The Public Intellectual

 

Chicago Times, "The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances"

Daily Patriot (Harrisburg, PA), "Silly remarks. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of."

--Reaction to President Lincoln's address at the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania November 19, 1863.

David Brooks

Even before there was television, before the internet, before X, there were people who could convey their thoughts to millions of people and have those thoughts considered, who could mold opinion, instigate discussion. Henry David Thoreau could sit in his cabin and write "Civil Disobedience" and "Walden" and his mind could touch the imperfect body politic.

Then came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who could reach people in their living rooms via radio.

And then Walter Cronkite came into millions of homes with his carefully apolitical "CBS Evening News."

Mad Dog has to admit, he is as suspectable as anyone, more than most, as he now watches PBS News nightly, reads, actually reads not just the cartoons but articles, every week in the "New Yorker" and lately has added "The Atlantic."

More often that not, Mad Dog finds himself flinging a magazine across the room, shouting, "What piffle! What trumpery! What sophistry!"

And yet, with each new issue arriving at his door, with every evening the TV beckons, and Mad Dog looks with hopeful eyes toward an epiphany which never comes.

Dudley Dudley, Hero of the NH Seacoast

There are some public figures who have been given a spot on national TV, in newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal which have massive, expensive, extensive distribution. They have the stage and the spotlight. From some occult process a select few have been chosen by some powers to speak to the masses. 

For years, I've watched David Brooks, with whom I have a love/hate relationship, but I can't say our relationship has grown old. It's simply aged.

Why I still read him, I cannot say. Maybe a large part of it is he is still there. I don't care if he is widely read or influential--I care whether I agree with him when I read him and whether I find myself saying, "True that. Finally, someone has put into words my own inchoate thoughts."

That is rare, nowadays, with David or with anyone else.

The American Dream

Jill Lepore, George Packer get it right more often than not, but they too often meander away from the salient point.

Evan Osnos reports more than he tries to elucidate or persuade, and his recent piece on "The Oligarch in Chief" mentions a woman named Erica Payne, who has organized a group called "Patriotic Millionaires" who says its the mission of her group to avoid the mistakes of the intolerant left: "We're not going to talk about all this stuff that everybody else wants to talk about...transgender, L.G.B.T.Q, guns--everything that makes everybody mad."

I read that and said, "Finally!"

But then there is David saying stuff like this: "Nations that hang together through crisis have a strong national identity--they return to their roots. They have a leader who replaces the amoralism of the nihilists, or, say, the immorality of slavery, with a strong redefinition of the nation's moral mission, the way Lincoln redefined America at Gettysburg."

Back to Our National  Roots

And that's where Mad Dog goes into orbit. 

The fact is, Brooks is not revealing a forgotten or unappreciated past; he is creating a myth of a world which never existed and which is the sort of Disney history we teach children in some public schools. Brooks is engaging in that dreamworld of Stephen Speilberg, who, in a typically Spielberg moment in his movie "Lincoln" he has two Union soldiers, one Black, reciting back to Lincoln his words from the Gettysburg Address, as if that wonderful coda actually reached and was taken to heart by the vast armies of the Union. As if that dramatic moment at Gettysburg, which actually, was not so dramatic, in the days before public address systems and sound amplification, but which did get recorded in some manner and eventually some people heard about it. 

But in a Spielberg-esque/Brooks telling, these soldiers now knew what they were fighting for, and would go out singing the Gettysburg address, like Onward Christian soldiers, and take it to the battlefield trampling out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored. 

Yikes.

There was no one, unified nation in 1863. Most of the soldiers who died at Gettysburg had no desire to free Negro slaves. The armies that fought for the Union were often comprised of coerced soldiers who wanted to leave and go back home.  For all that has been said about Lincoln's extraordinary sermon at Gettysburg, it was just that, a wish for what he hoped the nation could be, not what it was.  He was trying to lead a second American revolution, but until Grant ground down the Army of Northern Virginia, there was no such entity. And when the war was finally about to be concluded, Lincoln looked back over it and tried to make sense of it in his immortal Second Inaugural Address, and that, as Frederick Douglass (a frequent critic of Lincoln) said, was a "sacred effort."

And what is that "strong national identity" Brooks speaks of? Drive around the states of the old Confederacy, or the Mountain West or the Southwest from Arizona to Texas to Oklahoma and tell me what that national identity is.

Sherman, Obadiah Youngblood

And what does he mean by a nation returning to its roots? What are the American roots? No discussion of roots can occur without examining the slave culture of the South, or of the ongoing insurrection of Jim Crow, that guerilla warfare employing the Ku Klux Klan and lynching, the ruthless suppression of unions from Washington State to Pittsburgh to Chicago. 

Read American history as written by Howard Zinn or even Oliver Stone, or Emma Goldman, and find us some common roots. 

What Brooks, and what so many other public intellectuals give us is nothing better than the typical Sunday sermon about a fantasy he wants to believe in, which he wants us to embrace as reality, but which is a history blind to reality.

And there, my friends, you have the true art of the Public Intellectual.