Prometheus 6

I read Pedantry because is is, for the most part, an intellectual and cultural discussion. A break from the news and politics. So when Scott Martens decides an article is worth a high-level fisking, I read. Never mind that David Brooks is always an easy target.

What would you think of someone who said that their debts weren't a problem, because they were sure to win the lottery before their debts caught up with them? The illusion Brooks is praising is no different in nature.

I wasted four years of my life in American suburbia believing that if only I had a little more stock in my Schwab account, I could quit working and really live. I resent Brooks telling me that this fantasy - this delusion that took away time that I can never win back - was a good thing. I saw this sort of delusion all around me when I lived among the subjects of Brooks' analysis. Brooks believes that he is seeing some grand manifestation of the American Zeitgeist. There is no American Zeitgeist - what is going on here is quite immediate and material. It is the effect of how American society is structured, and it isn't always a blessing.

The failure to stop and think, to try to actually live in the now instead of, as Brooks puts it, having a "future-minded mentality", does immense damage to America. He doesn't do justice to the anti-sprawl advocates. This dream of a new world in the next development is their nightmare. Their vision is of urbanisation spreading like a forest fire: an expanding fringe of brightness and activity enclosing an ever larger area of decay and destruction. Brooks' complaints about the decline of the inner suburbs are identical to complaints about the inner cities in the 50's and 60's.

Brooks' exurbias have a seedy side. The exurbs are more than a little like Potemkin villiages. They thrive on the backs of a lot of unseen labour - factories and farms whose workers live very different lives, construction workers who can't live in the houses they build or shop in the malls they pave, the people who make their food and scan their groceries. That population lives very differently. Brooks pays them only the slightest bit of attention, when he talks about someone who has "left behind that exorbitant mortgage, that long commute, all those weird people who watch 'My Daughter Is a Slut' on daytime TV talk shows." They don't wear Land's End clothes. They don't fit in his Zeigeist, but they are just as real and just as important.