Ooh, my years are burning

David Brooks' column in The New York Times August 3, 2006 was a thinly-veiled dig at me for being lazy. At least he didn't call me shiftless, good-for-nothing, and no-count. Nationally-known hacks like David Brooks can't believe there's someone out in the sticks who can write better, funnier, and more perceptively than they. I know it. I own it. They do too. And unlike them, and like George Orwell, I don't just talk the talk. I walk the walk.

Many readers no doubt observed that if today's prostate-age moocher wanted to loaf around the house all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opnions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists. [Been there, done that. I wrote essays predicting what would happen in Fallujah and Iraq months and years before Thomas Friedman got his head out of the sand and/or his butt. Gail Collins, the editor of The New York Times editorial page knows it because I sent her the essays. And he knows it too because he has acknowledged it in his column. Actually, early in my newspaper career, a Duke Power executive who knew the editor of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal kept urging me to apply there. Only one problem: I didn't want to work for The Wall Street Journal. I still don't. I wrote a magazine column for the late-lamented indie Eye magazine in the nineties. I wrote a column on Apple and Macintosh for Macopinion.com. I also worked for The New York Times and it didn't take me long to figure out that I was smarter and more talented than Hedrick Smith, R.W. Apple, Sy Hersh, Joe Lelyveld, Eugene Roberts, Bill Kovach, Clifton Daniel, Scotty Reston, and a host of other Timesies. But I never advanced because of Ivy-league prejudice and political patronage - I lost my job to a Bella Abzug employee - which why I have hated feminists, feminism, and loud women in funny hats ever since.]

Others will note sardonically that the only really vibrant counter-culture in the United States today is laziness. [I get more done doing nothing than you'll ever by working, David. Study the Tao Teh Ching and BTO for more on this. I love to work at nothing all day.] But I try not to judge these gentlemen too harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-clas men would have judged their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for the familiies, and live as sel-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity, not by their achievement, but by their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory ["Dishonorably menial or compulsory." That sounds like a newspaper column. Especially ones endorsing the US effort in Iraq. As for achievement, just because you can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Like George Bailey, I am a wonderment.]

In other words, the values that used to prevail among the manorial estates have migrated to parts of the mass society while the grinding work ethic of the immigrant prevails in the stratosphere. [I certainly don't believe in heavy lifting. As Robert Fritz says, let the tool do the work.]

David, like many other immature adults, is feeling guilty or acting out in the hopes of getting spanked. Like children, they want attention, whether it's positive or negative, for things they have done or left undone. If it's any comfort, David, your spanking is coming. You don't have a lifetime sinecure like William Safire. Once I get my hands on the Times, I'm going to fire you. (And start competing newspapers in Richmond, Virginia and Washington, D.C. and put The Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Washington Post out of business, but that's another story.)