community, honorable labor and service to others.

Of course we cannot say the "L" word or the whole Centrist mirage collapses, but there it is.

And just like the very best After School Special Ever, David Brooks makes sure that everyone learns the most valuable lesson of all --

As the scientist went on to talk about the rush he got from riding his motorcycle in the mountains, Harold was gripped by the thought that, during his lifetime, the competition to succeed—to get into the right schools and land the right jobs—had grown stiffer. Society had responded by becoming more and more focussed. Yet somehow the things that didn’t lead to happiness and flourishing had been emphasized at the expense of the things that did. The gifts he was most grateful for had been passed along to him by teachers and parents inadvertently, whereas his official education was mostly forgotten or useless.

Namely, that if you are a scion of Gatsby's "West Egg" or Brooks' suburban Bethesda, the world is still your oyster.

And David Brooks is your hand-forged, sterling-silver Masahiro oyster fork.