David Brooks: Still Needs to Get Out of the House

SJ has an obsession with Our Mr. Brooks, for reasons beyond our understanding. The guy is an intellectual lightweight whose only purpose seems to make liberals like SJ nostalgic about William Safire. (We started being nostalgic rather early, but that is because we are usually ahead of the curve.) But today Brooks committed a truly indecent act of journalism. Apparently, having separate checking accounts violates the sanctity of the family--which for Brooks is always mommy-daddy-me as Deleuze & Guattari charmingly put it-- and the family is realm that must be kept purified of the capitalist wolves outside or western civilization is in deep trouble.

Get out of here, as Elaine would say. What is Brooks' evidence for what makes a happy family? A story by Tolstoy. Wewonder if Our Mr. Brooks is aware that Tolstoy is not writing about most Russians, considering that they were mainly serfs. So OMB has mistaken fiction for sociology. SJ agrees with Brooks that Tolstoy is much better reading than sociology, but then we prefer Anna Karenina, which, hmm, concerns a woman who is unfulfilled in her marriage, as does Middlemarch and Madame Bovary. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Victorian fiction is about infidelity or unfulfilled women. We should check if these couples had separate banking accounts.