Maybe his omission of the anything-but-Niebuhrian previous administration gnawed at him. And there goes Brooks again, protecting his buds by his silence.īut lo and behold, having made my way to the office and navigated to Brooks online, what do I find subbed in for the final sentence but this new one: “The Oslo speech was the most profound of his presidency, and maybe his life.” Well, I guess David had second thoughts about his kicker–as columnists are wont to do–and decided to withdraw the barbs and show the love after the column went to press. Bush? I’d be willing to bet the place in Maine that had Niebuhr been alive during the past decade, the principal object of his theological swift sword would have been the messianic Wilsonianism of Bush and his neocon consiglieri. In his typical soft neocon way, Brooks sticks the shiv into the doves of the Democratic left and the realists of the Republican right as contrary to the Spirit of Reinhold, but what about the self-destructive fervor of George W. He aims to be like Truman, not Nixon or Carter or McGovern.Īha! thought I.
He misjudged theĮmotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran. Obama has not always gotten this balance right. He talked about the need to balance the moral obligation toĬhampion freedom while not getting swept up in self-destructive fervor. Having devoted himself to portraying Barack Obama as the consummate Niebuhrian cold war liberal in his Nobel Prize speech, Brooks ended with these paragraphs: These things are evil, but not inevitable.ĭavid Brooks (Twitter: is a columnist for The New York Times, where this piece originally appeared.I finished reading my morning David Brooks in the hard-copy NYT at the breakfast table with the pleasurable annoyance that here was something to blog myself into a high dudgeon about. If someone would have come up to me and said, ‘You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to have this strange strength, we accept you,’ I would have broken down and given up.”
On the day he set out armed with guns, ammunition and machete, he didn’t want to do it. People were reaching out, but he had been too self-involved to see. Fellow students had signed it, offering to get together over the summer. When he got out of prison, he looked at his old high school yearbook and was shocked.
(The man pleaded guilty to carjacking and served time for it.) He interviewed a young man who prosecutors said set out to commit a mass shooting but was caught before he was able to get started. The most affecting article I read while researching this column was written by Tom Junod in Esquire in 2014. They want somebody to tell them, You don't have to do this. But even at the last minute, especially among the younger ones, there's often a last-minute cry for help. They count themselves members of the brotherhood of killers and wallow in delusions of grandeur. They want it to be as public and spectacular as possible.
0 kommentar(er)
