Purple America

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? The all-purpose David Brooks takedown:

Philadelphia Magazine: Restaurants, Shopping, Events, Best of Philly: Boo-Boos in Paradise: Wayne-bred David Brooks is the public intellectual of the moment. But our writer found out he doesn’t check his facts: By Sasha Issenberg:

"In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing." Brooks... was... bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on... "status detail."...

There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false. According to Amazon.com sales data, one of Goodwin’s strongest markets has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. That’s probably not, however, QVC country. "I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the country," says Doug Rose, the network’s vice president of merchandising and brand development. "Generally our audience is female suburban baby boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas."... Brooks could be dismissed as little more than a snarky punch-line artist, except that he postures as a public intellectual--and has been received as one....

In January, I made my own trip to Franklin County, 175 miles southwest of Philadelphia, with a simple goal: I wanted to see where David Brooks comes up with this stuff. One of the first places I passed was Greencastle Coffee Roasters, which has more than 200 kinds of coffee, and a well-stocked South Asian grocery in the back with a product range hard to find in some large coastal cities: 20-pound bags of jasmine rice, cans of Thai fermented mustard greens, a freezer with lemongrass stalks and kaffir-lime leaves. The owner, Charles Rake, told me that there was, until a few years back, a Thai restaurant in Chambersburg, run by a woman who now does catering. "She’s the best Thai cook I know on Planet Earth," Rake said. "And I’ve been to Thailand."...

"In Montgomery County we have Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, Anthropologie, Brooks Brothers. In Franklin County they have Dollar General and Value City, along with a plethora of secondhand stores," Brooks wrote. In fact, while Franklin has 14 stores with the word "dollar" in their name--plus one Value City--Montgomery County, Maryland, has 34, including one that’s within walking distance of an Anthropologie in Rockville.

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. "On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu--steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever--I always failed.... I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it."

Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The "Steak and Lobster" combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75.... The easiest way to spend over $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts "turn-of-the-century elegance." I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed. After it was published in the Atlantic, the nearby Mercersburg Academy boarding school invited Brooks as part of its speaker series. He spent the night at the inn. "For breakfast I made a goat-cheese-and-sun-dried-tomato tart," Sandy said. "He said he just wanted scrambled eggs."...

Last fall, Pottery Barn opened stores in Huntsville, Alabama, and Franklin, Tennessee, and the New York Times has introduced home delivery in Colorado Springs. It likely won’t be long before Franklin County gets both; yoga classes have already arrived....

I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being "too pedantic," of "taking all of this too literally," of "taking a joke and distorting it." "That’s totally unethical," he said...

Comments

[kvenlander]

It's a keeper. Wasn't there some sort of tempest over it back before The Beginning of The Second Term? Didn't BoBo try to defend his "observations"?

[tom s.]

Oh that David Brooks.

Every Thursday he points out a sweeping but entirely false dichotomy and every Sunday he draws false conclusions from a sweeping but perhaps not entirely false dichotomy.

[David]

OK,OK--but let it be known that Huntsville, AL is a high-tech center, and Franklin, TN is the seat of Williamson County, a Nashville suburb that's one of the wealthiest counties in the US. Neither place is exactly down-home--though Williamson is hardly "blue," either. Pottery Barns show up where people have money; and people who have money still tend to vote Republican.

[Christopher ball]

Errr, Brooks' article came out in Dec. 2001 and the Issenberg piece was published in April 2004, based on trips in January, a bit of a lag on fact-checking. And half of the facts are not contradictory. There can be "blue" cities in "red" states and vice versa. One of Goodwin's strongest markets might be a red area, but are most of them?

The annoying element of the Brooks article was that Gore won PA in 2000; Brooks should have travelled to a VA county that went for Bush, as did the state. He went to Franklin county, PA because it was close by. He was lazy.

But Issenberg misses Brooks' point in the article -- the master narratives that the GOP and Dems presented about allegedley "red" areas were both wrong. "Family values" rhetoric did not inspire those in Franklin County and neither did they feel economically deprived.

[me2i81]

"I wasn't lying, I was just kidding, sheesh!" is no longer just a gambit of 10-year-olds.

[billy]

Ok, the piece is no longer timely, but it's well worth disinterring. It's also well worth reading in its entirety, to see just how disinegnuous Brooks is, and just how patronising towards Issenberg when confronted with his own lazy and baseless theorising. He tries to shame her with the "I'm the successful NYT columnist so you'd better be careful if you try to criticise me" approach. (Since when has critiquing an article been "unethical"?)
To her credit, she remains calm and allows him to damn himself with his own words.
But ultimately, it's worth bearing in mind that Brooks' ridiculous and untenable grandstanding as sociologist and cultural interpreter is depressingly common. Homo Sapiens, in general, seems to subscribe willingly to the "three-examples-and-out" model of analysis.