Tuesday, April 13, 2010

White collar blues

I'm mostly just admiring this one. Matt Taibbi takes on some horrible class analysis from David Brooks, mostly ignoring his equally horrible sports writing. This strikes me as the money quote.

Then again, maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong perspective. Would I rather clean army latrines with my tongue, or would I rather do what Brooks does for a living, working as a professional groveler and flatterer who three times a week has to come up with new ways to elucidate for his rich readers how cosmically just their lifestyles are? If sucking up to upper-crust yabos was my actual job and I had to do it to keep the electricity on in my house, then yes, I might look at that as work.

But it strikes me that David Brooks actually enjoys his chosen profession. In fact, he strikes me as the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a Leona Helmsley lookalike a thousand dollars to take a shit on his back. And here he is saying that the reason the poor and the middle classes are struggling is because they don’t work hard enough. Is this guy the best, or what? Does it get any better than this?


It's not just Brooks, either. The pundit class is by and large made up of sorta rich people who want to stay in good with ungodly rich people. If hard work is involved, it lies mainly in putting the slurping sounds into something that reads like paragraph form.

2 comments:

susan said...

It's interesting that Taibbi spent so many years in Russia learning his craft and returned to the US just in time to take on the mantle of the new generation's Hunter Thompson. He's not the same, of course, except in his intense effort of speaking truth to mealy-mouthed power. I admire him a lot.

Ben said...

Well said. And from what I hear his father is/was an executive at one of the networks. So he could be a lot more TV friendly and insider-y if he wanted. Glad he's resisted the temptation.