The New York Times depicts a scene from David Brooks’ “$120,000 vacation.” (photo: Thibault Montamat)
David Brooks’ November 13 piece for the New York Times style magazine (11/13/15) reads like a joke. Is the Times columnist seriously regaling readers with talk of his “spectacularly expensive hopscotch” on a “self-contained luxury caravan”?
The piece, titled “My $120,000 Vacation,” details Brooks time flying around the world on a Four Seasons-branded private jet; and, yes, the paper paid for it. (Public editor Margaret Sullivan noted that the paper paid for “the portion of that trip for which Mr. Brooks was present”—which works out to about $35,000.)
So is the Times seriously asking for our interest in the “merits and demerits of such pampered high-end travel,” in how much Brooks enjoyed his “superfluous” second bottle of champagne, and how he “wished there had been a little more pretense and a little more intellectual and spiritual ambition” among his fellow travelers from the “lower end of the upper class”?
Are we meant to chuckle at his closing line: “Of course, we all have a responsibility to reduce inequality in our society. But maybe not every day”?
It’s almost a “no comment.” Almost.
Selfies at Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace (photo: Thibault Montamat)
Because Brooks isn’t a travel writer. Most days, the Times wants us to take seriously his opinion on public assistance, which is that welfare “has served as a cushion, not a ladder,” because “the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology.”
Or on democracy: American politics has become “neurotically democratic,” Brooks has said, suggesting instead a process that would be
unapologetically elitist. Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms…and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through.
Or on college campus activists, whose “moral fervor is structured by those who seek the innocent purity of the vulnerable victim.”
So at a time when 92 million Americans are out of the labor force, the highest number in four decades, 14.8 percent of the population live below the poverty line, which is $24, 250 for a family of four, when global inequality is skyrocketing such that just 80 billionaires now control the same wealth as 3.5 billion people, the fact that a supposedly “serious” columnist at the country’s “paper of record” thinks it’s cute to talk about how “sometimes it is the structure of things that you shall be pampered and you have no choice but to sit back and accept that fact” seems pretty darn unfunny.
Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the host of CounterSpin.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Conspicuous contempt
Make that “condescension”.
Better?
I’ve wondered, at various moments in my adult life, what conditions would give rise to an actual revolution of the 1789 French or the 1917 Russian variety. A revolt of a large segment of the population resulting from no foreign propaganda or incitements, but only from homegrown conditions.
Do the Power Elite think that their control of society is permanent and impregnable? Does their bad taste know no bounds? Are they (and we) immune to history?
the self-obsessed, socially ignorant, antics of our pampered wealthy reminds us all that they are little different from the chimps and baboons of the natural world.
Mr. Brooks deserves his champagne vacation. After all, trained in the scrivener arts, he serves as an ongoing apologist for the owners of his master’s voice.
A wag once wrote, there now exist three types under our prevailing economic model: servants, enforcers, and sybarites.
Occasionally, the toadies in the first category get a bone for their loyalty and services rendered to the third group. Brooks drools away downing his reward. So it goes.
Be well.
Mr. Brooks doesn’t understand; these are things a privileged man thinks but never says outside his circle.
Pampering Brooks is not the problem. The problem is having him shill for a corrupt political party in the so-called paper of record. The New York Times thereby joins the mass media it so profusely criticizes in relentlessly misinforming the electorate.
$120K to ‘salve his conscience’, eh? He must have some pretty strong qualms about what he’s saying in his columns for it to cost that much. But ‘presstitutes’ at that level don’t come cheap, I guess…
@Doug Latimer
You’re right this article is very condescending, but so what? Do you not know that this site is meant to investigate journalism? This is not an objective matter (not that journalism should be), it is by the very nature of investigations immune to such labels.
This journalist has been exposed as an elitist ‘liberal’ who is likely a warmonger as well. The question is why would a paper that claims to be the bastion of liberalism hire him and ask him to do such a variety of articles?
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