This Time It's Personal, Li'l Zoomer*

I have been trying hard to not read David Brooks lately. Really I have. But sometimes he pops up on my radar and, well, I just can't not read him.

He is just such a tool.

Proving that he loves nothing more than the status quo and rich people, Brooks takes time out from loving conservatives with inherited wealth to loving liberals with inherited wealth. Way to weathervane, Dave!

Yesterday's column was on Bobby Kennedy and how brave and stoic and generally dreamy he was. Whatever.

Now, I'm tempted to write about how we need to demystify the Kennedy clan once and for all. But I'm not going to. Because that isn't what really drives me crazy about Brooks's column. I am not even going to write about how transparently Brooks is sucking up to the new "in crowd." Although he, like, totally is.

No, what REALLY pisses me off is to hear Brooks acting as an apologist for the classics. I am all in favor of those in power reading classical literature. But Brooks does more harm than good with his advocacy. This is the second Brooks column in as many months in which he quotes and egregiously misinterprets an Aeschylus quote. The SAME Aeschylus quote (which makes me think that it is, perhaps, all of Aeschylus that Mr. Brooks has ever read).

He first used this quote in his excruciatingly pretentious column about being a Mets fan; in the course of talking about fandom, he manages to squeeze in every single quote he remembers from his University of Bartlett's education. Gack.

In yesterday's column, Brooks writes about how Bobby Kennedy found strength in reading Edith Hamilton's book about Greek culture, The Greek Way. Brooks writes: Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own — heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical.

Now this is, of course, nonsense upon stilts. Which Greeks? This monolithizing of the Greeks is just moronic--there is no Greek "sensibility" in any meaningful sense--the Greek culture of antiquity with which we are familar spans a millenium and two continents and any number of philosophical and religious traditions. Does he mean the Athenians? The Alexandrians? Does he even know what he means?

But even when he's specific, Brooks gets it wrong. This is the quote in which RFK found solace for his brother's murder and for which Brooks finds solace for the Mets' performance (um, bathetic much?). Brooks offers up the quote and his own gloss on it:

“God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

Kennedy, recovering from his brother’s murder, found in the ancient Greeks a civilization that was eager to look death in the face, but which seemed to draw strength from what it found there. The Greeks seemed more convinced of the dignity and significance of life the more they brooded on the pain and precariousness of it.

In neither of Brooks' columns does he identify the source of the quote. I wonder if he knows. If he understood its context, he might not like it quite so much. The passage is from the Agamemnon, and the chorus is discussing the Justice of Zeus, which grinds slow but exceeding fine. The chorus is about vengeance/justice and about how it is often visited upon subsequent generations. The specific passage that Brooks quotes is poorly translated.

Brooks writes: "God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer." The "must" there is entirely interpolated, the imperative of the translator and not the dramatist, and "suffer" is not, perhaps, the best translation of Aeschylus's πάθει, which can mean anything from "suffering" to "experience." At any rate, Aeschylean values do not embrace suffering as ennobling, nor did they find dignity in suffering. This was still a culture that valued the thanatos kalos, the beautiful death that is praised by such poets as Mimnermus. Mr. Brooks is reinscribing his own culture's values onto these lines. Mr. Brooks clearly doesn't know his Aeschylus from his elbow.

In his great satire against intellectual pretensions, The Dunciad, Alexander Pope invokes the Goddess of Dullness, whose acolytes dominated the world of 18th century publishing (the more things change, eh?). One of the great boons to the Dunces who pretend to erudition are all the footnotes, prefaces, indexes, commentaries, etc, that allow one to have the appearence of learning without the substance. He writes that Dullness shows her worshippers how to read only the scholarly apparatuses and to dispense with the literature altogether. To them she shows:

How random Thoughts now meaning chance to find.
Now leave all memory of sense behind:
How Prologues into Prefaces decay,
And these to Notes are fritter'd quite away.
How index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the Eel of science by the tale.

David Brooks has certainly not been turned pale by too much study. He is the pinnacle of Dullness, he has reached the height of index-learning and achieved the height of its folly.** He even writes at the end of his column that we are lucky if we find the wisdom of the Greeks "by happenstance."

But the danger of finding learning by happenstance is that we take it out of context--rather than allowing education to reshape our understanding of the world, we take it as portable sound bites. This isn't education, this is cocktail-party schtick.

To some degree, we always take things out of context. Or rather, we all have our own context which informs our reading—we read our own ideas and values into the text. This is why single text is never really singular—it has as many iterations as it does readers. But to perform this dislocation of values with such unexamined and ideologically motivated vigor is just annoying. It falsifies the past and it falsifies our relationship with it.

But what annoys me most is how it misrepresents the study of classical languages and literature. Classicists already have a lot of baggage—others in academia are, on the strength of the Nazis’ appropriation of Virgil and the philhellenism of much nationalist and proto-fascist thought, still suspicious of classicists. Classicists are still under the shadow of the racism and anti-Semitism of many who were drawn to the field for its ideological potential. The unthinking and nuance-free encomia of people like Brooks makes it all the harder to distance the discipline from the misuses to which it’s been put for the last hundred and fifty years.

It's also the reflex of a small mind that assumes that everything was better in the past, and doesn't bother to find out what that past really has to teach us. It has a lot to teach us, but we have to be willing to learn.

*As Dwight reminds me with great wisdom: if you don't like the Li'l Zoomer cartoon, don't read the Li'l Zoomer cartoon. This is sound advice. 87% of me agrees with it. 25% of me thinks that it's important to know what song the Devil's singing. And 42% of me enjoys hating the Li'l Zoomer cartoon. And 102% of me sucks at math.

** To return to our old friend, Pope:

A little Learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.