david brooks

dear david brooks,

your recent article "high-five nation" was just the worst. let me explain why.

you say that "[on v-j day] the allies had...completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. and yet there was no chest-beating." maybe there was no exuberance on v-j day because we exploded and incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in japan. maybe people recognized the frightening future implications of our use of nuclear weapons. maybe it wasn't because those were more modest times.

you call "individual expressionism" a capitalistic routine. you are wrong. sure, aspects of it are frequently co-opted by corporate interests, but there are vital movements (do-it-yourselfers, backyard farmers, much of the bicycle culture, to name a few that come immediately to mind) whose individually expressive members are driven not by money, but by intellectual curiosity and desire for self-sufficiency and sustainability. 

you use michael jordan's basketball hall of fame induction speech as an example of immodesty. can't m.j. allow himself a little self congratulation for the simple reason that he is the greatest basketball player to have ever lived? and because he was being inducted into the basketball hall of fame? there is nothing wrong with him reflecting publicly a little bit on his success in front of people who appreciate his accomplishments. he is frequently quoted as saying that his predecessors made his success possible. is the forced aw-shucksism prevalent among athletes today better than a little honest discussion? do you really think michael jordan is trying to bolster his resume at this stage in the game? shit.

later, you essentially compare the actions of contemporary professional athletes and entertainers, people who are paid to get attention, to those of soldiers and average americans at the end of a brutal two-front war; a war in which we unleashed the most fearsome human-made device ever devised on a civilian population. do you really think that our soldiers today would unabashedly celebrate the use of nuclear weapons on our enemies? do you even think that terrell owens would pretend to pull down his pants and moon afganistan or that dikembe mutombo would wag his finger at iraq if we obliterated their major metropolitan areas? 

you might remember babe ruth's called shot in 1932, which is possibly one of the cockiest gestures of all time. not just calling the shot, but the mocking and grandstanding the accompanied his trot around the bases. if there wasn't a precedent for public celebrations of personal accomplishments before, that certainly set it. 

an opinion column at the new york times? you can say anything you want to hundreds of thousands of intelligent people. don't fucking call me and my contemporaries immodest and self-indulgent and then back it up with illogical nonsense.