High-Five Nation: David Brooks in the New York Times
This piece was brought to my attention by Uzi Ben-Ami.
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High-Five Nation
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times, September 15, 2009
On Sunday evenings, my local NPR station airs old radio programs. A few weeks ago it broadcast the episode of the show “Command Performance” that aired the day World War II ended. “Command Performance” was a variety show that went out to the troops around the world.
On V-J Day, Frank Sinatra appeared, along with Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, Dinah Shore, Bette Davis, Lionel Barrymore, Cary Grant and many others. But the most striking feature of the show was its tone of self-effacement and humility. The allies had, on that very day, completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. And yet there was no chest-beating. Nobody was erecting triumphal arches.
“All anybody can do is thank God it’s over,” Bing Crosby, the show’s host, said. “Today our deep down feeling is one of humility,” he added.
Burgess Meredith came out to read a passage from Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent. Pyle had been killed just a few months before, but he had written an article anticipating what a victory would mean:
“We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature’s material. We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud.”
This subdued sentiment seems to have been widespread during that season of triumph. On the day the Nazi regime fell, Hal Boyle of The Associated Press reported from the front lines, “The victory over Germany finds the average American soldier curiously unexcited. There is little exuberance, little enthusiasm and almost none of the whoop-it-up spirit with which hundreds of thousands of men looked forward to this event a year ago.”
The Dallas Morning News editorialized, “President Truman calls upon us to treat the event as a solemn occasion. Its momentousness and its gravity are past human comprehension.”
When you glimpse back on those days you see a people — even the rich and famous celebrities — who were overawed by the scope of the events around them. The war produced such monumental effects, and such rivers of blood, that the individual ego seemed petty in comparison. The problems of one or two little people, as the movie line had it, didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
You also hear a cultural reaction. As The Times of London pointed out on the day of victory, fascism had stood for grandiosity, pomposity, boasting and zeal. The allied propaganda mills had also produced their fair share of polemical excess. By 1945, everybody was sick of that. There was a mass hunger for a public style that was understated, self-abnegating, modest and spare. Bing Crosby expressed it perfectly on “Command Performance,” as Gregory Peck, Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall would come to express it in public life.
And there was something else. When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.
But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.
Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine. Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called “Advertisements for Myself.”
Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.
This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
I remember V-E Day and V-J Day. It was a time of relief and gladness but not of triumph. Many graves had been filled and many who lived would not be the same again.
But life goes on and the world moves forward to Destiny. The U N was founded (was it 1946 ?)and while we had prayed throughout the war
(and numerous victories could be credited only to very fortuitous circumstances or to providence)
It was agreed that Jesus Christ would not be mentioned in any prayer involving the U N.
Before the war we had been a nation maybe 75% agricultural but that was to change. And the factories that had hummed producing war equipment and materials were to be kept running so the products were to be consumer goods and the public were to be turned into consumers
and advertising had it’s great role to play. I probably still have here somewhere Vance Packard’s book “Hidden Persuaders’, an insight into the means of the conversion.
And gratitude for the end of the war faded and the public media began to be filled with constant reminders of American know-how which was given credit for almost everything.
Houses were being built by the thousands with NO down payment and 2% (?) interest, colleges and university classes were educating many new students from families who had never had a member in ‘higher’ education All on the G I Bill benefits for military veterans.
Television was making its advent invading American homes and after only about five years of ‘peace’ Americans were thrust again into war: Korea.
We were now the richest nation in the world, they told us, and we went to war with American know-how AND EXPERIENCED THE FIRST AMERICAN DEFEAT. I read an American General’s comment it was the first time he had ever seen American soldiers run in battle.
And so we have progressed on and most have experienced what followed; crazy war in Viet Nam and an even worse defeat and demoralization of the military but we were getting more educated as a people all the time AND SO MUCH SMARTER as anyone can see and we indulged in prosperity with ever increasing national debt.
And the labor unions were also smart, really smart, so that their janitor members were making more than company non-union engineers. So manufacturing jobs began to be moving out of the country – everybody was now so smart we had to keep on increasing the national debt to keep them living in the style the were entitled to. And as more and more of our goods had to be imported the negative balance of trade ever increased.
And now Americans have become so educated and so smart that they can function as an Information Society without producing much of anything
produce wealth out of paper, their economy survives on government stimulus debt spending, and they have decided that it is right for men to marry men and the women likewise, while their government no longer responds to the will ( Ho ! ho !) of the people and is invading nations and killing people on the other side of the world TO PRESERVE THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE.
Ah ! The fruits of victory !
Who would have thunk it ?!
September 18th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Its hard for me to take Brooks seriously. He was singing a different song when his boy Bush the Second was swaggering across the flight deck beneath the “Mission Accomplished” banner.
September 18th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Assuming that you’re right, MaskedMarauder, about Brooks having responded differently to the swagger of W in the “Mission Accomplished” era, you have a point. But it’s a point of very limited value.
Over the years, I’ve become increasingly bothered by ad hominem approaches to ideas. The important question is: does this article say something that’s valid and that matters. To that question, I believe the answer is yes.
In some circumstances, it makes some sense to focus on the WHO behind the message rather than the WHAT within the message. But in what way is this such a circumstance?
If Brooks here were applying one standard to the other side while applying another standard to HIS side, then the inconsistency is important. It becomes important. But here Brooks does not seem to be grinding any partisan ax. If he’s scoring points, I didn’t notice it.
If Brooks was part of the problem in 2003 (and again, I’m just stipulating that, without know whether it’s true about that “different song” you attribute to him), does that disqualify him from speaking about that problem some six years later? I don’t think so.
Let him who is without past errors cast the first stone.
September 18th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Is it probable, that the allies would have won the war, without Russia? Can we bath ourselves in the the bubblebath of Hollywood types and western propaganda not available to the Russians? And the Nazis; german soldiers fought and died on a cosmic scale: where are the Pecks and Gables of our enemies to glorify their efforts? Why is it, that the world revolves around white capitalists, while the slavs of communist Russia and the teutons of nazi germany are not given their fair share of respect for duty and honor for their dead: it`s all one sided and vacuous of the true nature of our fellow men. The instigators sit brooding in their studies, sipping wine and thinking “sorry `bout that”.
September 18th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I noticed long ago examining photos of Americans following +Armistices+
that ended decades of brutality and senseless slaughter, that the eyes of groups of Americans had an innocent, different kind of far away look that has vanished fr/ group photos today. The only places great photojournalists did their work where we can find today’s “managed smiles,” like ‘Used Car Salesmen’ and air stewards, and so on. Those eyes revealed that war had consumed more and more than those raised in peacetime can ever imagine. It was true +humility+ and a true reality that “we are no different – we’ve all seen the dark side,” all together. Latter generations would go through a brief period of self-immersion based on “Peace and love,” before the corporate behemoths took over everything, esp. the music. Seldom will such unique performances find us, now…., from Benny Goodman to modern rap/hip-hop, there is such a gulf. The biggest draw at this year’s German celebration is a European rapper who speaks French but sounds like all rappers/hip-hop “artistes.” There is no harmonic variation, no unchoreographed movements, etc.
Wayne Dyer’s big selling book, _Looking Out for Number One!_ sold lots and set him on a path that ends up in a very different place. It is now the “ME” generation, as corporate advertising never ceases to remind us. “Have a nice day.” Seemed hollow and insincere to those who lived through War for several intense years. Then there was relative peace for a while, til New Libralism found their campaign contributions skyrocketing from “defense and security” industries in the 80′s…, and war became just another video game, now it is literally, so…. Drone pilots sit in airconditioned offices at “joystick” controls, just outside of Reno or Las Vegas and drop lethal ordinance on the _Innocent_ in Afganhistan.
True unadorned humility only comes to the west following wars. It is in the eyes. Navajos have long known that to size up another, merely look into their eyes, windows to the soul, and you can find truth presaging brutality and intimidation w/ big bad weapons or peacemakers who only want to help.
This is what makes the Dalai Lama so appealing and peaceful. He was small when war/occupation forced him on another “long walk.” But, he remembers the eyes of his mother, always filled w/ what Dzochen Atiyoga teaches about real compassion (_feeling_ with another, literally, not suffering). Humility is normal for our origins, and sadly, it is war that too often brings out that Biblical Injuction, war that makes us intimately aware at a deep level of how normal our existential sufferings are…. But, war increasingly waged by tech geniuses far away from the reality, expands, and our young no longer share the burden as they did even in Viet Nam. This Volunteer Army it so often poor kids who need the money for their families.
When and if they come home, the look in their eyes has changed too, and if they’ve had 3-5 tours, the new immediate gratification system imposed by ads seems stupid and far away, with too many horrific family tragedies. They can’t pass they days, with brothers/sisters in peace w/ inane video games, preparing another generation to keep the military industrial complex topped-up with all the newest high tech toys that are lethal beyond extremes. The kids who survive 5 tours come back changed. Soldiers were changed if they survived the Viet Cong, too. Remember, “Born on the 4th of July” w/ Tom Cruise? A drone tank is on the drawing boards….
And then, the Shock Jocks who fill the absolutists with rage at government, esp. that of a black man. Beneath all this, is Detroit, the inner city now hollowed out, factories empty and burned, leaving vast tracts of open land, where poor blacks who couldn’t afford to leave…, so now, they are growing their own _organically_ produced food, all they have to eat. No need for food stamps here. It is all done with a great deal of _humility_, and gratitude for what little we have….
I watched Jimi’s last performance at Fillmore East in 70. It was masterful and not a hint of corporate dominion. His intro is poignant, brimming with humility. “We should dedicate this to all the soldiers fighting in Milwaukee, Chicago, Selma, Ala., LA, and those in Viet Nam.” He played “Machine Gun,” with such amazing humility, no fires or dancing about, nor hyperbole of any kind, no big stage show – and what came out was not substantively different from Beethoven’s “Heiligenstadt Testament, or Mahler’s First under Solti. It’s +Deep humility+, expressing *something which used to bind us together*, now has become dominated by the corporate elite who find humility does not need to buy too much “stuff,” shrinking their already swollen by obscene profits.
David Brooks has evolved and now groks what the artificially stoked anger at government really is: An ever more _strident_ cornucopia of Neg-Humility, sweeping across the land. Until we find humility again, we are in for a rough ride. Too many have had it too easy for too long. Ca. spending on a Security Fence has reached multiple billions, while schools, courts, parks, shut down, no longer able to pay for services. So many anomalies from those who think shared suffering is a high-tech movie or video game…. Humility. I think I’ll have some with a cup of tea.
Meanwhile, Time’s a’ comin’. “Hear my train a ‘comin’.” Yes. Humility train without any home depot, for now.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Glen Miller … ever thought much about him, Mr. Ferrell, what do think happened to him?
September 18th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Is hardship the only way to cultivate humility in society? Unfortunately, it seems to be the most effective mechanism for growing humility across what we know of the human experience. In comparison, what influence would love have? When a person genuinely loves others, thinking of their interests before his/her own, isn’t humility nourished?
He who has the capacity to love most is also the most humble.
Not only have we become a prideful, me-centered, nation, we have also become a cold, callous one. (Speaking in general, of course. There are many wonderful exceptions.)
We face forceful humbling in the not-too-distant future. But, could we deflect that consequence if we learned how to love others better first? I’m not so sure that people living in America just after WWII had mastered love even though they had conquered pride to some extent. Maybe their lack of attention to developing the capacity to love others partially explains why their humility did not last.
The “shock jocks” who regularly whip their disciples into a lather preach precious little love in their sermons. We are told, “love thy neighbor,” but if your neighbor disagrees with you, sue him or yell in his face at a town meeting. We are told by example, “Love only those who see the world as you do.” It’s quite sad. And, it’s creating a race of easily defeated hollow men and women.
September 18th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Heart-felt apologies (“I’m sorry”) seem rare among the elite. Wine is now the favored soft-drink of the newly rich here in Marin Co. n. of SF. And, bee populations continue to fall, while corporate farming operations have to truck bees for thousands of miles just to pollinate Monsanto genetically altered seed plants. The rich have no conscience. The Gates’ can afford to give 65 Mn to global health projects in Africa; which they no doubt can write off their income tax. No one asks about that important question. PBS still interviews them as if they are ‘just folk.’ spreading their largesse among the poorest.
Sadly, btw. the woman who founded the whole foods movement in Detroit has said the program had to end because developers appeared and built new sky-scrapers over all the garden plots. And, few are filled with new offices of any kind. “Vacancy rate is over 80% and now all these poor black folk haven’t even a market to shop with food stamps at….”
Plutocracy is real and unforgiving, always the end result of using war as a pretext to keep society humming. It is shameful, and too real. Most dramas on PBS are about rich folk and their personal dramas. Natural I’d guess. We are all pretty much what we’ve been given and what we’ve experienced, including the quality of pseudo-food most are compelled to eat.
What else is new? God/Nature did not make us to live like this, but we are what we are…. etc.
September 18th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
“God/Nature did not make us to live like this, but we are what we are…. etc.”
Oh I think so ! All the indications are that people believe and assert that they are ‘free ‘moral’ agents’ and a law unto themselves,; no ? Obeying the laws of others only where necessary and protesting all the while.
So ! Are you sure we were NOY made to live like this ?
The indications seem clear to me that you were destined to live out the consequences of your choices. Want to blame corporate America ?
The rich elite of the world ?
The Media ? The Church ?
Somehow it still looks to me like it is the collective choices of individuals, many educated and so smart, ah yes. that have brought us to this present state of things no matter who or what one hears you blaming.
The Republicans we can see blame everyone and everything but themselves.
But they are NOT alone; are they ?! Not !
September 18th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Americans don`t go around with their tail between their legs, so they are not humble; besides, money, puffs one up and there is lots of that around. Living in isolation in the nuclear family adds to the feeling of exclusiveness and the constant drone of hollywood films and media images, are centred around the world-high image of the bwana American, `Indiana Jones` types. Upon graduation, they are counseled to roam the world and change things for the better: who is going to listen the wisdom of Navajo, who belive that animals have a spirit?
September 19th, 2009 at 12:57 am
AB Schmookler: I don’t consider what I said an ad homenim approach.
There can be no real understanding a written piece without considering the author of the words. In writing, like other trades, a person’s reputation matters in interpreting the work product, that’s why at least half of all literary criticism is biography. A million monkeys permutating the alphabet on a million typewriters would surely pass through Brooks on their long march to reproduce Shakespear. And not a page of it would have any meaning because exactly the same words in exactly the same order would be nothing but random strings, bereft of intent and purpose.
To suss out intent and purpose context matters, and context entails paying attention to the author and not just the words. So what does he say?
He begins with the false premise that the US was ever humble for more than a week at a time. The US maintains over a thousand military bases in over 130 countries and spends more on military purposes than all of the other nations on earth combined. The vast majority of our current territory was obtained by force or gold, not by voluntary assimilation of the people we chose to govern. This is not the posture of a humble nation and it did not start just yesterday.
Then he goes on to misdefine “humility.” By accident or by craft?
Humility does not mean ” the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else”. Humility means freedom from pride and arrogance, a sense of one’s own unworthiness through imperfection. The word he was groping for is “egalitarian”, a word so irremediably bolshie that no conservative pundit would ever dare endorse it.
Next he dates the dawn of our age of “self-exposure and self-love” with Muhammad Ali saying out loud that he was the greatest. Brooks attributes that to just a way to “to win shares in the competition for attention.” Perhaps it was advantageous to his box office. Then, in 1967, Ali refused to serve after induction, was stripped of all titles and was sentenced to 5 years in choky because, he famously said, he refused to kill Vietnamese just because “some jive honkey” told him to. Then he cites Mailer’s 1970 book with an uncharacteristically frank title.
Is it just coincidence that he anchors our (supposed) slide into the abyss with two famous liberal publicity hounds? I find it impossible to think so. Its not like there were no conservative candidates he might have chosen. Eight years before Mailer’s book was Nixon’s “Six Crises” which was, well, an advertisement for himself. And before him there was Joe McCarthy who’s laundry list and lurid talk kept him on the front page for months and months and months.
While we grow anxious over the growing hysteria of the right wing fringe, Brooks singles out five individuals for opprobrium, only one of whom, Joe Wilson is a conservative! Ali and Mailer are two liberals. The other three are celebrities, a special class of anathema to conservatives, of uncertain political political alignment. And three, 60%, are black. What a peculiar demographic to take the blame for all this. Accident or craft?
He tries to sound reasonable and balanced, but he almost never is. How can anyone not read this and come away blaming liberalism for the decay of our society? Clearly, if the tea-baggers have gone mad its only because the solipsistic egomaniacal liberals drove them to it.
I don’t find this the least bit surprising because that’s what Brooks does for a living. He finds queer angles and tortured metaphors to put a happy face on conservativism and leave liberals holding the bag. This is what he does. This is his MO. It is not an ad homenim argument. Its the application of prior experience to a novel artifact, a perfectly rational and, I think, responsible thing to do.
September 19th, 2009 at 7:39 am
If it is not an ad hominem attack, that suggests that if the article had not David Brooks’s name on it, but some John Doe of whom you’d never heard, you’d still not think the article had any truths worthwhile to teach us. Is that indeed what you think of the article, considered apart from the name at the top of it?
September 19th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Interesting exchange.
The value of the column was, to me,
the recalling of the wholesome human outlook on the ‘moment’
that was recalled, and I think reflected more or less the way it was.
Great memories of what humanity is capable.
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The bit about Russia was partly maybe true but they were then NO friend to America and were permitted to take East Germany when it was not needed at all and caused decades of conflict and the isolated Berliin.
It was NOT a co-operative consent, as I understand it, but was a choice:
Do the allies ( U S) consent to it or the alternative fight Russia now.
Russia’s part in the war was not to aid the allies but entirely for Russia.
(open for correction from anyone with a cleared view)
I don’t read Brooks OR Friedman either anymore. Usually there are more coinstructive things to do. But I do appreciate the memory of 1945 recalled.
America was reaching its high point of ascent just as the decline began.
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The destructive nature of modern progressivism (AND ‘conservatism’) are not the CAUSE of the ‘culture’ but the RESULT.
And modern ‘culture’, ie, the true religion of the ‘masses’, has been created
by T V, mis-interpretations of ‘science’, mis-education,
half-baked religion . . . . . .and the natural bent of human nature.
And that last there being maybe first.
September 19th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Correct. I think that if it had been submitted anonymously I would not have read it as critically as I did. I would have glossed over it and passed on, dismissing it as a fairly superficial and innocuous reformulation of conventional wisdom.
But I’ve been reading and watching Brooks off and on for about a decade and so, conditioned by past experience, I reacted differently.
Personal reputations are important. People go to great lengths to establish and then defend their reputations, and its been this way for a long, long time.
It makes sense to do this because it makes learning worthwhile. ONe of the big inventions of Western Civilisation was the non-anonymous author. It allows us to calibrate sources of information. Our reading history need not be a random walk through the library. Reading one book by X leads us to anticipate what his or her next book will be like, both for good or ill.
Compare this piece by Brooks with Dave Zirin’s blog on almost the same subject over at HuffPo. The differences in tone, scope and sense of it compared with Brook’s piece, what Brooks might have wrote even though he’d almost certainly reach a different conclusion, are clear, I think.
Although it came out yesterday I didn’t read it until today so it didn’t affect my response above. Until today I had never heard of Zirin (I have no interest in professional sports at all), so it was the sort of John Doe encounter you mention.
September 19th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
I have of late been contemplating members of my family who helped defeat the nazis and the fascists of that era (both overseas and on the homefront). Humility and egalitarianism both seemed to be their watchwords. And both are worthy ideals today.