David Brooks, When The Shrooms Hit

 

This week, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has shuttled fully back to his self-appointed role as the Acela Corridor Pantograph's Faith and Humility reporter.

And this week he'd like to talk to you about the Lord.

So if you would like to read all +4,000 words (no kidding) of Mr. Brooks' exegesis on poorly understood theology and his "faith journey", well, this is a free country for awhile longer, so suit yourself.  

If you want the shorter version, 

Since faith is an inherently internal experience, judging the validity of someone else's faith is a fool's errand.  

However, as America's leading Brooksologist, I would be failing in my duties if I didn't mention two things.  

First, over the past 20 years or so, whenever events have shown David Brooks to have been drastically, catastrophically wrong about big, important things (which is always) as sure as night follows day, Mr. Brooks will find something else to write about.  Something other than the rubble of his failure that is staring him in the face.  Sometimes it's flat out denial.  Sometimes it's wishcasting about the future: spinning fairy tales about how awesome everything will be sometimes in the near future when the present unpleasantness disappears.  Frequently Mr. Brooks manufactures an imaginary Liberal villain so that he can lash out at Both Sides and put what is very clearly a Republican catastrophe into the Both Sides Do It rear view mirror. 

Or, as one cynical wag put it back in 2019:

Whenever he publicly belly-flops into the empty swimming pool of his own boundless ignorance of how America lives and works and thinks and feels in the Land Beyond The Hudson (as he did last week), Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times frequently retreats to the one safe place where he can pontificate in galactically-sweeping language and no one will dare gainsay him. 

The pulpit...

Second, I cannot help but notice that, according to Mr. Brooks' own timetable...

In 2013, I experienced an acceleration of those moments. This time they were not mere spooky experiences, but illuminations — events that tell us about the meaning of life and change the way we see the world. One morning in April, I was in a crowded subway car underneath 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue in New York (truly one of the ugliest spots on this good green earth). I looked around the car, and I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls. Each of them had some piece of themselves that had no size, color, weight or shape, but that gave them infinite value. The souls around me that day seemed not inert but yearning — some soaring, some suffering or sleeping; some were downtrodden and crying out.

....he was having his long, warm hot tub of the soul at exactly the same moment he was dumping his wife and taking up with his much younger research assistant.  From Slate:

David Brooks’ Scant Self-Awareness

This morning, David Brooks published an enigmatic column titled “The Thought Leader” that basically offers a satirical recounting of the life and times of a member of America’s opinion elite. The column set off a lot of intra-office debate, in part over the question of how self-aware Brooks was while writing the piece. Something I learned in the discussion is that Brooks and his longtime wife, Sarah, were getting divorced as of last month. That’s an awful experience, and it’s hard not to feel sad for anyone going through it.

At the same time, I really do think it puts the question of self-awareness squarely on the table. Brooks’ columns have frequently worried about the “dangerous level of family breakdown” in America, and have specifically put this crisis of family stability at the center of class politics. You’ll never see a Lorenz curve plotting the drastically inegalitarian distribution of capital in the United States in a David Brooks column. Instead you’ll hear about how that kind of thing is a distraction from the real issue of the lower orders’ own misbehavior...

After which there followed, what seemed to these tired, old eyes, an endless number of thinly-veiled  Sad Bastard Lashing Out At His Ex columns, which no one at The New York Times saw fit to rein in.  

And eventually, like so many pilgrims and seekers before him, Brooks' path to enlightenment led him to an airport bar in Newark where he peered deeply into his second or third glass of overpriced scotch and discerned therein the reasons "Americans think the economy is terrible."

"Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination." -- Swami Sivananda

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