The Jane Addams Precept

Jane Addams, 1915, via Wikipedia.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks has been thinking about the Progressive-era Chicago activist Jane Addams ("The Jane Addams Model"):

These days everything puts me in mind of Jane Addams.

Everything, David?

Many of the social problems we face today — the fraying social fabric, widening inequality, anxieties over immigration, concentrated poverty, the return of cartoonish hyper-masculinity — are the same problems she faced 130 years ago. And in many ways her responses were more sophisticated than ours.

Oh, that. We're back on the Road to Character and those individuals who radiate something or other through their lives, etc., etc., though I would question whether the Addams model of conducting one's life is a suitable model for those of us who are challenged in the aspect of being born rich, and able to take time out traveling through Europe looking for good ways of spending it all.

Which is not intended to diminish the accomplishments of Jane Addams in founding and running the Hull House settlement in Chicago, because she was a truly extraordinary woman—and Brooks doesn't even mention her work as philosopher, social researcher, and public intellectual, hmm, wonder why that is.

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.

If life gives you grenades...

...can you make grenadine? I guess not, but maybe if you're sufficiently "deluded in good ways about your abilities" you might think you can, and perhaps that's all you need.

Charley Chase in  Mighty Like a Moose (1926), directed by Leo Carey.

Shorter David Brooks, "Tales of the Super Survivors", November 24 2015:

This is the age of terror, when people are constantly subject to unexpected stabbings, shootings, and bombings, but I think we need to maintain some sense of proportion here. After all, scientific research demonstrates that a good 75% of people never develop post-traumatic stress disorder under these kinds of conditions. So really. what's all the fuss about? Moreover, of those who do get PTSD, some are "super survivors" who heal from the damage, and come out radiating love and joy, and you know how I feel about people who radiate stuff.

Love languages and prankster narcissi

Lon Chaney (channeling Dr. William Kristol, I think) in Herbert Brenon's Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928). Image via TheLastDriveIn.

David Brooks is really upset. So much so that he's had to modify the both-sides-do-it formula to incorporate the time dimension—both sides do it, but not necessarily at the same time:

Democrats have historically liked presidential nominees they can go gaga for, even if they lack experience: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. Republicans on the other hand like to nominate the guy who’s paid his dues and already lost a presidential run: Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

So far this year, the parties have switched love languages.

Pause to note that Bill Clinton didn't exactly lack experience: his two years as Arkansas attorney general and ten years as Arkansas governor are wholly comparable to Ronald Reagan's seven years as president of the Screen Actors Guild and eight years as California governor. Walter Mondale spent 12 years as Senator and four as vice president in spite of an uncertain gaga-rousing ability; Michael Dukakis was a very fine and very liberal but unluckily not gaga-inducing Massachusetts governor for 12 years total; Al Gore spent eight years in the House, eight years in the Senate, and eight years as vice president, inspiring gagacity among a fairly limited contingent; John Kerry spent 23 years in the Senate, although his gagatractive period of around 1969 was clearly over by the time of the 2004 campaign; and if Ronald Reagan wasn't a gaga candidate I don't know who was; his intellectual incapacity and ideological extremism should have been instantly apparent, but it didn't matter as long as, as Barry Goldwater complained,

Spiritual Pron

Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson in Sam Wood's Beyond the Rocks (1922), via TheLoudestVoice.

Shorter David Brooks, "Fracking and the Franciscans", June 23 2015:

Pope Francis, author of a new encyclical on the protection of the natural environment, is the kind of ideal human being I've been talking about who radiates goodness, generosity, humility, spiritual awareness. What an idiot, huh?

As with the largely leftist cast of The Road to Character, George Eliot, Dorothy Day, Frances Perkins, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Brooks wants us to admire the Pope's deep spirituality while ignoring everything he thinks. Wonderful man, but unfortunately stupid on geological, biological, economic, and political issues; you should listen to a smart guy like Brooks, otherwise known as a narcissistic blowhard, instead.

Cheap shots and radiant inner light

Image by J.Scott Applewhite/AP.

Jeb! to Declare Presidential Run, Playing Down His Surname

By MICHAEL BARBARO and JONATHAN MARTIN JUNE 15, 2015

MIAMI — Jeb! (who uses only one name), a son and brother of presidents, formally entered the race for the White House on Monday by portraying himself as the most accomplished leader in the 2016 field, declaring war on Washington’s political culture and insisting that his former family name of Bush gave him no unique claim to the Oval Office.

As his mother, Barbara, a former first lady, looked on, Mr. Jeb! directly confronted the central doubt looming over his candidacy: that he presents the latest incarnation of a tired dynasty and thinks himself entitled to the Republican nomination.

“Not a one of us deserves the job by right of résumé, party, seniority, family or family narrative,” he told a crowd of 3,000 supporters in a community college’s gymnasium. “It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s test.”

Mr. Jeb!, whose tenure as governor of Florida was marked by the privatization of traditional state services, vowed to “take Washington — the static capital of this dynamic country — out of the business of causing problems.”

Nah, just for fun.

NYTimes commenter AR: