When A No-Class Hump Talks Down to the Middle Class About Class

"I'm that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust." - Congressman David Crockett
(David) Brooks's conclusion is clear:
Davy Crockett was a gangster rapper.     Dr. Cleveland

"I suck...I can’t remember what I said but my mother told me I was extremely stupid.” - David Brooks*

Few public persons make my skin crawl like " cultural commentator" David Brooks.   Many other Americans feel the same about Brooks.

David Brooks is the go-to-voice of the elite against everyone else,  in the drag of a ' sober, sane and pliable conservative.'  You can read David Brooks in the American elitist rags, New York Times and the laughable Washington Post and watch Dave on PBS, ABC and other organs piping away for a corporatist elite America.

Brooks is a faux- person and author of the marvelously dull Bobos in Paradise.  I read it. It stinks on ice.  For cultural commentary go to P.J. O' Rourke, a man of intellectual heft and wit, but for pure oleaginous butt-munching propaganda, ask Dave Brooks.

Brooks is famously ludicrous for drooling over Barack Obama's smartly creased britches and Babesplains politics with the the bumptious Mark Shields and the prissy virago Judy Woodruff.

Today, this smarmy dope complains that the upper-middle class ( people with way more money than I will ever dream of) is ruining America, because Dave sees them as Hippies with too much time, treasure and absolutely no talent.  These  moneyed Hippies, like Dave himself, hold college and advanced degrees over the souls of the masses as proof that they are a priori better persons than high school diploma and GED people, but vastly superior to the people their policies enslave. This Brooks fart-in-a- windstorm of an Op-Ed for the New York Times offers servings of smarm like this:

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.”

Gee, unlettered people appreciate only Mexican, or Chinese, or Pizza?

Oh, Eat me!

Dave was braced, by a book.  I was braced by Officer Frank Sims, CPD at Hites on 79th Wood in 1969, because I was standing with Mike McKeating.

Eat me, again!

Most of my contemporaries chose entering the American workforce, the military and law enforcement over Loyola, DePaul, UICC, or Illinois State.  They own diplomas from CVS, Hubbard, Harper, Little Flower, Brother Rice, Leo, Maria, Bogan, Calumet, Mount Carmel, Weber, Lindbloom and De La Salle high schools and know all about not only soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette, but also galumpki, dolmades, pierogi, pascki, mazukas and colcannon.

The guys who went to war in late 1960's and early 1970's also are familiar with pho, banh gio and corned beef and cabbage banh mi.

Yet, syrupy Dave wants all and sundry to accept the fact that the upper-middle class has somehow developed an invisible electric-eye security fence ready to zap the shins of diploma holders and scare them out of tony eateries.  "Yo, Dog!  Don't go there!  You need an advanced degree in Phallic Studies from Occidental.  The Dick Degree, Fool!**"

I don't know any Old Money people.  You pedigree'd scions of the Mayflowe with given names like Increase, Purchase, Atonement, Sodomy and Commerce.  People who drive beaters and wear clothes from the Truman Era handed down from Mater and Pater and open wrestling farms, or work in the State Department.

The guys I know who went to Brown, Yale and Princeton won  scholarships and played football and they went to work teaching high school, working with under-funded kids, Boeing Corporation and the NSA.  They were never asked to join Skull and Bones.

I know many nouveau riche folks - upper-middle class, or Brooks' Bobos.  One guy went to Notre Dame from a dirt farm in the Texas panhandle and became the leading Real Estate name in Chicago.  He treats janitors and cleaning crews like they were Saudi Royalty.   Another made dolls and billions and taught kids at Leo what hard work can do for good. Money is only a tool.   Happiness lies far beyond the curve the dollar sign.

I know bartenders and roofers who have read more Milton, Conrad, Turgeniev and Joyce than the English Department of De Paul University and understood what they wrote and why the wrote even better.

David Brooks wrote this piece because he was 'braced' by a study that agreed with the crap on the pages of Bobos in Paradise.

He is an elitist cheerleader and works for some very nasty people. As my high school classmate who took four years of Latin, would say, Lector cave, or Cave ne qui legit.  

Whatever! How about some Mexican.  That was not a question.




*Biography
David Brooks is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on “PBS News Hour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He teaches at Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the bestselling author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement; Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There; and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. He has three children and lives in Maryland.

**The Phallus: Occidental College:
It’s difficult to get to grips with the exact nature of this course – if you’ll pardon the pun. It’s cited as studies  “between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism” but is actually a survey offered by this distinguished college’s department of critical theory and social justice.