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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (6590)	12/11/2005 4:00:39 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542596

Help me out with David Brooks. I would love to do so, Mary, but you've asked the wrong person, perhaps the "wrongest" person. I quit reading Brooks' NYTimes columns sometimes back. I found them indefinite, much too abstract, devoid of factual basis where one was needed, and not sharp directed political commentary. The step from Safire to Brooks was a large down step. I've been reading Jerome Karabel's The Chosen recently, on the admission policies of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton over the last century. One of the center pieces of the argument is, of course, the anti-semitism in some significant portions of the old WASP elite and its embodiment, not without various fights, in the admission policies of these schools beginning in the early 20s and running at least into the middle 60s. That's as matters of policy; as matters of practice it's been, of course, longer, The book is a must read if you are interested in the stratification gatekeeping role of this sector of higher education in American life. But, to get back to your question, Karabel thinks highly of two other recent books on the topic, Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test and Brooks' Bobo. So I will read it in the next few weeks. So, I read the op ed section of the Times this morning, as I always do, spending particular time on Frank Rich's column, but, as always, skipped Brooks. My guess is, given the short bit of material you've offered, that Brooks argued that violence is necessary in the face of jihadists (he would read the Palestinian Munich bit backwards from today). Does that sound right? I'm afraid we've already thrown our copy of the Times out. If you can't find it, I'll read it later tonight online. I'm heading back downstairs to watch the Giants and Eagles football game and won't be back in my study until after 7 this evening. This new neocon reality that there is good violence that kill and hurt human beings and bad violence is not anything that I can ever reconcile with. I'm definitely not a neocon as you've seen from my typing here. But I certainly did approve of the Clinton administration's use of NATO in Kosovo, including the bombing campaign, to stop ethnic cleansing. And would have approved of much the same in Bosnia. So I do think there is a need, sometimes, for violence to stop violence. How about you?