Brooks, sometimes I almost can’t believe that you really exist. Are you a real person, or a fictional character made up by a consortium of business interests and the Heritage Foundation to espouse pro-commercial interests in the Times? It’s hard for me to judge based on today’s piece. For those of you without the time to read the article, here it is in a nutshell:
(1) recently, American has lost its “commercial,” can-do spirit; (2) America has always had said spirit, as evinced by the popularity Dale Carnegie, some hypocritical preacher, and Donald Trump; (3) Obama and other ne’er-do-wells do not support the commercial spirit, which irks Brooks; (4) the commercial spirit will inevitably return triumphant, as it is a part of our “cultural DNA.”
As is my usual difficulty with responding to Brooks, I don’t know where to start with the stupidity of his arguments. I mean, just to get started, he cites some of the greatest hacks in American history in his own support, from the authors cited above to Horatio Alger and Jim Cramer. Is this supposed to be convincing? Perhaps it convinces that Americans will always be extraordinarily gullible and greedy, but you’re making a normative argument that the commercial spirit is good for us, aren’t you Brooks?
In that case, what your analysis ignores is the corrosive effects that this commercial drive has had on other American values over the years. I believe it was good old Ben Franklin who told us that “a penny saved is a penny earned,” and yet we have become the most debt-laden country in the history of the world, mostly because of this zealous appetite for more and more that you praise without hesitation.
Another old school American value is so-called “equality of opportunity,” that is, the idea that a relatively level playing field provided by public education and other social programs gives most anyone the chance to succeed. Yet, social movements and government policies over the last forty years have done everything possible to ensure that there is very little equality of opportunity. White flight and flight of capital from our inner-cities have created ghettos where illiteracy often reaches above fifty percent, where high school graduation rates fall almost to zero, where murder rates exceed anything imaginable in the wonderfully safe suburban environment to which rich and middle-class whites fled. In many former industrial communities such as Flint and Pontiac, Michigan, our commercial spirit has left communities decimated with no real hope of urban revival. And the general greed of our upper class has ensured that since 1970, real wages of the middle class have steadily declined while the fortunes of the rich have grown decade by decade.
Not to mention the cultural vacuousness for which we have our commercial spirit to thank. Would a heinous mockery of human life like Paris Hilton (or Perez Hilton, for that matter) ever been taken seriously for a second back in those wondrous days of Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan?
The taste for money, among the “sophisticated” rich as well as the teen with dreams of “bling” in his heart, stem from the same vulgarity which is corrosive to the better aspects of the human spirit. When major religions preach the evils of coveting wealth, it isn’t because having money is inherently bad; it is because, as Brooks notes, such covetousness is an addiction. An like any addiction, love of money gradually pushed all other human values out of one’s heart and one’s vision. It’s why we can so easily step over men dying in the street, why we can abide debacles like Katrina, why we can rape our environment in the name of progress without blinking an eye.
The fact that America is addicted to the drive to get rich quick is no argument in the addiction’s favor. It’s sort of like saying that being a heroin addict makes one a better panhandler, so we shouldn’t try to break said person’s addiction. Clearly this reasoning is asinine. You welcome a return of the same tired ethos that has brought our country to the brink of ruin at least twice. You may be right that as soon as things level out, people will embrace greed as our great national value again. But to champion such a return right now, to look forward to it with gleeful dollar signs in your eyes, is a position I’ll never understand.
