David Brooks has written another one of his “people are broke because they don’t go to church” pieces. It used to be that washing dishes at the YMCA was an ennobling experience that would pay for your college tuition. It used to be that Hollywood directors took the side of the masses and painted workers as the salt of the earth. What went wrong? How come the only way to have any status in our culture is to gain fame or fortune?
Here is where everyone who understands the first thing about the Reagan Revolution balls up their fists and punches Mr. Brooks between the eyes. Your first hint that Mr. Bobo is out of touch is that he’s talking about William James, Franz Capra, and Paul Tillich. We could be having this conversation in 1955 without changing anything.
And all this hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy. I’ve never seen a columnist so convinced that everyone else is as status-conscious as he is himself. What decade was it when we tried to decide as a nation that there was nothing icky about being rich?
That’s right. The 1980’s. Ronald Reagan time. When the Me Generation met the MTV generation and everything went to crap. When Alex P. Keaton turned on his idealistic parents and made it all about making a buck.
Weep for the country.
Words like character, which once suggested traits like renunciation that held back success, now denote traits like self-discipline, which enhance it.
Many rich people once felt compelled to try to square their happiness at being successful with their embarrassment about it. They adopted what Charles Murray calls a code of seemliness (no fancy clothes or cars). Not long ago, many people covered their affluence with a bohemian patina, but that patina has grown increasingly thin.
Now most of us engage in more matter-of-fact boasting: the car stickers that describe the driver’s summers on Martha’s Vineyard, the college window stickers, the mass embrace of luxury brands, even the currency of “likes” on Facebook and Reddit as people unabashedly seek popularity.
The only thing to do is to get thee to a nunnery.
