Someone could make a living (or at least a blogging) hating on David Brooks. (Indeed, someones do. Try googling “I hate David Brooks.”) Today’s column, apparently the outline for a commencement speech (is it possible that no citadel of higher learning invited Brooks to give their grads a sendoff?), is the same old thing he’s been peddling in his columns and his book for awhile now: a hash of animus toward “expressive individualism” (see Habits of the Heart for maybe the best version of this argument and for a good example of how it inevitably ends up affirming the protestant work ethic), rejection of the idea of being-over-doing (as if this were the prevailing ethic of our time, rather than a straw man put up by people who think we just don’t do enough), affirmation of “expertise,” and wishful thinking about the innate goodness of us all (especially the successful and rich), but I’ve done my hating, and I have to agree with what a friend of Mark Engler’s said: “Mocking David Brooks is somehow both the lowest of low-hanging fruit and vital to our democracy. It’s a puzzle.” An important thing to do, in other words, but one that devolves into vice the more you do it. I’ve done my bit, but I don’t want to end up needing glasses, let alone going blind, so no more.
But here’s what’s worth hating on this morning. I paid my money to the New York Times so that I can legitimately read more than twenty articles a month. I promptly forgot how much that cost me, but whatever it is, shouldn’t it exempt me from those ads that darken whatever I’m reading, splash across my screen, take forever to load in, and withhold the “click here to close” X for a mercilessly long time? At least when a cat lies down on your newspaper, it doesn’t try to get you to buy anything.
