David Brooks says the Chinese will destroy us because today’s “Jareds” screw around on Facebook all day instead of working long hours like their grandfather “Sam”:
Sam entered a world of iceboxes, horse-drawn buggies and, commonly, outhouses. He died in a world of air-conditioning, Chevy Camaros and Moon landings. His life was defined by dramatic material changes, and Sam worked feverishly hard to build a company that sold brake systems. Sam wasn’t the most refined person, but he understood that if he wanted to create a secure life for his family he had to create wealth.
[…..]Jared lives a much more intellectually diverse life than Sam. He loves Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and his iPhone apps. But many of these things are produced outside the conventional monetized economy. Most of the products are produced by people working for free. They cost nothing to consume.
[….]Jared is also providing much less opportunity for those down the income scale than his grandfather did. Sam was more hardhearted, yet his feverish materialism created more jobs.
Jared worries about that. He also worries that the Chinese and others have a material drive that he and his cohort lacks. But he’s not changing. For the past few decades, Americans have devoted more of their energies to postmaterial arenas and less and less, for better and worse, to the sheer production of wealth.
Of course it is unthinkable that any East Asian person would ever waste time on electronic gadgets and social media. Beyond that, though, do the middle-to-upper-middle-class “Jareds” of the world actually work less than their grandfathers? No, they seem to work a little more.
Nice try, though, Bobo.
Update. You all know why that top decile is working so much harder today than in 1980 right?
The Reagan tax cuts let them keep more of their money, so they stopped withholding their productivity.
MobiusKlein
Can Bobo come out to Silicon Valley and see folks working hard?
Or perhaps his nearest hospital.
Davis X. Machina
Is there anybody here who, given this quote, couldn’t solve for X?
Didn’t think so.
OK, it coulda been Friedman, too….
MonkeyBoy
Well, at Jared lost weight and made money being a corporate spokesman.
BGinCHI
There it is. Right there.
Nostalgia as argument. Christian suffering and self-denial as economic imperative.
Not a shred of evidence. Just faith in received ‘wisdom’.
The right in this country, and especially its upper-class twit enablers, has no ideas, and no idea how anything works.
KG
It’s a perception thing. Sam made something, real and tangible. Jared doesn’t, he writes code or sells securities, or whatever it is. Sam would get grime under his fingernails from working with his hands, Jared gets carpel tunnel (sp?) because he types on a computer (which really is just a fancy typewriter and we know that’s woman’s work).
wsn
Is Obama still running his policy proposals by this guy?
Or, why I am not at +5?
KG
@Davis X. Machina: um, let me try…
let’s see… uh huh, carry the one, divide by three…
X = Sam?
Jason In the Peg
And for less and less compensation I suspect.
Cat Lady
DougJ, you have won. I hate Bobo and his shiny totebagger friendly veneer more than I hate any of the other wingtard nutjobs spewing their bile. Has there ever been a smugger more mealy mouthed apologist for our Galtian betters than that non-productive POS? No. No, there hasn’t.
jl
Did the writer at Balloon-Juice with the trademarked name leave out a link to the source for that graph.
I first saw the graph at a Krugman post that debunked Brooks’ latest fable. Then it showed up at DeLong’s blog, or maybe Economists View.
I think a link would be helpful:
February 15, 2011, 8:35 am Lifestyles Of The Rich But Not Famous
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/lifestyles-of-the-rich-but-not-famous/
KG
@KG: or, what @BGinCHI: said.
BGinCHI
If Bobo’s dad was Sam, what is his Jared/Bobo son producing?
David Brooks, where are the jobs!?
david mizner
Yeah, Bobes, definitely the country’s major problem: a lack of materialism, not enough greed.
Sentient Puddle
Yeah, and? There’d be pitchforks and torches if they tried to monetize Wikipedia. Fucking pitchforks and fucking torches. And then a few seconds later, another free alternative would pop up somewhere on the web.
Is it too hard to imagine that you can’t place a monetary value on everything?
bemused
I really hate when David unleashes his imagination and lets it fly. That’s why I don’t read him until someone prints excerpts of whatever that mishmash was which I read just because it’s there and wish I had just kept on walking.
jrg
I spent all day testing products that will be sold, and exported. Yes, I was paid. What the fuck does David Brooks produce?
Is is plan to begin exporting bullshit? Because I do that at night in blog comment sections, for free. I’m sure this concept terrifies him.
schrodinger's cat
Is there a more pretentious and vacuous pundit than Brooks? You know who works even less than Jared and is far more annoying? Punditubbies inhabiting the NYT op-ed pg.
A Farmer
Bobo should be more like Sam and work a little harder trying to discover actual data that might either match or refute his imaginary characters.
Davis X. Machina
There is nothing upon which a monetary value cannot be placed.
Baruch atah ha Shuk, ha Dayan ha’emet.
BGinCHI
@Sentient Puddle:
Apparently.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste, as is a pricey education.
Edit: In Yiddish: A moyekh iz a sakones dover keyn avekpatern .
KG
@Sentient Puddle: the funny part is, BoBo is a bit wrong about this. Facebook is “free” because of advertising, the same way radio and broadcast television is “free” because of advertising. Many free iphone apps have ads on them, others (many, actually) you pay for. YouTube has advertising now, too. Only wikipedia operates on donations. And having represented a company that makes iphone apps, I can tell you, there is still a cost to creating them, so the code writers aren’t working for free. Neither, I suspect are the people who actually work for Facebook or YouTube.
DougJ®
@jl:
Thanks, I forgot the link.
asiangrrlMN
Are the Chinese going to be the next bogeyman? Because, if so, I need to get a button that says, “I’m TAIWANESE, not Chinese” made, tout de suite.
Violet
Facebook is considered intellectually diverse? I guess there’s more to Farmville and Mafia Wars than I thought.
Alex S.
Once the Chinese are as wealthy as we are they will also want to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In the end it will come down to the fact that there are 1,3 billion Chinese, more than there are North Americans and Europeans combined. And maybe at some point Bobo will realize that the purpose of the economy is to raise living standards, not to be the number one on some list.
Dennis SGMM
Bobo didn’t finish the story. Sam’s heirs sold his company to Megacorp which promptly outsourced the whole thing to China in accordance with the globalization so favored by Bobo and his pals. That’s why Jared ain’t working there.
Tool.
Delia
Ya know, if Bobo really wants to write fiction, I’m sure there’s a course through his local community college where he could sign up and learn to avoid all these amateurish flaws that make these stories of his so nauseating. But then again, when your official job is bootlicker of the Galtian overlords, I guess you can write any damn nonsense you like and get it published.
freelancer
If only David Brooks wrote for Highlights, he’d find his niche as the continuing author of Gallant and Goofus.
cyntax
That’s because all the manufacturing jobs have been outsourced you cretinous bastard!
Has Bobo ever waited tables or worked construction or served in the military? If he wants to see the problem with America, it’s staring at him every morning when shaves.
As to sheer production of wealth, there’s a ton of it; it’s just locked up at the top of the pyramid. Even as the American worker becomes more productive, our wages stay flat. WTF is that about Bobo?
Jay B.
Corporations have, for almost 40 years, squeezed the shit out of Jared and his dad. They are, or were, more “productive” in squeezing out shareholder value than old Sam was even in his heyday. Exponentially more “productive”.
Sam “stole” a pension. Or perhaps had union protection and decent wages. He didn’t have debt, because things like housing and education were within economic reach, even for a mere laborer.
The amount of disingenuous horseshit Brooks piles in here — this is the society HE WANTED — is too much to bear. This is what happens when you spend the better part of 40 years breaking unions, signing into “free trade” and bragging on the glories of globalization. It’s the neoliberal’s wet dream.
And now we get the buyer’s remorse, paid in crocodile tears by a motherfucker who never worked a single fucking day in his life.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Jared doesn’t “love” any of those things. He takes them for granted. Emotionally stunted and creaky old Sam-worshipers are the ones who project their loves and hates onto technology.
Sam LOVES his brake-systems.
Walker
What the Hell does this mean? There is no real wealth to be made in manufacturing or materials in the US. It is finance or things like Facebook, YouTube et. al. What does he want Jared to do?
And David Brooks is confusing working for free with starting up a business without an established revenue stream. No one with Facebook intentionally worked for free.
Sko Hayes
@Violet: Well, you know Violet, Sarah Palin once admitted it took her an entire morning to write one paragraph on Facebook.
It’s for those kind of intellectuals, not the ones you’re used to.
different church-lady
@Delia: Darn, you beat me to it on the fiction angle. That’s a dude who needs a new shtick about as bad as a shtick could be needed.
Zifnab
Today’s kids are going to be beaten by the Chinese if they don’t GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!
With your Twitters and your Faced Books and your frolicking at the Applebee’s salad bar.
BGinCHI
I cheated and used a Yiddish translator for my post above.
In case the site wants to go all-Yiddish, it would be called “Balon Zaft.”
Now, zaftig? That sounds about right, actually.
(Chubby Balloon)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Uh huh. Because people today buy fewer cars and TeeVees and refrigerators and clothes and whatnots than they did in the ’50s. That’s why there are fewer manufacturing jobs
Walker
@Sentient Puddle:
Wikipedia has a business model: donations. Servers ain’t free.
If that business model does not work, then they will have to do something else, like ads. Certainly if Wikipedia cannot keep the donations model going, then there is no way another free alternative is going to overcome its network effects to compete. They would have to store the data somewhere, and immediately run into the same cost problems Wikipedia has.
Sentient Puddle
@Violet: Hey now. You can play Carmen Sandiego on Facebook now.
CARMEN SANDIEGO.
jl
@Sentient Puddle:
From your block quote of Brooks’
“Most of the products are produced by people working for free. They cost nothing to consume.”
First off, is this true? That billionaire who runs Facebook is working for free? The money I contributed to Wikipedia disappears into thin air? And consumption is not ‘free’ it costs, for one obvious thing, time.
Second, it makes no sense, what is the connection between the (mythical) volunteer labor that goes into these products and the cost of consumption?
As for the graph, I think it is unfair to expect Brooks to be able to whip up relevant data and graph on quick order to test the Brooks ‘lazy freeloader’ hypothesis of U.S. decline.
But, you know, the fact that employees in the U.S have been increasing working hours in the U.S. compared to other developed countries, and to post WWII U.S. history is not exactly obscure.
In fact, I do not understand how anyone who claims to have any interest at all in studying and understanding U.S. society could have been unaware of this fact, and kinda looked into it in one way or another.
So, I guess if you have the right conservative and corporatist cred you can get paid to push out just about any kind of hack nonsense. It doesn’t have to be true, it doesn’t even have to make sense. It just has to have the right PR ring to it, and the check is in the mail.
I was able to access Brooks’ column at zero marginal cost, but reading was not ‘free’ for me, in terms of either psychic well being or cost of the time it took to read it, or the precious lives of the electrons that died in its production.
Suffern ACE
Jared’s father, Pete, lost his job for a few years in the 1970s and wasn’t the same after that. Because he couldn’t really save much for Jared’s college, Jared took out student loans to attend the local community college. He worked for awhile doing data entry and felt middle class because he worked in an office, but office work didn’t really lead anywhere and he didn’t get the 2 hour lunches that Sam got. While he was grateful to Sam, he liked the idea that through facebook, he could play games with people from around the world. His 2,000 Mafiosi and 2,400 treasure island “friends” include lots of young players in lots of countries around the world. He’s quite certain that the reason he doesn’t make anything is not related to the spartan lives of middle class people in Asia.
Observer
@asiangrrlMN:
sure but it’s gonna say Made in China on the back…
beltane
This sounds like Brooks doing a lame-ass ripoff of a George Carlin skit, the one where Carlin makes fun of names like Todd and Tucker claiming that Eddie and Tony and Vinny could kick their ass any day of the week.
I wish Carlin had done a skit going off on Bobo.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Ach, I’ve got to learn to read Bobo more carefully. I assumed Sam was some grubby lunchpail type who belonged to a union and collectively bargained for a lower hourly wage in return for a health plan and pension for his old age.
Don’t leave me in suspense! How did our Sam Galt manage to build that company and create those jobs under the suffocating Eisenhower tax code? I’m sure Bobes addresses this point. Don’t make me click on the link and read the whole thing.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
If Bobo really wanted to learn something, he would google for people talking about his posts, come here, and learn something.
But then he might realize he shouldn’t be getting paid.
Brachiator
So are Bobo and McMegan fighting to determine who is mas estupdio with respect to math and economics?
schrodinger's cat
Can we outsource Bobo’s column to Tunch. We only have to pay him in gooshie fud and occasionally in tuna. I am sure he has more wisdom in tail tip than Bobo has in his entire body.
ETA: Besides Tunch has WoW, Whiskers of Wisdom!
guy
Holy crap am I sick of BoBo’s folksy parables. Every goddam article and book he writes is about fictional soccer mom this and hardworking turn-o-the-century cobbler Sam that. Why does he constantly try to explain his “I just kinda thought this theory of the world up while staring at the ceiling on Tuesday” theories using the same sort of dumbed-down simplistic characters found in third grade math textbooks? Irrespective of the content of his articles – he may be a blind, deaf, and crippled squirrel but he finds a nut every now and then – it’s his horrific reductions of complicated sociological and political realities into these fantasy avatars that just drive me nuts. It’s such a lazy, lame, overwhelmingly condescending method of writing that I’m sure the only reason he doesn’t just base every article on something a barrista told him once is that Friedman already has that racket locked up.
General Stuck
Nope, like the old saying Chuck Colson had hanging on his office wall. Grab Them By the Balls and Their Hearts and Minds Will Follow
Of course he was referring to Vietnam pacification strategies, but tack on 30 years of supply side Reaganesque wingnut economic philosophy mainlined into the American bloodstream, and you can tack onto Colson’s missive, American worker productivity.
There is little remnant left of the balancing equation of Supply and Demand in our so called free market system. The game is rigged to uber collusion and price fixing from unbound monopoly into one big corporate control hub at Plutocrat Central Command.
Or, why? was it coincidence that after a GOP victory and capture of the House of Reps, shortly thereafter Oil prices shoot up as speculators can relax again, after 2 years of the fidgets and self control from the uncertainty of an all Dem run government.
Now the GOP protectors own a piece of government control and can stop any dem tampering with the gawds of profit powers that be. So all of a sudden, any excuse is good enough to ramp up the speculation of boogymen threatening oil supplies, though the same boogymen have always been there. Just the same since Obama’s election and control of both chambers of congress.
The game is rigged from the top, and now the SCOTUS has driven the final nail into the coffin of promoting the general welfare with it’s Citizens United abomination, and all the other abominations to follow for creation of the new order our Corporatocracy, sweeping away all the commietard blather and promises of reform and their blasphemous “demand side” heresy for a share of the pie from anxious peasants in waiting.
There will be three classes in the new pair-a-dime. The Rich, the Poor, and the Security Class confiscating all the stray pitchforks and lanterns.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Is this what I’m missing? Sam died of the Galtian Fever?
Just Some Fuckhead
Shorter Bobo:
Back in my day..!
trollhattan
And another thing:
“Sam” used to throw away his Monopoly(tm) set after every use and buy a new one. He would shoot his television after each viewing. I wish he’d shoved his LavaLite(tm) up Bobo’s….
Violet
@Sentient Puddle:
Maybe David Brooks wants to take Carmen Sandiego on a date to the Applelebee’s salad bar. Perhaps that’s his definition of “intellectually diverse.” No wonder he finds that on Facebook.
beltane
@Jay B.: Sam would have been a union man. Sam would have proudly walked the picket line pumping his fist at The Man. David Brooks would not have liked Sam. David Brooks wrote a variant of this column a couple of months ago where he complained that American workers were not like Ralph Cramden. David Brooks would crap his pants being in the same room as Ralph Cramden.
Elizabelle
My favorite way to read a David F. Brooks (Fatuous is my middle name (R)) column?
Go straight to the NY Times reader comments.
Even the “highlighted” commenters gave David Brooks a seminar yesterday.
First comment, off the bat, from “Jim”:
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15brooks.html
PurpleGirl
@jrg: What the fuck does David Brooks produce?
Gas. (Lots of it; it could produce electricity if he just hooked himself up to a pipeline to a power plant.)
cyntax
Ah well… got off the boat and went to check the comments section. At least every third poster brought up the off-shoring of jobs. And a number mentioned the accumulation of wealth and stagnating wages.
Wonder what it’s like to be Bobo and to be regularly spanked by your commentariat yet still get paid. Maybe his columns are just his way of exploring his own repressed guilt at how useless he really is.
beltane
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: No, no. Sam was taxed to death by that commie loving Frenchman Dwight David Eisenhower.
Suffern ACE
@cyntax:
You know, Sam probably had to take a trip twice a week to the barber to shave. He did it in his horse drawn carriage with his wife, who got her hair set each Saturday so as to look her best on Sunday in church.
DonkeyKong
Another chapter of David Brooks villager oeuvre “Blowin Put Puts in the Tub”
WyldPirate
@jl:
Damned American academics can’t even be bothered to cite their sources nowadays. ;)
Chinese academics wouldn’t do that because they are not too lazy to credit others for their work–except when they are ripping it off in totality or paying someone else to do it for them. (not that all Chinese academics do this)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I motion that we take a Balloon Juice field trip to Aspen next time Bobes gives a seminar. Tunch will pay, and then we can all get serious and thoughtful and shit, maybe get gigs with Fred Hiatt and CNN.
Elizabelle
Second “highlighted” comment, by “Ralf” of Minneapolis, is equally more astute than anything Brooks himself contributed.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15brooks.html
I will stop with the cut and pasting now, but, for God’s sake:
David Brooks gets a speaking role at a TED conference for writing this bunk.
Citizen_X
Notice, on that graph, the 1st decile? The lowest-paid one? They don’t seem to be hitting 40 hours for some reason. Can you tell me why, Bobo? Hint: try looking up “Walmart labor practices,” for a start.
@BGinCHI:
Say, I know a cat that that name might apply to…
trollhattan
BTW, did “Sam” go to work with an onion tied to his belt? I’m sure Bobo could check his interview notes.
Davis X. Machina
I always assumed it stood for ‘Facile’.
Comrade Dread
Yeah. You should really tell him to Google ‘starcraft’ ‘warcraft’ and people dying from playing them too long.
cyntax
@Suffern ACE:
After having gotten her hair set and Sam getting his shave, they both went to church where they were surrounded by people that looked and acted exactly like them.
Wait what was the point of that column…?
I’ve been lulled by the pablum, blinded by the slight.
freelancer
But did Sam ever tie an onion to his belt? It was the style at the time.
@trollhattan:
Damn. Beat me to it. Do you have five bees for a quarter?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
(Removed due to moderation)
Dave C
I think we need a “Fuck David Brooks” tag.
Gregory
Yeah, you lost me there.
Legalize
Really. And what the fuck is it that Bobo does all fucking day? What the fuck of value does that twat produce?
Elizabelle
@Davis X. Machina:
I’m not sure Brooks actually has a middle initial.
Although he should. And “facile” works for me.
But thank the flying Spaghetti Monster: he can never become our government overlord.
He was born in Toronto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(journalist)
cyntax
@trollhattan:
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Mike in NC
@Brachiator:
Sadly, the time will soon come when there’s a weekly cable show where David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle will be paid obscene wages to pontificate on the miserable state of the American middle class (such as we still have one).
trollhattan
@freelancer:
Great minds, Abe Simpson, and all that :-)
Svensker
Bobo must have been pulling late nights at the Applebee’s salad bar to get those the interviews to back up all that good writing. What a hard worker that guy is! Too bad the salad bar is actually his ass.
Maude
@asiangrrlMN:
You had to go and open that can of worms. The idiots don’t know the difference. You could wear a shirt that says I am Iranian and they still wouldn’t be able to figure it out.
Hope either mom is gone or you are surviving with her.
Obama is a secrit Mooslim. That covers a lot of countries.
Bobo does exactly what? Sits where and does what? He talks and I guess that’s vital to the nation’s economy.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@WyldPirate:
(Let’s try this without the naughty word):
I’ll bet the academics who lecture their students on the decline of America being caused by too much soshulism don’t forget their sources.
JPL
@trollhattan:
I was going to write that David Brooks should go f*ck himself but your response is so politically correct that I’m going to steal it.
cyntax
@Dave C:
Or… “Forget it Doug, it’s Bobo-town.”
Svensker
@cyntax:
Revved up like a douche?
BGinCHI
@Dave C: Gross.
freelancer
@cyntax:
If you’re going to do a tag; This.
Dave C
@cyntax:
That’s got to be a reference to something, but I don’t know what it is. Sounds good anyway, though.
Elizabelle
Lest anyone forget David Brooks’ crack analytical skills:
a greatest hit: Bye Bye Bootstraps, from August 2006:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505E1D8103FF930A3575BC0A9609C8B63
cyntax
@Svensker:
Another cud-lip in the night?
@Dave C:
The end of Chinatown, when Jack Nicholson’s character is told: “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown,” as a way of providing a false closure for all the deceptions, lies and powerplays Nicholson’s character uncovered in the course of the movie but was unable to change.
ETA: And of course the line just points up Jake’s helplessness in the face of entrenched corruption. Good times!
General Stuck
Why sell a widget to 500 people for two dollars, when you can sell one to one person for a 1000 dollars. And pay your workers a nickel for their troubles and make them owe that nickel and their soul to the company store.
WyldPirate
@Legalize:
Shitty books and columns?
Suffern ACE
@Elizabelle: I fondly remember 2006. I think you could still surf the History Channel and still have a chance of learning something about actual history – you know, events that took place – and not hours of programing devoted to Mary Magdalen and Nostradamous. I think I’ll blame Bobo for that change. He had to make certain that any pleasure not related to earning a buck needs to be as unpleasant as possible.
Barry
@Sentient Puddle: That comment about ‘produced for free’ is Bobo’s tell.
What really p*sses him off is young whippersnappers spending *any* time and energy on something which the elites can’t profit off of.
jl
@Elizabelle:
Oh dear. Bobo needs to check up, see how the old noggin is doing, or maybe admit that he really doesn’t care what he writes, as long as it adequately accords with the morning’s blastfax on The Message of the Day.
But look at this:
“staid industriousness of Ben Franklin”
Franklin may have been industrious, but he was not staid. Even a glance at Franklin’s Wikipedia entry will tell you that much.
Suffern ACE
@Barry: The elites will profit off the stuff produced for free. The “convential” “material” economy that Bobo wants them to spend money on are probably involve things like Newspapers and Books and watching the good ol’ TV he appears on so regularly. He knows that in this new age, he’ll either have to get naked to get attention or be ignored.
Why am I guessing that he noticed that Arianna Huffington just made a few hundred million for her “free” website and he’s faffled why the Times continues to struggle to find readers willing to pay more than two cents for his worthless opinions.
Fang
This is anecdotal, but most young people I know work their backsides off to stay afloat in an economy stacked against them. They work incredibly hard just to not go backwards, and many can’t even manage that.
Sure they mess around on social media. Their parents and grandparents had their own ways of enjoying social time. That’s not the factor – the factor is a system that has abandoned them and left them behind in many cases. One of my friends has given up on ever finding employment and is working to found her own businesses, something she easily dedicates 50-70 hours a week to (she has very understanding parents who figure she’s onto something). I know many others who are as industrious.
Brooks doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Also water is wet, wrestling is fake.
Violet
@Suffern ACE: Isn’t Bobo about to go behind the New York Times’ paywall? Let’s see if his tune changes once the free hits stop coming.
slag
@Sentient Puddle:
Holy crap. Seriously? I just gave up my old Apple and was thinking that the one thing I’d miss about it is Carmen Sandiego (US and World, thankyouverymuch). And then I realized…I missed that game so much that I haven’t bothered to play it in 15 years. Nonetheless, it’s a really good game.
Oh yeah…and David Brooks is a waste of space who’s projecting his own feelings of worthlessness onto “Jared”. Imagine that.
Brachiator
@Mike in NC: RE: So are Bobo and McMegan fighting to determine who is mas estupdio with respect to math and economics?
Yeah, sadly, you’re probably right on that one.
After getting paid the big bucks, they will probably also have a weekly segment on why the rich need a tax cut.
Turgidson
Sweet mother of crap, Bobo is a clown.
Gee, which ideology was in ascendency when so much of our technological and quality of life progress was made, so that Jared could use Facebook (while he works just as hard, which you didn’t bother to research, obviously)? I’ll wait, Bobo….
Hate that fucker.
JWL
At least Sam didn’t drive a cab like one of Tom Freidman’s idiotic phantasms.
Suffern ACE
@Elizabelle:
Jared did not read that column. That was the day he was at the bank taking out a second mortgage on the house. His wife had been denied disability and wasn’t working at the moment. They had been managing to keep up, but the latest round of treatments had put them into debt. Once she was better, that would help pay the loan back.
Tehanu
No, David Fuckhead Brooks’ life is defined by materialism. If “Sam” was anything like my grandparents, his life would have been defined by his love for his family and his ability to provide a home and education for his kids without both him and his wife needing to work 16 hours a day. As usual, Bobo hasn’t got the slightest friggin’ clue about what’s actually important to anybody who ever actually worked for a living — unlike him.
Fuzz
What I hate about David Brooks, and a number of other conservative pundits like Bill Kristol, is that they’ve never had jobs that entailed anything more than writing columns expressing their opinion and reading books that reinforced those same opinions. Look at Brooks’ biography. He was hired by the National Review right out of college. For at least the past 30 years this guy has been paid to just write a few hundred words about his opinions every so often, and then go on PBS and talk to close out the day. Please spare me the preaching about work ethic and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and all that bullshit.
Elia
I’m always surprised by how my capacity to be disgusted by David Brooks can grow and grow, like the beautiful and glorious market itself.
Mo's Bike Shop
What did William Caxton get for all his work? Huh? Huh?
Wile E. Quixote
@jrg:
No kidding. David Brooks has never held anything that even resembles a real job. He went to the University of Chicago (one more thing to hold against that school) got a liberal arts degree and then got a job working for William F. Buckley. He’s never done any real work in his life and doesn’t even have what it takes to be a shift manager at McDonalds much less a worker in the information economy that he and Tom Friedman are always spooging over.
Wile E. Quixote
@Fuzz:
You beat me to it. Yeah, I hate Bobo for this. Bobo thinks that clamping a liplock onto Bill Buckley’s ballsack is the same as pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
DougJ®
@Wile E. Quixote:
I bet he’s got some high-school summer job story he’d love to tell us all.
frosty
Utter bullshit. Sam’s world coincides with the US being the first country to get on to the oil economy. Hard work had a minor role in the changes in his life. Becoming awash in a sea of fossilized sunlight made all the difference.
Factoid of the day: The jet plane that carries a load of tourists from LA to Cairo to see the pyramids uses more energy than it took to build the pyramids.
Elia
Did anyone else hear that interminable monologue he gave before some totebag audience on NPR?
Wile E. Quixote
Does anyone remember Bill Hicks’ bit about his new TV show, “Let’s Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus?”. Bill Hicks is gone sadly enough, but if he had survived he might be doing a bit like this today.
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ®:
Why do I have the feeling that if he does it starts off with “Dear Penthouse Letters” and then goes on to talk about the woman’s cleavage and “primal scents”?
JCT
@DougJ®:
I’m willing to bet that schmuck never really had a summer job either. Wow, what a piece of work. My daughter is a junior at UChicago and used to tell stories about how all of her Core classes had a least one “that kid” — the guy/girl who would pull nonsense out of their asses and pontificate at length.
Somehow I think old Bobo has behaved this way all of his useless life.
Nutella
If Sam and Jared are in the same family, sure. Pushcart to pushcart in four generations is common. But today’s immigrants are working their butts off right now in typical immigrant style so their children and grandchildren can move into white collar jobs. This is news to Bobo?
Mike G
@Fang:
This is anecdotal, but most young people I know work their backsides off to stay afloat in an economy stacked against them. They work incredibly hard just to not go backwards, and many can’t even manage that.
This.
If the middle class is less dedicated to work, maybe it’s because work is decreasingly financially rewarding, increasingly unstable and insecure, and increasingly like drudgery thanks to the bullying, micromanagement and serfdom that feature ever-larger in corporate life — thanks to decades of policies that reward the rich, corporations and the politically-connected and hammer the middle class.
But our ever-richer rightard overlords can always find scribe-whores like Bobo to blame it on “laziness”; or “Hollywood” or “librul culture”.
Sly
Wow, David. Before you, I’ve never seen or heard someone argue that blatant paternalism is a noble enterprise. How very fucking avant-garde of you.
Dilettante.
EvolutionaryDesign
Fuck fucking David Brooks. Someone should shiv that asshat already.
Jebediah
@cyntax:
Brilliant turn of phrase!
Pangolin
I LIKE you people. There apparently IS a place where we remember that David Brooks has been all for selling jobs to China for thirty years and now he blames the American worker for being lazy. Then you take a crap on his (Brooks) head which he soundly deserves.
I’m old enough to remember when a union job at a supermarket paid enough for one wage-earner to support a family and buy a modest house; in California. People are working just as hard. The wealthy are simply stealing more of the value of our labor.
Villago Delenda Est
OK, I think at least every one of any point that I might make about this idiotic (but typical) Brooksian screed has been made, so I’ll just say “well done, BJers” and leave it at that.
Jamey
Also, this: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/152/the-socialist-networks.html
Cover story on Fast Company–Chinese are OBSESSED with Facebook (or Facebook clones). Almost daily I pray that someone takes Bobo out in a bar-fight.
Jamey
(to get out of Moderation Limbo)
Also, this: The Cover story on THIS MONTH’S Fast Company.
Chinese are OBSESSED with Facebook (or Facebook clones). Surely there must be a copy of Fast Company in the men’s room where he works.
Almost daily I pray that someone takes Bobo out in a bar-fight.