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I hadn’t realized David Brooks was this closeted. He writes that Ms. Sotomayor is a woman from a large, poor, non-white, immigrant family. She worked hard. She achieved stellar success at two Ivy League universities. Despite being a Latina in a world of over-achieving white men, she has consistently been noticed for her achievements throughout her career, thus opening doors to further advancement. She has reached the pinnacle of her profession: after seventeen years as a federal judge, she is a nominee to become a justice of the Supreme Court.
Sotomayor’s life also overlaps with a broader class of high achievers. You don’t succeed at that level without developing a single-minded focus, and struggling against its consequences.
The world is made up of many such women and men who achieve beyond their initial lot in life. Every town and neighborhood has them. They keep things running when tensions flare, the water or business dries up, and the houses of worship threaten to become deserts or the schools nightmares.
The world is littered also by the bodies of men and women who might have attained that role, but who were handicapped emotionally, physically or mentally by something in their past lives, such that they could not make their achievements match their promise. And there are many in between, some happy, many not, who work hard at home, at work and when they lay down to sleep.
Floating above them – especially in our media and other centers of power – are the middling and poor performers who rise far above their talents because they are pretty, because they never say no, because their families open doors and reward failure without regard to merit or moral stature or even gratitude. They have become presidents, OpEd page editors, and writers of books that confuse totalitarianism with liberalism so badly that all they can do is put a smiley face on their books to make themselves feel better.
Bobo, the grand intellectual and social historian, writes as if in all his jobs – at the WSJ, the NYT and PBS, reporting on corporate leaders, presidents and academics – he never encountered anyone who had earned their place. Has he never looked around him or has he done so too acutely? Is he stupefied that a Latina has achieved their same success and paid the same price in foreshortened personal happiness? Or has he only noticed the familiar: the middling or poor performer, born on third base and who goes through life thinking they’ve hit a triple?
Whatever the answer, Bobo should come out of his closet more often.
8 Comments
*snicker* Way to call back to the hand-on-thigh story.
As Groucho would say, “I resemble that remark”.
LOL on the bus photo.
Your title reminded me of the “diploma” my late brother had outside his office cubicle: “Master of the Obvious.”
I have concerns about Sotomayor on the 4th Amendment versus national security. I would have preferred someone more liberal just to begin to redress the Court’s sharp lurch to the extreme right. Brooks and the conservatives have a problem with her because they really don’t have a substantive problem with her. They feel they should and so they are reduced to whining and grumbling that she is not a white male.
Agreed, I would have much preferred a new Brennan, a stalwart liberal, to act as a counterbalance to Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas. Obama is chained to the middle, but doesn’t seem to know where it is or sense that it keeps moving right. Or he’s a conservative in conservative’s clothing and finds that just dandy.
Let’s see what newfound angst and revulsion the GOP comes up with today. The battle seems not to be about Sotomayor, whose appointment seems likely, but about future S.Ct. and federal appellate court nominees, and to make electoral hay out of their future decisions.
What would Brooks know about achievement? Success and Brooks are strangers.
The point of these columns is that David Brooks has been successful at taking and using a major national podium to soft sell radical authoritarianism as if it were classical conservatism. He paints promoting the general welfare and community concerns as if it were promoting socialism – a term gelded by the traditional media into anything from communism to the daily bete noir of Big Capitalists.
Mr. Brooks has, indeedm had a neocon hand up his back or pulling his strings since he left his undergraduate days at Chicago. He is more talented than Jonah Goldberg or Bill Kristol, but just as pampered, albeit not by family. And he returns the favor. But it would not be helpful to progressives to underestimate the impact of his soft sell. It moves everything from tobacco to aluminum siding to NutraSweet and Big Ag.