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6.16.05
Pond Scum: Brooks Bothers
By Steve Finbow
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I am in South Africa, and was planning to write this week’s Pond Scum on the quirks and politics of the Rainbow Republic. I was looking forward to it, and then I received an email from Mark Grueter. The email contained two links – one to his excellent piece on George Orwell, and another. This second link is to the op-ed column of David Brooks. I wrote this introductory paragraph after I had written what follows. Mr Brooks, this is addressed to you, but then you will probably never read it as it is on what you may consider an “obscure online site.” I’ll email you. And, dear reader, please forgive the long paragraph – that's how it came out, and that's how I like it, baby.
Art By Nicholas Allanach
Dear Mr Brooks,
In your “Life Lessons from Watergate,” (New York Times, June 5, 2005) you state that young people “discover that though they are really good at manipulating the world of classrooms, they have no clue about how actual careers develop.” Really? Well, how did they learn to manipulate classrooms? Isn’t getting to the top of the class, flirting with the teacher, becoming head boy/girl, a means of developing a school career? (Moreover, David, where’s the comma after “that”?) Young people (the clue is in “people”) do not leave school inchoate beings; young people leave school with life lessons already learned, lessons they apply to their futures. Otherwise, what’s the point of going to school? Young people (it seems you consider them a different species) do not all fear the workplace. Young people are not all workshy. Some young people actually enjoy a challenge. You write, “In college they were discussing Dostoyevsky; now they are trapped in copy-machine serfdom.” Oh, and people in ‘copy-machine serfdom’ – I’m thinking Nicholson Baker, here, The Mezzanine, The Fermata – are incapable of discussing Dostoevsky? Whom do you want them to discuss? Michael Jackson? Why does clerking suddenly lead to a lack of intellect? Or a lack of interest in literature? Maybe you don’t read Dostoevsky any more. I don’t think you have read Dave Eggers, or David Foster Wallace, or George Saunders – your sense of humour is as pale and washed out as your shirt colour. What do you talk about, Mr Brooks, when you stand around the water cooler? How wacky your glasses are? What’s more, “The most nakedly ambitious – the blogging Junior Lippmanns – rarely win in the long run.” Win what? You’re the one who argues that young people are in competition with each other. Here, you are just bloating your argument with self-referentiality. I suppose the older generation are not in competition with each other? I bet your 4x4 has a greater engine capacity than your neighbour’s. How did you get your job? Was there no competition? Was there no one capable of writing an op-ed column for the New York Times? Obviously, no one with your writing skill, your biting wit, or your Swiftian consciousness. By ‘blogging Lippmanns’ I take it you mean Walter Lippmann, and not Deborah Lippmann, celebrity manicurist? But then you’d probably frown on that because I looked it up on the Internet; you know, that newfangled thingamajig that allows one to research without sitting in fusty libraries, smoking a pipe while adjusting one’s cravat – and I do love that tie – it says colour-coördinated (thought you’d like that umlaut) but daring, into electronic circuitry but in an aesthetic way.
And what’s with this? “[B]ut that doesn’t mean you can’t mass e-mail your essays for obscure online sites.” Which obscure online sites? OK, we can’t all publish in the New York Times, but, from your ivory tower, what jollies do you get pronouncing online sites ‘obscure’? If people visit them, read them, submit to them, in what way are they obscure? Is McSweeney’s obscure? Ask Stephen Elliot? Is Salon obscure? Ask Cintra Wilson. Is Slate obscure? Ask George Saunders.
What’s your problem? Don’t like a bit of competition from the less follicly challenged? You write, “They create informal mutual promotion societies, weighing who will be the crucial members of their cohort, engaging in the dangerous game of lateral kissing up.” Do mutual promotion societies only exist within the youth community? What about the Freemasons? The Republican Party? B’Nai B’Rith? The KKK? These aren’t informal mutual promotion societies, they’re formal. You scratch my back and I’ll get you a cushy job writing op-ed pieces for the New York Times. What is wrong with young people helping each other? If you are talking about online literary magazines, and I think you may be, just think about how writers have assisted one another over the decades. William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg all helped each other get published. Ezra Pound helped T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Gertrude Stein helped Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. All literary movements are mutual promotion societies. All movements weigh up the crucial members of their cohort – political parties do not choose the most ineffectual politician to be leader (well actually, looking at the Republican Party’s decision to have Reagan and GW Bush as leaders, I may have made my own point invalid). What is wrong with disliking your nearest rival for a job? Wasn’t it William James who wrote, “Rivalry lies at the very basis of our being”? Young people are human, you know – and dislike is a human trait (well, it was when I started writing this and I can feel it growing).
“And of course they are always mentor-hunting, looking for that wise old Moses who will lead them through the wilderness and end their uncertainty.” A whole generation of writers mentor-hunted Gertrude Stein. Ginsberg and Kerouac mentor-hunted William Burroughs. What’s wrong with an older generation influencing a younger one? I thought that was what you guys wanted – deference, the continuation of the capitalistic ideal? You moan like fuck when young people decide that Yogi Berra, Hakim Bey, or Osama bin Laden are the ones they respect and follow. “And all they have to do to find their way amid this confusion is to answer one little question: What is the meaning and purpose of my life?” Should young people stop asking this? Should anyone? Have you? Yeah, you probably have. The meaning of life for you is to talk bollocks about something you know nothing about. As for your last paragraph: didn’t the Watergate story become myth, a fairy tale, as soon as Redford and Hoffman became Woodward and Bernstein, as soon as Watergate was Hollywooded? Please tell me, what’s wrong with ambition? I’m not sure about Deep Throat but your column did not seem to contain Deep Thought. Instead of your button-down, if I were you, I’d button it.
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.-------------------------------------
Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
© 2005 Me Three
