David Brooks celebrates the manners
of The Swine, homing in on, in his words the replacement of “(E)verything
that was refined, stuffy, formal and stiff” with the casual. “The triumph of the casual”, he insists
with a straight face, “is good” (1)
Brooks is here decrying the ‘formalism’
of all previous age. The idea that one
would assume a ‘public’ face is derided in this celebration of the casual. It used to be that to go into public spaces
one would don one’s “Sunday go-to-meeting” attire and assume a public
posture. Now we go to church, indeed,
funerals wearing T-shirts emblazoned with messages—some obscene. This, in the view of the libertine is a step
forward. Brooks, blinded by the lights
of his generation, cannot see the direct correlation between the wholesale
celebration of the casual and the declining comity of our social
interactions. The common denominator is
unbridled individualism, celebrating, enshrining and glorifying it at the
expense of the greater society.
Watch any film of, for instance, a
baseball game or downtown shopping in the 50’s or even the 60’s and you will
see men in suit and tie, women in their Sunday finest. Now one goes to these games to be greeted by
beer belching bores dressed in T-shirts, shouting drunken obscenities. Indeed, at Fenway the crowd once amused
itself floating a blown-up sex doll through the crowd. The replacement of formality with Disco Demolition
writ large is hardly something to celebrate.
Then there are the morals. Here Brooks, while awarding the Swine his
‘gentleman’s C’, gets more honest
writing:
“In the realm of morals, things
are more complicated. If the ethos of
the silent generation was ‘we are all in this together’ and the code was
self-effacement (‘I’m nobody better than anybody else, but nobody’s better than
me’), then the ethos of the boomer is ‘Do you see how special I am?”
“Personal freedom has been the
master trend for this generation. That
was a legitimate reaction against conformity.
On the other hand, there is more isolation, bitterness and division. The ethos of the meritocracy filled the
values void left by the retreat of any shared moral vocabulary”. (2)
True enough. But the Greeks were
wont to point out that the opposite of citizenship is the idiot, those that put
personal interest and gratification ahead of the public good. The pipe dreams of Ayn Rand and the wet dreams
of Paul Ryan leave to many behind and are the groundwork for the revolt of the
masses. It is this celebration of the
lizard that is the rot upon the republic.
An Br’er Putin, he jus laugh and
laugh
Grade: F.
Impeach and Imprison.
___________
1.
Brooks, David.
Ibid.
2.
Ibid
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