Vol. 60: On the road with David Brooks

A Times columnist hears America kvetching

After reading David Brooks’s latest op-ed column in the New York Times (March 8), I learned that he’s looking to hire a ghostwriter so he can take a much-needed break. And who better to fill that slot than a seasoned journalist like yours truly? My initial effort is below. Please give me your feedback before I submit it later this week.

Surviving the, y’know, bad stuff in the heartland

         I’ve been crisscrossing the country almost constantly over the last five months. It all started last year when, confronting yet another deadline, I found myself plum out of column ideas for the umpteenth time. Hemingway once said that the most terrifying thing he ever saw was a blank sheet of paper. That’s how I feel about a blank computer screen. So, I asked my editor for suggestions.

“Why don’t you take your nose out of your books, get out of the office, and crisscross the country in search of America’s current mood?” she replied.

What a nifty idea! Why didn’t I think of that? See, that’s why columnists need editors. And believe you me, at the New York Times, we have the best!

         There was just one problem: How to get out of the building? At the Times, we have elevators as well as stairs, and you could spend a lifetime deciding which option is morally superior. Especially since Paul Tillich never wrote a treatise on the subject.

Dismaying questions

         Truth to tell, I confronted an even more daunting challenge: Crisscrossing the country is no easy task, what with all the rivers and lakes and mountains and cul-de-sacs. And the University of Chicago didn’t offer a major in crisscrossing when I was an undergrad. So I had to figure out how to do all that crisscrossing by myself. Thank goodness I took my chauffeur and valet along, or I never would have made it across the Hudson.

         One thing I discovered while crisscrossing the country is that Americans will hold a presidential election this year. It seems they hold one every four years, whether they need to or not, and always during leap year, which lasts a day longer than the other years. This was news to me since Adam Smith never mentioned it. Neither did Spinoza.

         Wherever I went in this broad and diverse country, talking to dozens of people— maybe even three dozen— the mood I encountered was the same. In red states and blue states, purple states and battleground states, and even weird states, like New Jersey, people asked me the same dismaying questions, such as “Do you have the correct time?” or “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” or “Where’d you get those socks— at Wal-Mart?” or “What was your name in the old country— Bratislavsky?”

Churchill and FDR

         The rare exception was a cocktail waitress in Mud Puddle, Nebraska, who sidled up to me at the bar and asked, “Hey, big boy, how’d you like to cuddle up with a volume of Isaiah Berlin?” When she offered to play fox to my hedgehog, I knew that I had come to the right place. She took me by the hand and led me to a dark and secluded corner where she had stashed the complete works of Berlin, who to my mind ranks right up there with Socrates, John Locke, and William F. Buckley Jr. For my money, this sage can do no wrong (even if his family’s name was Zalman in the old country).

Here, deep in America’s heartland, perusing a brilliant exegesis by Berlin, I found my Holy Grail. And if you don’t know what an exegesis is, I won’t tell on you if you won’t tell on me.

Berlin explained how Churchill and FDR confidently rallied their downhearted citizens during some war they were fighting. Churchill as president and FDR as prime minister— or maybe it was the other way around— were longtime leaders of their respective countries, whose names escape me. At what seemed like civilization’s darkest moment, they inspired their citizens through their adroit use of defiant symbols (like cigars, cigarette holders, and whoopy cushions), stirring rhetoric (like “We have nothing to offer but blood, sweat, tears, and deodorant” and “We have nothing to fear but my brother-in-law and his relatives” and “We will fight them on the beaches, in the streets, and in the restaurants, especially after 6 p.m. when parking rates are reduced” and “I would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord, as long as I don’t have to clean the toilets”), and cheerful self-deprecating wisecracks (like “Take my wife— please!” and “I have all the money I’ll ever need, as long as I die before next Thursday at 4 p.m.”).

Mission accomplished

         Before I knew it, I had accumulated enough ideas to fill an entire 800-word column. Well, almost enough. As my colleagues constantly remind me, writing a newspaper column is like making love to a nymphomaniac: No matter how brilliantly you perform, you have to do it again and again and again. Isaiah Berlin never said that because he didn’t write columns— only exegeses.

So now I’m back in my office at the Times. Well, almost back. I’m still trying to decide whether to take the stairs or the elevator to get up there. In these polarized times, it’s important to keep an open mind about everything.

To read two previous parodies of David Brooks by Dan Rottenberg, click here and here.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com