I'm the last person to ask for advice about people. Especially women...If she was here I'd probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about 5 minutes. Ain't that ridiculous?... Naw, it ain't really. 'Cause being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being an old decrepit bag of bones, that's what's ridiculous.
--Sam the Lion, "The Last Picture Show."
Imagine this life changing event: After years of rejection and being ignored, your book has finally been accepted for publication by a storied New York publisher and you are invited to the American Booksellers Convention at the Convention Center in Washington, D.C.
You have written about the most important subject of your life, but 19 publishers returned the manuscript, either unopened or with a letter, "Thank you for your submission, but we find your book does not meet the needs for our current list." One woman, an editor fresh out of Princeton, liked it, but passed on it. At least she wrote an actual rejection note.
Then, just after you hauled 19 manuscripts (400 pages each) out to the dumpster, you realize you cannot account for the 20th, and you check your list and you realize it was that one you dropped off with some ninety-nine year old woman at the Beacon Street, Boston office of a New York publisher, and you are not sure he ever even got it. That secretary may have died before he got back from lunch. So you phone his office, and he answers--the secretary probably did die--and he says, "Oh, right. Well, don't get your hopes up, but I gave it to my editor and he said he thought it had some merit, and I'll send along his comments."
The "editor," it turns out, is a twenty-something college drop out named Brendan, who works in a Cambridge bookstore and lives in his parents' basement in Charlestown, but whenever this publisher stops by the bookstore, he chats about books with this guy, and the publisher is impressed by his insights into literature. In fact, this publisher had published Katherine Anne Porter, and he was astonished that this twenty-something even knew who she was, never mind that Brendan could say exactly why "Ship of Fools" and "Old Mortality" were such fine works of art.
So, the publisher started dropping off manuscripts with Brendan, and Brendan didn't find much in any of them, until he read your book. "Needs some cropping and direction, but some scenes of considerable power and some very good sentences."
And the rest is, as they say, unlikely history. The book is sold to the Literary Guild as its main selection for the month of March. Rejected by 19 publishers and at least one Ivy League editor, seen by a blue collar reader in a Boston bookstore.
And you get invited to a few star studded parties in New York City, where you meet famous people, who turn out to be disappointing, and less than meets the eye.
And, finally, the book is officially published and presented to the world at the American Booksellers' Convention in the nation's capital.
And you arrive, and here is the part I've been leading up to: you find the Convention Center, which is a city block large, and you take the elevator up to the exhibition hall, and you get off and look around and there is a sea of stalls, filled with books, which makes the Library of Congress look like your corner Mom and Pop bookstore: Fifty thousand titles that year. (In 2026, it would be 650,000, and that does not include the large self publishing list.)
And you look around, and you can only by asking at various information booths, find your publisher's kiosk area, and there, nestled among scores of celebrity author books, books by authors with audiences, books by authors who write novels about jockeys and some who write about suburban infidelity or sexual repression, books about cats and self help books, is a copy of your book.
And so you have been published.
And you think about the visits you made with various literary agents because someone told you you needed an agent, but you couldn't understand why, since you had already sold your book to the publisher, but the agents smile demurely and say, "Well, but you need someone to champion your cause."
But now you think: Yikes!
How does anyone ever get heard in this ocean of voice?
So that's what this post is about: Who gets to offer advice? How are they chosen from among that vast ocean roar of voices and sounds? Who gets the microphone? And why. And How?
Somehow, some people do get heard; they do occupy the spot light and some get into that spot light regularly. And people listen to them, for advice.
Garry Trudeau's latest Doonesbury has the president of Walden University saying to the graduates at the commencement ceremony, "Graduates, I'm sorry to report we were unable to find a speaker for today. With AI transforming every aspect of life at warp speed, it seems non one felt up to offering advice to this year's class. So, instead, I'd like each of you to take out your phones and spend a few moments consuming wisdom from your preferred online influencer."
And so, there we are.
Advice.
Opinion.
Which brings me to David Brooks.
David Brooks commands big bucks from speakers bureaus. He lectures a Yale, at the University of Chicago. He gives commencement speeches. He has stopped writing his newspaper columns, but he continues to appear each week on the PBS Newshour in a segment with Jonathan Capehart, called "Brooks and Capehart."
Last Friday, he was asked his opinion of the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, and Brooks, with admirable concision, said, "He's a moral degenerate." Brooks went on to say why: Platner has a tattoo which may be a Nazi meme; he has abused and intimidated women and he has written nasty Reddit posts in the past.
There are 330 million Americans and 100 U.S. Senators, Brooks notes, and we can't do better than Platner? Never mind the fact there are only 1.4 million Mainers, less than 100,000 voters actually vote, a quarter of those are over 65, so, not to quibble, but the willing and able to become the next U.S. Senator do not number in the millions.
But, really, what was Brooks saying?
He does not like Platner because Platner does such declasse` things as getting a tattoo, getting drunk, sex-texting women. Which is to say, Platner acts like a blue collar, pick-up truck driving bar hound.
But maybe we need somebody to represent the whoring, hard drinking men of the world.
In "Charlie Wison's War" Tom Hanks, as Charlie Wilson, is astonished to learn that a puritanical, Bible thumping committee chairman has appointed him to the committee Charlie thought he had no shot at. "I'm a booze hound and a womanizer," Charlie reflects, "Maybe he thought guys like me needed more representation."
If David Brooks had been that committee chairman Charlie would have had no shot at membership.
Brooks is very insistent about how much he tries to be out on the hustings, listening to ordinary people. He, of course, is not himself "ordinary." He is rich, for one thing. And he makes his living by talking and writing and he would doubtless say, by "thinking." He's a thinker.
But maybe Brooks ought to consider thinking about this:
Who is the moral degenerate: A man who is unfaithful to his wife or a woman who is unfaithful to her country?
While she smiles beatifically, and wears her Ann Taylor suits, Susan Collins has voted to confirm 95% of Trump's judges, who have in turn given Trump a get out of jail free card; she voted for "border protection" to launch ICE agents attacks on American (Democratic) cities and the concentration camps they call "detention centers;" She supported firing FBI director James Comey and installing Cash Patel in his place; she could not bring herself to condemn the shootings of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, saying only that she hoped ICE would improve its training and use of body cameras. She voted against the Trump impeachments.
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| Silence Implies Consent |
And while she says she hopes democratic Ukraine can prevail against autocratic Russian rape, the most she can manage to say about Trump's attempt to humiliate and repudiate Ukraine's democratically elected President Zelensky is that the White House scene where President Trump lectured Zelensky about not holding any cards, where VP Vance scolded Zelensky for not being sufficiently grateful for American support and where the boyfriend of MGT shouted out a question about why Zelensky was not wearing a suitably respectful suit--in the face of all of that her best response was that it was "unfortunate."
Which is like the mother of a school shooter saying she wished her son had been better behaved.
If Graham Platner is guilty of having dirty hands, then we have to admit the choice is now between a low grade misogynist, a randy bro, and a sweet looking grandmother with blood on her hands.
Susan Collins is the moral equivalent of the wife and mother of those Mississippi good ol' boys who murdered the freedom riders and ensconced them under a bridge, the loyal wife and mother who remained silent and complicit and smiled sweetly for the cameras.
