David Brooks may be a talented writer, an affable fellow, and a reasonable-minded pundit─but he sure is lazy! If you've gotten used to seeing a columnist wander down to a protest─the recent conservative protesters on Capitol Hill, for example─interview a handful of people ("Are you guys racist? No? Good") and file a column, you still will be impressed with how Brooks spins anecdote into argument. Did he go down to cover the protests last Saturday? No, he went for a jog and stumbled into them. Did he interview anybody? If he did, he did not mention them. Is that because he interwove his observations with data analysis, rigorous argumentation, or interviews with experts or newsmakers?
No. Brooks devoted an entire column to arguing that the conservative outrage at President Obama is not racist, neither personally nor even in a nebulous political sense, and his sole piece of evidence was what he witnessed while standing around on the National Mall. And what did he witness? The white protesters "mingling" with an African-American cultural celebration, buying the food at the event, and watching the musical performances, without any fights breaking out. In other words, if you buy lunch from a black person and do not yell at her while ordering, you aren't racist. Does that mean white people never bought lunch from black people or listened to their music back in the days of segregation? Or if they did, does that mean Brooks thinks segregationists were not racist either? The laziness is intellectual, not merely reportorial.
Reasonable people can disagree about where racism starts. Or better yet, they can acknowledge that many cases fall into a gray area. Is conservatives' obsession with ACORN and the clever stunt they recently pulled motivated by racism? Not necessarily, but then again, the guy who posed as a pimp when he went into the ACORN offices said on Fox News that he isn't really a pimp because he is "the whitest guy there is." Was Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during Obama's address to Congress related to the fact that he has a fondness for old segregationists and the Confederacy? Maybe not; maybe he just thinks illegal immigrants will sneak on to the health-care rolls and that is a really bad thing for society, but it's not an unfair question to raise. Is every individual who worries about stimulus spending, financial regulation, or an increase in government involvement in health care a racist? Obviously not. But what about Rush Limbaugh, who recently claimed that "white kids get beat up" in "Obama's America" and appeared to suggest that schoolbuses should be resegregated as a result? Dittoheads and Tea Partiers are, to say the least, overlapping groups.
"Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there," says Brooks. "But my impression is that race is largely beside the point." That's a cop-out. There are ways of at least trying to ascertain what people believe: from opinion polling, interviewing folks, or looking at the statements of their leaders. You do not need a machine for peering into the soul of someone who says the things that Rush Limbaugh did.
Brooks is entitled to his opinion that the grassroots protesters are not motivated by personal animus for Obama, or that their animus is not driven, even partially, by race or xenophobia. But anyone who gets paid to write for a living owes his readers a more honest effort to prove that point than just riffing on what he learned from a five-minute jogging break, and a long digression on the history of agrarian populism that the one author he cites disagrees with.
Alternatively, Brooks can stick to a policy of reporting by observation in his daily routine─hey, it's good work if you can get it. Here are some suggested Panglossian Brooks columns for the future:
-"The minimum wage is not too low, because the janitor in my office building looks well fed."
-"Teenage girls should stop being so promiscuous. I heard about this one girl who totally got pregnant." (Actually, he sort of already wrote that one.)
-"The Arab world loves us! When I went on vacation in Egypt the people who worked in my hotel kept smiling at me and asking how they could make me more comfortable."
Leave more suggestions in the comment box.
