Op-Ed Columnist: Public Hedonism and Private Restraint
By DAVID BROOKS
American pop culture may look trashy, but America’s social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair.
via Rudy
Fascinating Article
April 22, 2005 by 3 Comments
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons
Wade,
I’ve been reading your blog ever since Chris K turned me on to it and we had lost touch since I moved to the U.K. and you away from B’ham. Today’s hit on my RSS feed piqued my interest because I had read the article prior to you highlighting it and I thought Brooks was out to lunch. Let me copy and paste a few lines that we of note:
“Second, it’s becoming clear that we are seeing the denouement of one of the longest and increasingly boring plays on Broadway, the culture war….But today’s young people appear not to have taken a side in this war; they’ve just left it behind. For them, the personal is not political”
If we take Brooks at his word, that would mean that all kids are either libertarian or on the left of the political spectrum. Is Brooks saying the culture wars are over and the Left won? I’d like to think so, but even I’m not making that claim.
Or how about this one, “In other words, American pop culture may look trashy, but America’s social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair.”
Of course American culture is changing, but is it undergoing such a fundamental change that we are seeing improvements and repair? Brooks sites some stats (from who knows where) about teen sex, but that is hardly the whole picture of American pop culture. We still have a culture that consumes way more than it can afford, still aborts thousands of fetuses a year, still pollutes with reckless abandon and still continues to reward people who used illegal or immoral tactics to get there (i.e. baseball and Enron)
Sorry Mr. Brooks. You and I don’t share the same culture and I’m afraid the culture shock might be too great for us to switch.
Mike–great to hear from you! Thanks for chiming in.
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