the diary of antoine roquentin

I know I’ve been posting a lot of my schoolwork, but I absolutely loved writing this paper and it’s probably the most satirical and biting thing I’ve ever written. The prompt was to analyze these two New York Times articles on the problems with our “culture.”

The first column: David Brooks’s “High Five Nation” 9/15/09

The second column: Bob Herbert’s “Behind the Façade” 7/3/09

I turned this in last week but haven’t gotten it back yet. However, my critical writing professor tapped me on the shoulder on my way out of class today and said that she really liked my ideas and that we should have a talk sometime, which makes me think I got an A.

[EDIT: She loved it, and I got an A both on content and style.]

Antoine Roquentin
Critical Writing
Susan Fischer

High-Five Dystopia

Two columns in the New York Times, David Brooks’ “High-Five Nation,” published September 15, 2009, and Bob Herbert’s “Behind the Façade,” published July 3, 2009, paint a picture of a morally bankrupt culture obsessed with self-congratulation, immodesty, and infantile fantasy. Herbert’s uses the caricature of a childish, self-indulgent Michael Jackson as a metaphor for the prevailing attitudes of our time. Brooks, while writing in a similar vein, uses the image of a humbled America at the end of World War II as the shining example of a people who had achieved so much while displaying mass modesty.

Where Brooks’ backward-looking vision seems to be intended less to indict the present than to venerate the past, Herbert doesn’t spare our “culture” any criticism, linking Reagan’s willy-nilly deregulation of the economy with a sort of cultural deregulation, where things once thought to be childish and immature were allowed and even encouraged. Herbert writes: “Jackson was the perfect star for the era, the embodiment of fantasy gone wild.” It’s difficult to argue with his assertion that our behavior as a society has moved more and more beyond self-indulgence to abject fantasy. As he writes, “[m]ost of the nation seemed fine with the idea of going to war without a draft and without raising taxes.”

Brooks and Herbert have very different rhetorical styles in play in each column. Brooks, with his nostalgia for better times far behind, uses a detailed description of the subdued but joyous feeling at the end of World War II in America to make us pine for those bygone days of humility. “The war produced such monumental effects, and such rivers of blood, that the individual ego seemed petty in comparison[,]” he writes. Herbert, on the other hand, takes a different tack by listing the most egregious of our failures both as a society and as individuals: politicians abandoning the poor, repackaging a mountain of debt as an economic boom, decimating American jobs, and “[letting] New Orleans drown.” The angry staccato of these lines show that Herbert isn’t willing to pine for modesty. We should be ashamed of what we’ve done. Like wayward children, Herbert seems to be saying that before we can move forward, someone needs to become enraged about this type of shortsighted, unrealistic behavior. Talking of Jackson’s pedophilia cases, “the details of which would make your hair stand on end[,]” Herbert links the Jackson fever that erupted after his death to a recapitulation of the worst traits of our society, that of our ability to forget horrendous crimes and opt for fantasy over reality.

Despite using a more subtle rhetorical style than Herbert’s, Brooks makes a similar jab at our complacency and self-satisfaction by subtly contrasting the heroic achievements and sacrifices of World War II with the shameless self-congratulatory buzz that has come to pervade our society. Instead of listing our failures as a society, Brooks seems to focus on individual acts of egotism, such as the iconic episode of “Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won.” He ties this to earlier developments in what he posits as a gradual slide from modesty to egomania. Linking the ubiquity of advertising to the development of shameless self-promotion, from Muhammad Ali telling everyone who would listen that he was the greatest of all time, to Norman Mailer’s book “Advertisements for Myself,” Brooks is highly skeptical of this direction we’ve taken. As he puts it, “This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live.” His subtler message doesn’t convey the sense of urgency that Herbert’s does: Brooks’s most egregious example of our collective hubris is Michael Jordan’s self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech.

In using a lighter touch, Brooks dilutes the seriousness of his argument, making it sound like a curious historical anecdote. Herbert makes the opposite mistake: using the fanciful metaphor of Michael Jackson ends up making his argument look hyperbolic and his assessment of our lack of collective restraint a bit laughable. Despite being a bit over-the-top, the metaphor does highlight our society’s obsession with meaningless ephemera: Twitter trends, nip slips, and best-dressed lists taking over the space in our consciousness once devoted to hard analysis of society’s efficacy. As Herbert astutely notes,“[i]t was almost as if the adults had gone into hiding.”

Another key area that the arguments differ is where the two columnists speak of the implications of our “problem with no name.” Where Herbert seems primarily concerned with the arenas of public policy and our lack of ability as a society to take responsibility for our frivolous and indolent ways, Brooks seems to resort to giving our society an etiquette lesson from a time that is not relevant to 2010. His big metaphor is that of a radio program sent out to the troops the day of the victory in World War II with celebrities sending a message of humility to be a counterpoint against the grandiosity and pomp of the Fascists. Instead of commenting on Kanye West, Brooks would do well to highlight the ills of actual Americans. Herbert does this well, showing a more linear progression instead of Brooks’ flash-forward from the 1940s to now, as if there were no one to take the blame for the social changes that created these grevious faux pas that offend Brooks’ delicate sensibilities. As Herbert writes, “Ronald Reagan was president, making promises he couldn’t keep about taxes and deficits[.] The movie ‘Wall Street’ would soon appear, accurately reflecting the nation’s wholesale acceptance of unrestrained greed and other excesses of the rich and powerful.” Celebrities will always be a capricious bunch, but what’s unconscionable is when American society thinks that we can get away with the same shenanigans, which is exactly what happened.

Brooks and Herbert are focusing on a growing problem in our society, one that has already borne fruit as an ill-informed electorate fixated on meaningless ephemera, knowing more about the characters on Dancing With the Stars than the legislators that represent them. However, both columnists carefully skirt the idea just below the surface: that the media plays an increasing role in churning out people with these types of shortsighted, infantile behaviors. The New York Times itself is a dinosaur, and once it inevitably goes bankrupt, the greased wheels of shallowness and self-absorption will roll on unchecked. What possible check or balance could we have on our masturbatory psyche as a nation? While our schools fail, more and more people fall into poverty, and healthcare costs spiral out of control, what are we thinking about as a people? We’re busy living the lives of people even more spoiled and childish than ourselves on television.

The real fear is for the next generation—the generation that views the childish antics of the people on reality television as a background level of vapidity. In a world completely removed from any kind of societal context, everything becomes reality television. Did 200,000 people really die in Haiti, or is this just CNN’s reality show of the minute? As Bob Herbert has so astutely points out, “we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind.” We will reap the dividends of our shortsighted choices, and soon we will be back to our humbled selves, but until then, can’t we just have one more Coach bag? One more trip to Neiman Marcus? One more vacation to the Côte d’Azur? Someday, the free ride of the rich will come to a crashing halt, and the nation will have to do a lot of hard thinking about what an entire society obsessed with supporting the whims of the leisure class means.