A Tale of Two Kotkins

Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (1533), with a disturbingly unidentifiable object floating at their feet.

Shorter David Brooks, "Where America is Working", New York Times, June 3 2016:

One of the many things wrong with the ongoing presidential campaign is how it focuses on what's wrong with America, like the struggling white neighborhoods of the industrial Midwest, where the Trump voters are, although they're not struggling themselves, which makes them desperate for change. The result is a campaign driven by fear, resentment, and pessimism, which is obviously Trump's fault, since nobody in these places would be frightened, resentful, or pessimistic if not for his baleful influence. 

We should focus instead on the neighborhoods that are working well. For example, cities: sprawling, gas-guzzling Joel Kotkin cities like Houston and tightly-zoned, hipster Richard Florida cities like Portland are both doing well. Since both models are successful, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, we should be having a debate about which one is best.

That's the suburban futurologist Joel Kotkin, to whom Brooks devotes a more or less annual tribute (he missed last year, and in 2011) on the theory that Houston represents the ideal of what an American city should be. Today's column is, in a manner of speaking, the 2016 edition of the Kotkin offering, but something, as we'll see, goes dreadfully wrong.

Too cool for shul

I haven't been meaning to neglect the Sage of Cleveland Park, but to tell the truth he hasn't been all that inspiring of late.

Image from Jewlicious.

So what if he argues that Obama is caught in a Cascade of Brutality from which he can only escape by starting a Friendship Circle with the Republican Caucus of Common Sense? Little did I know that Obama was going to take Brooks's advice and have a stag party of Republican senators at Plume in the Jefferson Hotel, with Tom Coburn as a human shield.

we do know that of the 16 people seated in the hotel’s private Parlor Boardroom (including the 12 senators and presumably a handful of staffers), there were six orders of the filet, five of the Colorado lamb açaí, four Lobster Thermidors, and one special-ordered vegetarian plate. Dessert options included peanut butter crumble, heart of guana chocolate tart and iced Tahitian vanilla and praline bar.

The president had arranged for the $85 per person tab (not including tax or tip) to be billed directly to the White House. The hotel was sworn to secrecy on the question of whether or not wine was ordered or consumed. (Washington Post, March 7, 2013)

Le tout-Washington was feverishly speculating, of course, as to who that vegetarian Solon might be. I'm hoping it's Chambliss. As to whether the Brutality stops here or not, stay tuned. Apparently the Republicans were much startled to learn that Obama had proposed cutting Medicare and Social Security growth; it seems McConnell has been hiding it from them, though you'd imagine they'd have been able to find out on their own, say by asking their clear-eyed young staffers to read the newspapers for them.

And then Brooks went on a tour of darkest Midwood, Brooklyn, where the Applebee's has two salad bars, one meat and one dairy. Just kidding. But I'll bet you can find a Whitefish Thermidor. The natives there, Modern Orthodox Jews, spend their lives figuring out how to live exactly like everyone else—wired, overweight, and amused to death—without violating the laws of kashrut, thus illustrating Brooks's principle that life is better when you live by a code and all your fundamental decisions are made for you.

Much of the delight in life comes from arguing about the law and different interpretations of God’s command. Soloveichik laughingly describes his debates over which blessing to say over Crispix cereal, which is part corn, but also part rice....

All of us navigate certain tensions, between community and mobility, autonomy and moral order. Mainstream Americans have gravitated toward one set of solutions. The families stuffing their groceries into their Honda Odyssey minivans in the Pomegranate parking lot represent a challenging counterculture. Mostly, I notice how incredibly self-confident they are. Once dismissed as relics, they now feel that they are the future.

No word on when Mr. and Mrs. Brooks are going to give up Saturday driving and start begetting those 14 kids. Oh wait, I forgot that they practice Brooksian Exceptionalism, in which there is an advanced condition known as too cool for shul.

Image from Heeb magazine.

Speaking of the future, that turns out to be located on the Axis of Tedium that extends through the plains from North Dakota to Texas and then veers eastward (bypassing New Orleans) to the Atlantic, where it sweeps northward through South Carolina, framing America's new growth area where our country is growing (backwards) into a commodity economy based on tar sands, soy beans, and shale gas. Really! Our Brooks is challenging no less a thinker than Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mustache of the Thinkable, who has insisted for years that we are heading toward an economy of pure thought!

One of the approximately two interesting things about this column is the resurfacing of a character we've met before (just last November) in Brooksland, noted urban futurist Joel Kotkin of Chapman University, Orange County, California, previously spotted lamenting the decline in religion, fascism, and male managers, which is leading to inadequate rates of reproduction (at least outside Midwood). Today he has a new webpage for the Manhattan Institute arguing the existence of these new growth corridors where a new class of "material boys" are going to totally kick China's ass by burning more fossil fuel than was previously thought to exist so they can grow more corn and soy so they can raise more pigs and cows so the entire country can die of heart disease before it starts dying of thirst in the desert of the 22nd century. Or whatever. He makes Friedman seem like a model of perspicacious thoughtfulness.

In fact Brooks cites Joel Kotkin an awful lot. He has been citing him since Pearl Harbor Day, 2004, when he noted Kotkin's theory that people (i.e., Republicans) in the exurbs of the Plains and the South have more babies than the selfish materialists of the coasts and the Rust Belt and Europe. He mentioned Kotkin in passing in a column on compassionate conservatism and Katrina to the effect that

Immigrants were flowing across the land in search of opportunity, but as Joel Kotkin has observed, few were interested in New Orleans

(a statement, then and now, as false as it is pointless). In January 2006, Brooks referenced Kotkin's concept of the "New Suburbanism", of

an ''archipelago of villages'' -- a new sort of landscape that is neither city nor sprawl. It's all kind of amazing: market-tested cohesive institutions to counteract the segmenting and niche-ifying forces of the age. It's not anti-suburbia; it's go-go suburbia growing up.

And in December 2008, it was the "New Localism" of the reviving downtowns of Charlotte and Dallas.

In April 2010, he took up Kotkin's thesis that America was on the verge of a population surge to fill up those suburbs with the young and enterprising. That September,  Kotkin was Brooks's authority for asserting that California had been wrecked by environmentalists, rich people, and government workers (in fairness, he acknowledged that anti-tax fever might have a share in the responsibility).

It's as if Kotkin were Brooks's PR client, or maybe his reclusive Smarter Brother. Every time he opens his mouth, it seems, Brooks is on top of it. As he worries these themes back and forth, while the birth rates and employment patterns and migration go up and down, and the Kotkinian future swims in and out of focus, Brooks is reporting every move. What's this about?

From JaysAnalysis.

It's Retroactionary Tuesday!

Updated 10/15/2014

Image by The Daily What, via Slashfilm.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Sorting Election", New York Times, 14 October 2014:

I mean which do you prefer, the Bay Area and the quaint old backward-looking, high-regulation, walkable-neighborhood broccoli information economy of the 1990s, or Houston and the hot new forward-driving, petroleum-stained, big-freedom raw-meat energy economy of the 1980s? The country's big enough for the both of them, right?

He's in his highest-gloss nonpartisan just-sayin' mode today, calling forth wonderful peals of invective from Driftglass, who can be driven very nearly insane by that "who, me, conservative? Why I'm just an innocent bystander" pose, and the faux-barbaric yawp coming from someone who until recently believed Applebee's had a salad bar:

Templates in your head

Via SparkleBox.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Field is Flat", New York Times, March 27 2015:

Democrats could easily lose the presidential election next year. For one thing, they probably won't take Georgia, Arizona, or Texas. Besides, the voters have templates in their heads.

World-famous moral philosopher David Brooks seems to have been stuck for weeks on a slumming trip in his filthy old haunts, in the ghetto of ordinary panditry, whether owing to the agenda of his hidden masters or just boredom with moral philosophy. As far as I'm concerned it's more fun when he does the moral philosophy, but he doesn't care about my needs.

Today it's the elections looming just 20 months away, and a couple of articles from the National Journal, neither of them for some reason by Ron Fournier.

Don't get familial with me

Futurist lace-ups by Evan Schultz, ArtKicks.

David Brooks writes:

At some point in recent history people all over the world started acting as if "freedom" meant adults doing whatever they wanted, as long as it didn't hurt anybody.*  Thus, they began refusing to allow their parents to immure them in monastic foundations or marry them off to strangers. More generally, they began to reject any arrangement that might close off their personal options. 

This brave new world brought with it some fairly amazing changes. Society no longer wielded the shotgun that it had used virtually throughout human history, from Austen to Updike, if you will,** to commandeer its young people into mixed-doubles child-rearing teams; and all sorts of bizarre new living formats arose, from single mommitude to Boston marriages and cages aux folles à la provençale, from the strictly single-sex Spartan dorm to the violently heterosexual Negev kibbutz, from the horizontal parental pluralism of polygyny and polyandry to the vertical pluralism of moving back in with grandmamma, it had become an Age of Possibilities. 

And increasingly the family possibilities included the possibility of having no family at all. Nearly 20% of American women in their 40s have never had children, as compared to 10% in 1976, and a Pew Research Center study found that children were 37% less important as a factor in a successful marriage in 2007 than they were were in 1990, while sex was 4% more important, and shared political opinions 9% more important. It is common knowledge that in Washington, D.C., if you want to have a friend you should get a dog. 

Nor is this happening only in America. It is estimated that more than 20% of Italian women born around 1965 will never have children, and I'd guess that by now that one is not likely to go wrong, given that they're turning 60. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese birth rates are among the lowest in the world. Among middle-aged German men, 48% insist that one can have a happy life without children, three times as many as in their fathers' generation (who were of course famous for their devotion to the KKK of Kinder, Kirche, und Küche***). The world is rapidly turning from dominance by the two-parent family into a cafeteria of options in which you can pick up the main dish of progeny, the starch of housekeeping, and the side salad of some occasional sex in any ridiculous or excessive combination you like with any number of like-minded or complementary partners. 

A deft analysis of this global phenomenon has recently been put together—just last month, in fact—in the Internet pamphlet The Rise of Post-Familialism, by a crack team of researchers under the leadership of noted urban futurist Joel Kotkin of Chapman University, Orange County, California while he was working a holiday gig at the Civil Service College, Singapore.**** Some of the reasons, Kotkin suggests, might be the decline of religion in many people's lives, the decline in fascism (especially in Spain), or the increasing opportunities for women in managerial positions now that they are being admitted to first-class colleges like Harvard, Yale, Radcliffe-Brown, and the Air Force Academy, leaving them clearly less time for violin lessons and lacrosse practice. “In Singapore,” notes demographer Wolfgang Lutz, “women work an average of  fifty-three hours a week. Of course they are not going to have children. They don’t have the time.” 

The situation is Singapore is especially interesting, because being Asians, Singaporeans have always had a fanatical devotion to the two-parent family.***** Nevertheless they now have one of the lowest birth rates in the world, at a rate of 1.15 births per female in 2010, while 37% of the males and 25% of females in the 30-34 age cohort remain single.****** 

These new trends are bound to have enormous repercussions in social life, as inveterate "singlists" concentrate in the dense urban environments where they can hook up for anonymous sexual quickies without leaving their buildings, while breeding pairs continue their traditional spread out into suburbs to raise their free-range organic babies. The former will inevitably vote Democratic and the latter Republican, and it seems likely that we are all on the road to social and biological collapse as the numbers of the former grow and those of the latter shrink. 

But then perhaps the Age of Possibilities is based on a misconception. It may be that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, and what we really need is to be enshrouded, in commitments that, like actual shrouds, we do not freely choose but inherit, commitments to spouse, pets, God, and country. It is through such commitments that we learn to worry about others and about the future, when we will be well and truly enshrouded, and whatever children we have produced will be coping with whatever tax policies they have inherited from us. 

And then who knows? Why does it have to be a two-parent family? Perhaps some of these new forms of commitment will leave their victims feeling just as trapped and desperate; isn't that what really counts?

*As opposed to more traditional definitions like

"Freedom is the power rooted in reason and will to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform some deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. Human freedom… attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude." (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1731)

or more concisely

freedom for the Christian is to choose Jesus Christ and to follow His ways. That is what freedom is.

**I, obviously, won't. What Brooks is thinking of is not actually most of human history but merely a kind of Long Victorian Era, when married middle-class women in Europe and North America had as little sexual freedom as single ones—beginning at the moment in Europe and North America when they stopped farming out their babies to wet-nurses, shamed by the polemics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  and ending when the use of infant formula became respectable. Thanks to chemical birth control single women achieved sexual freedom for the first time in history at around the same time.

***In fact according to Wikipedia the Nazi régime did not use this phrase, associated with Wilhelmine Germany and the loss of World War I. They did however offer rewards for fertility, as of 1933, giving a very substantial loan to the parents of a first child which was forgiven in installments on the births of a second, third, and fourth.

****Here, after giving you the impression that he has mastered all this data in the course of his extensive reading, is where Brooks reveals the source it all came from; not this time slipped into his Kindle by an anxious publisher, because the thing is not exactly published (it exists in 40 pages of  PDF), but perhaps communicated to Brooksie by Fieldstead and Company, the Orange County nonprofit that funded it, which exists to manage the philanthropic programs of the Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. family "as part of a Christian worldview." A humble little corner in the land of wingnut welfare, running for example this:

Orange County Rescue Mission is a non-profit organization that uses Biblical principles in programs such as relationships, finance, and parenting. They accept homeless men, women, and children from any faith and do not require the homeless to participate in religious services to receive services such as food.

Ahmanson himself is a former member of C.J. Rushdoony's Christian Reconstructionist movement who left over such issues as Rushdoony's call for the death penalty for homosexuals, which Ahmanson has never supported; a Touretter whose wife takes care of most of his public communications; a major backer of the anti-Darwinist Discovery Institute; and, since 2008, a member of the Democratic Party (like the Christian Reconstructionists, California Republicans are too right-wing for him). 

Way more complex than a Koch brother, as you see, as well as "moderate" in a half-assed Brooksish way, but we are not talking about cutting-edge research environments here. Chapman has no graduate school and issues mostly business degrees; the Civil Service College includes course offerings like Emails@Work for Support Officers (8 hours), Developing Personal Confidence through Public Speaking (24 hours), and Creating Positive Bodies and Minds in Mid-Life and Beyond for Division 1 & 2 Officers (for Women Only) (16 hours).

*****More accurately known as the three-grandparent family in the ideal case for Chinese or Malay-Muslim families, organized around a patriarch with two wives (even though Muslims are permitted to have up to four wives and there is no explicit limit for Chinese). It was partly doomed when the government banned polygamy, under British influence, and when government housing policy began to plan only for four-person households (plus a maid, for the affluent, but in general a Filipina and hence not a suitable concubine). 

******This crisis is indeed one of the reasons for the establishment of the Singapore Civil Service College: it is hoped that in the more relaxed but nevertheless work-oriented atmosphere of, say, a lecture on familialism by Mr. Kotkin, colleagues will feel emboldened to ask one another out on dates, thus reversing the trend of socializing primarily on line. Undoubtedly the College's course offerings include instruction in dating behavior as well. 

Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Evening, 1910.  From Counterlight's Peculiars.

Paradise Paved

Bison hunters bringing hides to market, Taylor County, TX, sometime around maybe 1870, via TexasBeyondHistory.

A huge landmark moment in media coverage of climate science occurred yesterday, but nobody seems to have noticed it, including the writer who did it, David Leonhardt ("Harvey, the Storm that Humans Helped Cause"), in The New York Times:

The daily surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico last winter never dropped below 73 degrees. You can probably guess how many previous times that had happened: Zero.

This sort of heat has a specific effect on storms: Warmer weather causes heavier rainfall. Why? When the seas warm, more moisture evaporates into the air, and when the air warms — which has also been happening in Texas — it can carry more moisture.

The severity of Harvey, in other words, is almost certainly related to climate change.

Yes, I know the sober warning that’s issued whenever an extreme weather disaster occurs: No individual storm can be definitively blamed on climate change. It’s true, too. Some version of Harvey probably would have happened without climate change, and we’ll never know the hypothetical truth.

Not sure what the "hypothetical truth" is doing in that sentence, actually. I'd say the hypothetical truth is what we do know, and what we'll never know is whether it's wrong.

But that sober warning is no longer regarded as quite true, is the thing. I can't remember where I first saw it, sometime in the last few months, but the science is now there; the new scientific consensus is that, while you can't blame a particular extreme weather event on human-caused global warming, you can blame that for the extremity, within certain probability limits.

The Brooksie Awards

Kokoro ("Heart"), 17th-century Japanese calligraphy via Onmark Productions.

David Brooks writes:

In my work as projectile-eclectic philosopher and continental observer at good old Yale University, where I have served in recent years or at least months in an endowed chair as W.F. Buckley Memorial Professor of Humility Studies, I frequently have an opportunity to tell students eager to learn the writer's craft from a diligent if diffident craftsman that eighty percent of the work is done before a fellow puts thumb to thinkpad, in preparatory work, in the accumulation of the literary gold dust of fact and wisdom, and in hammering it into preliminary shape in the interior of one's mind.

Thus when it comes time for me to write a column, after a hearty breakfast and an hour's sitting meditation, I like to begin by gaming it out in [jump]

Who created Trump? A new theory from the Monsignor

Salvador Dalí, The Tempation of St. Anthony (1946), via Wikiart.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has been puzzling for months over what dark and dreadful forces have conjoined to bring us the Trump phenomenon—the liberals? the media? Caesarist President Obama in person? and, since both sides always do it, the other thing too of course, and on Sunday ("The Post-Familial Election")  he was asking again:

HOW did we get here? How did it come to this? Not just to the Donald Trump phenomenon, but to the whole choice facing us on Tuesday, in which a managerial liberalism and an authoritarian nationalism — two visions of the president as essentially a Great Protector: a feisty grandmother or fierce sky father — are contending for the votes of an ostensibly free people?

Never mind that "managerial liberalism" (that's what he's been calling "Caesarism" all year, if I'm not mistaken) and authoritarian nationalism have been pretty prominent parts of our civic discourse in one form or another for an awfully long time, and first fought for the presidency probably in 1824 when John Quincy Adams took the prize in an actually rigged maneuver from Andrew Jackson, after nobody managed to win in the normal way (to be fair to Adams, the mechanism literally had to be rigged—like repairing a plane in mid-flight—because it was broken). You must tell me some time how George W. Bush wasn't posing as "fierce sky father" when he descended from his machina onto the deck of the aircraft carrier, codpiece and all.

So as usual, no, what he's upset about is still just Trump, and the abnormality of the situation in which he feels he just can't vote for this particular sky father, unlike all the other authoritarian nationalists he's voted for or otherwise venerated in the course of his life, and the awful problem of finding yet another somebody or something to blame for Trump other than Republicans, or conservatives, or himself.

Which is, for this final Douthat emission before Election Day—wait for it—

The residual sadness of the lonely heart

David Brooks's new poem, below the fold, building off his encounter with a Kentucky senior citizen, capped his haunting column of September 21 (reported in my own piece here), as if the emotion couldn't be confined in prose. The work universalizes that moment into a statement of mourning, for the life you led in the 1960s on the Philadelphia Main Line, from which everyone that matters is no longer barbecuing in the back yard but distressed, divorced, alone. The immortality of suburban living promised by Brooks's old friend the suburban futurologist and now Trump backer Joel Kotkin suddenly seems unattainable; those green and family-oriented spaces, swing set and sycamore, mall and megachurch, the old Welcome Wagon, haven't conquered the fact that we suffer, grow old, and die. Thanks, Obama!

Image from Wikimedia Commons via CityMetric.

March of the Volunteers

Illustration by Sarah Rogers/Daily Beast, from a piece of last July by old Joel Kotkin taking astonished umbrage at conservatives supporting anti-sprawl zoning.

I'm enchanted by this parade of Republican geezers ready to sacrifice themselves and die for the market economy: Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick

“No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, ‘Are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in … I just think there’s lots of grandparents out there in this country like me — I have six grandchildren — that what we all care about and what we love more than anything are those children. I want to live smart and see through this. But I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed and that’s what I see.”

(From Matt Stieber at New York Magazine, who noted that the 2.6 million American children are being raised by their grandparents, which is not to mention who knows how many millions of American grandparents putting themselves in danger by providing daycare for the kids while the middle generation goes to work in the current crisis.)

radio rodeo clown Glenn Beck

Cheap shots: Double Take

John Barrymore in Sam Taylor's Tempest (1928).

I abhor, of course, all kinds of cheap and prurient gossip, even in the realm of Brooksiana, but I feel I have to say something about this opening graf of the Acknowledgments to The Road to Character:

Brooksy New Year

Happy New Year!

Updated 1 January.

Death of Mimì. English National Opera, don't know the date or cast.

David F. Brooks, winding up the year in his traditional way with the annual presentation of the "Sidney Awards", not a red carpet ceremony by a list of magazine article recommendations, oddly dominated this year by human interest stories, tales of personal obsession productive and unproductive (a man loses his son on 9/11 and becomes a 9/11 truther; a man who was sexually exploited as a young teenager now studies "rooms occupied by Ghislaine Maxwell"; a novelist receives a fan letter from a convicted murderer and, convinced he's innocent, puts her own life on pause in a crazed crusade to get him out of prison), but among the more typically Brooksian choices is a piece by a former research assistant of his at The Times, April Lawson, in a magazine, Comment ("Public Theology for the Common Good"), edited by another former research assistant of his at The Times, Anne Snyder. 

Snyder, of course, is also Mrs. Brooks, as well as

Director of The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a Fellow at the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism [now known as the Urban Reform Institute, with our and Brooks's old friend Joel Kotkin serving as executive director, wouldn't you just know it], and a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum. She holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Georgetown University and a B.A. in philosophy and international relations from Wheaton College (IL).

while Lawson was a co-founder and Associate Director of Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which Brooks founded for the Aspen Institute in early 2019 only to be forced to abscond from it when BuzzFeed revealed that Aspen was paying him six figures for it even as he puffed it up in his Times column, as well as puffing up Facebook's participation in it in remarks for which Facebook seemed to have paid him as well (see my report on this from last March, apparently at the same time as Snyder's book, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver's Guide to Supporting Social and Moral Renewal was issued by The Philanthropy Roundtable, $14.95 in paperback, sorry I didn't get to this when we were all planning our end-of-year donations, as I'm sure the suggestions from this incestuous web of do-gooding are completely sensible and not at all self-serving).

And Lawson is now Director of Debates at Braver Angels, a Weavy nonprofit (not connected to the Aspen Institute as far as I know; but praised in print by David Brooks as early as Feburary 2018), devoted to bridging the distance between Red and Blue, and her essay, "Building Trust Across the Political Divide", retails what she's learned in a couple of years conducting debates on Braver Angels principles: everybody must be sincere, everybody gets to speak, and everybody always addresses the chair, as a way of avoiding the pitfalls that generally afflict such efforts, largely, as Lawson says, because they are generally run by liberals:

Literary Corner: The Size of Texas, the Surprise of Death

From the president's press conference, San Antonio, Wednesday, 10 April, reported by Seahorse at GardenWeb, a remarkable pair of sonnets taking a long walk through his current preoccupations, the need for a wall, the fact that Texas is larger than the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which Central Americans don't realize, and the unexpected relationship between walking and death:

Two Border Sonnets

by Donald J. Trump

I. A Vast State

If we had the wall, the good people
will not be able — you’ll see them on the other
side of the wall. Number one, they won’t
come, because they’ll see there’s no way
of getting through. Right now they think there’s a
way to get through. And the people back home
never hear about that, they start to walk.
They tell them Houston’s half a mile away,

but it’s 300 miles. It’s desert. This
is a vast state, it’s a vast area. You look
at it, the state’s tremendous. I come from
New York. You have Fifth Avenue and that connects you
to Park Avenue, it's not too far away,
but this is hundreds of miles between places.

Late 17th-century print of an etching, ca. 1520, by Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Death and the Devil Surprise Two Women, from the collections of the Victoria and Albert, London.

David Brooks is stardust. David Brooks is golden. David Brooks is billion-year-old carbon.

Photo by Julie Larsen Maher © WCS, via National Geographic. Talking about preserving it when our EPA is run by a tool of the agents of pollution and greenhouse gas production is dreary policy and politics, isn't it? Let's make it into a deep-sounding allegory instead!

Verbatim David Brooks, "This American Land":

These days I often ask people what percentage of our nation’s problems can be solved through policy and politics. Most people say that most of America’s problems are pre-political. What’s needed is a revival of values, fraternity and a binding American story.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that David Brooks often asks people what percentage of our nation's problems can be solved through politics and most of the respondents say that most of America's problems are pre-political?

Answer: David Brooks refuses to release his visitor logs, so we can't ascertain for sure.

Today we have some entirely original thinking from David Brooks as 1950s New York intellectual, armed with quotes from Thoreau and Whitman and aiming at the Great American Summary Statement. I'm trying to imagine how stressful it is to have a conversation with him:

BROOKS: Say, Yas, just offhand, what percentage of our nation's problems can be solved through policy and politics, would you say?

YAS: Uh.

BROOKS: I mean, I'd say not that many.

YAS: Well, um, sure. I mean the question would be, what other means are you talking about? What's your no-policy, no-politics approach to national problem solving? Who's in charge?

BROOKS: I don’t know all the ways that revival of spirit can come about, but even in the age of the driverless car and Reddit, I suspect some of the answers are to be found in reconnecting with our ancient ideals and reconnecting with the land.

YAS: Oh. Ah. Reconnecting with the land. To be sure.

BROOKS: So I can chalk you up for revival of spirit, and fraternity, and a binding American story?