FACE-OFFDavid Brooks vs. Thomas Frank
At first glance, the gently mocking social satire of conservative pundit David Brooks and the fire-breathing polemics of lefty author Thomas Frank would seem to have little in common. A side-by-side reading of their new books, "On Paradise Drive" and "What's the Matter With Kansas?," however, reveals some surprising similarities. |
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| David Brooks |  | Thomas Frank | ||
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The opening gambit
"Let's take a drive. Let's start downtown in one of those urban bohemian neighborhoods, and then let's drive through the inner-ring suburbs and on to the outer suburbs and the exurbs and the small towns and beyond. Let's take a glimpse at how Americans really live at the start of the twenty-first century in their everyday, ordinary lives." |
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The opening gambit
"The poorest community in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80 percent. . .. People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about." |
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The Big Idea
"Are we as shallow as we look? . . . [Some observers] sense that Americans, even suburban middle-class Americans, aren't motivated primarily by grubby bourgeois ambitions but by a set of moral yearnings and visionary dreams that they can't explain even to themselves." |
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The Big Idea
The Great Backlash: "Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. . .. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A. . .. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes." |
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The God's eye view
In exurbia, it's "as if Zeus came down and started plopping vast towns in the middle of the farmland and the desert overnight. Boom! A master planned community! Boom! A big-box mall! Boom! A rec center, pool, and four thousand soccer fields! The food courts come first, and the people follow. |
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The God's eye view
"The block Tim Golba lives on is a tidy row of simple suburban homes built in the seventies. . .. It's the sort of neighborhood that hasn't aged too well: The houses all hew to the same general design, with only a few cheap ornamental features -- fake balconies, plywood fleurs-de-lis -- to dress up the box and distinguish one from another." |
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The theory of political vapidity
"Theology is too troubling a topic for general conversation, and politics is not that interesting, so the new neighbors converse happily about how much better the traffic is here than wherever they used to live." |
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The theory of political derangement
"In its implacable bitterness Kansas holds up a mirror to the rest of us. . .. [H]ere is where we can see the deranged gradually become normal, where we look into that handsome, confident, reassuring, all-American face . . . and realize that we are staring into the eyes of a lunatic." |
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On French intellectuals
"The quintessential French love letter to the U.S. is Jean Baudrillard's 1986 book, `America.' . . . `Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity,' he writes. Aah! Brilliant! A Puerile Paradox! One pictures him posing like a great Gallic hunter next to this bon mot he has bagged on the American desert." |
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On anti-intellectuals
"The Republicans today are the party of anti-intellectualism, of rough frontier contempt for sophisticated ideas and pantywaist book-learning. `Harvard Hates America,' screamed an early backlash classic, and today's GOP hates Harvard right back." |
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On David Brooks
"One simply must tolerate imprecision of the poetic if one is to grasp the true and powerful essence of a place or people. Since I am no poet, I will try to use humor to get at the essence of the way we live, comic sociology." |
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On David Brooks
As "a clue into the deepest predilections of the backlash mind, Brooks's [Red America/Blue America] scheme is a revelation. What divides Americans is authenticity, not something hard and ugly like economics." |
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The stirring conclusion
The past century's "radicals, intellectuals, artists, revolutionaries, and dissidents . . . failed to see what Whitman saw, that America is the permanent revolution, that deep in middle-American life, even in the most placid-seeming suburb, there is an unquenchable longing and hope, and it is in committing to far-off dreams that we fight the insularity and the trivialization that threaten to swallow us up every day." |
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The apocalyptic conclusion
"Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness." |
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