Ward on Words

David Brooks was probably feeling very smart and intellectual and clever when he posted his most recent column . He links a great John Ford Western with a look at manhood today in America; he covers current unemployment stats, reflects on boy culture and school culture; he quotes the American Enterprise Institute along with lines from The Searchers . It's all in there. The column is a muddled mess. He opens with a rather vast claim: "As every discerning person knows, The Searchers is the greatest movie ever made." Now I think we can say that discerning people know The Searchers is one of the greatest movies ever made. [I make that claim myself here .] But to assert as fact that it is the very greatest film ever made and to note that if you don't get that fact, you are not a discerning person - which is disdainful and argumentative - is perhaps not the best way to open this column. He goes on to note that the close of the West has left American manhood in a...

David Brooks has a post on the decline of the humanities. He seems not to understand that educating students to think critically has been under attack for quite some time now. His president, GW Bush, focused money and attention on "teaching to the test." It has been a cataclysmic failure. Of course for Brooks, the Ivies are the benchmark. Brooks notes: "Even over the last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third." Brooks seems not to understand that that Ivies are the food source for the Wall Street Banks. An Ivy education focused on the humanities is not the best for those voracious enough to drag down the US economy and then expect a bonus as a result. But the focus on the big bucks is not to blame. According to Brooks, humanities professors have "lost faith..."  "Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting missio...

David Brooks' recent op-ed piece in the NY Times takes a look at what happened to the global economy. Why has all hell broken loose? Was it greed or stupidity? In that he is a conservative Republican, Brooks does not agree with the "greed narrative" being used to answer the question, most notably defined in "The Quiet Coup" by Simon Johnson. In this narrative, greedy oligarchs usurped our democracy and took over our government. Instead, Brooks finds comfort in the "stupidity" narrative, in which "overconfident bankers didn't know what they were doing." Brooks see logic in the idea that the steady stream of Ivy League MBAs that populated Wall Street were too stupid to understand what was going on under their noses in their businesses. Too stupid to realize that they had no capital supporting their loan policies. Too stupid to understand that the insurance devices they were selling were insufficient to cover the potential l...