In case you hadn't heard about this (or had only heard the News Hour version), David Brooks has been catching some flack for this tweet.
Sometimes, Twitter can be a wonderful place to crowdsource a problem. In this case, how do you run up this tab at an airport Applebee's knock-off. It turns out that the food portion of the meal shown in Brooks' tweet cost him quite a bit less...
The restaurant confirmed that
80% of the tab was alcohol, which means that either
Brooks has very expensive tastes in liquor (and the Newark Airport 1911 Smoke House Barbeque has a surprising selection of top shelf bourbons) or he was really relaxed before his flight.
The tweet generated so much buzz that Brooks had to address it on News Hour.
The "apology" (I'm sorry but the scare quotes are pretty much unavoidable) is prime Brooks, pretending the uproar was about unhealthy meals and class
insensitivity, not about trying to pass off a big bar bill as a food
inflation story.
This is, of course, the same tired shtick that the man has been milking for decades, sweeping generalizations with erudite trappings and always a great show of concern and empathy for the less fortunate, the kind of smug noblesse oblige in sociological drag that places like the New York Times can't get enough of.
If long-time readers are getting a sense of déjà vu, it may be because we wrote pretty much this same column six years ago. Brooks launched his career by lying about restaurant tabs, so there's a nice sense of symmetry here.
David Brooks has gotten a lot of
attention for this passage from a recent
column:
I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times
about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are
less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the
lower 80 percent.
Recently I took a friend with only a high
school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich
shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with
sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like
soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if
she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate
Mexican.
American upper-middle-class culture (where the
opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are
completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class.
They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their
chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
Surprisingly few of the commenters, however, have picked up on the
overwhelming sense of déjà vu in the anecdote. One of Brooks early
successes was an essay analyzing class differences in America based on
things like where we ate and shopped. It was a hugely popular and
influential piece, slightly marred by the fact that many of the most
memorable illustrating examples were not true.
Sasha Issenberg did the
definitive take down.
There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false.
According to Amazon.com sales data, one of Goodwin’s strongest markets
has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. That’s probably not, however, QVC
country. “I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the
country,” says Doug Rose, the network’s vice president of merchandising
and brand development. “Generally our audience is female suburban baby
boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas.” Rose’s standard
PowerPoint presentation of the QVC brand includes a map of one zip code
— Beverly Hills, 90210 — covered in little red dots that each represent
one QVC customer address, to debunk “the myth that they’re all little
old ladies in trailer parks eating bonbons all day.”
“Everything
that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red
America do with motors,” Brooks wrote. “When it comes to yard work, they
have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens.” Actually, six of the top 10
states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red.
“We in the
coastal metro Blue areas read more books,” Brooks asserted. A 2003
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater study of America’s most literate
cities doesn’t necessarily agree. Among the study’s criteria was the
presence of bookstores and libraries; 20 of the 30 most literate cities
were in Red states.
“Very few of us,” Brooks wrote of his fellow
Blue Americans, “could name even five NASCAR drivers, although stock-car
races are the best-attended sporting events in the country.” He might
want to take his name-recognition test to the streets of the 2002 NASCAR
Winston Cup Series’s highest-rated television markets — three of the
top five were in Blue states. (Philadelphia was fifth nationally.)
…
As
I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks
ever left his home. “On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I
was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the
most expensive thing on the menu — steak au jus, ’slippery beef pot
pie,’ or whatever — I always failed. I began asking people to direct me
to the most-expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster
or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been
beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and
’seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough
surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not
do it.”
Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red
Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much
surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled
center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It
costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my
waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”
The
easiest way to spend over $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit
the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a
$50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a
lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream
sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy
Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed. After it was
published in the Atlantic, the nearby Mercersburg Academy boarding
school invited Brooks as part of its speaker series. He spent the night
at the inn. “For breakfast I made a goat-cheese-and-sun-dried-tomato
tart,” Sandy said. “He said he just wanted scrambled eggs.”
Issenberg's expose got plenty of attention and you might expect
Brooks to shy away from dubious anecdotes about the dining habits of
“the lower 80 percent.” We might even use this as a jumping off point
for a critique of Brooks's character (a man who teaches a course
entitled “humility” kind of opens himself up for that sort of thing),
but that would be a rather petty exercise of questionable value.
The
important question is not "what kind of man is David Brooks?" But "why
does someone like David Brooks do so well in 21st-century American
journalism?"
David Brooks has a
long history
of distorting events, omitting pertinent details, making convenient
mistakes, and sometimes simply making shit up. The New York Times knew
about all this when they hired him, but it didn't particularly bother
them because David Brooks was and is the ideal conservative columnist
for the paper.
This is because Brooks, better than anyone else,
addresses the fundamental paradox of the New York Times political
identity, that of a basically liberal paper with a legacy of class
bigotry going back at least to the 19th century. Brooks writes
thoughtful, literate, often elegant columns that let the readers feel
bad, but in a good way, a way that never uncomfortably challenges deeply
held beliefs.
There is something almost cute about Brooks'
apparent belief that a mishmash of Food Network reruns and lifestyle
porn constitute some kind of impenetrable cultural code. It's a bit like
listening to second-graders who are convinced they've fooled the
grownups when they speak in pig Latin. For the target audience, however,
it is a nearly ideal message. It perfectly balances liberal guilt with a
sense of class superiority.
To be fair, there are valid points
here (as there are with almost all of Brooks' columns) -- Inequality and
a lack of mobility are massive problems and the imbalance in education
expenditure greatly exacerbates the issues. (I'm a bit more skeptical
about the zoning explanation.) – though it's worth noting that the
drivers of the great compression (highly progressive taxes, stronger
social safety nets, substantial government investment in education,
infrastructure and research) don't make much of an appearance.
Brooks
is not some soulless hack like Bret Stephens, He is an intelligent,
interesting, and in all probability, generally sincere writer. He is
also a deeply flawed one, and those flaws and the way his employers
react to them, are often highly informative.
