New York Times Death Spiral Watch

This is just so embarrassingly bad. On so many levels:

David Brooks: The Great Forgetting: They say the 21st century is going to be the Asian Century, but, of course, it’s going to be the Bad Memory Century. Already, you go to dinner parties and the middle-aged high achievers talk more about how bad their memories are than about real estate. Already, the information acceleration syndrome means that more data is coursing through everybody’s brains, but less of it actually sticks. It’s become like a badge of a frenetic, stressful life — to have forgotten what you did last Saturday night, and through all of junior high.

In the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex.

Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots. On the one side are these colossal Proustian memory bullies who get 1,800 pages of recollection out of a mere cookie-bite. They traipse around broadcasting their conspicuous displays of recall as if quoting Auden were the Hummer of conversational one-upmanship. On the other side are those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.

This divide produces moments of social combat. Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.

Your response here is critical. You want to open up with an effusive burst of insincere emotional warmth: “Hey!” You’re practically exploding with feigned ecstasy. “Wonderful to see you too! How is everything?” All the while, you are frantically whirring through your memory banks trying to anchor this person in some time and context.

A decent human being would sense your distress and give you some lagniappe of information — a mention of the church picnic you both attended, the parents’ association at school, the fact that the two of you were formerly married. But the Proustian bully will give you nothing. “I’m good. And you?” It’s like trying to get an arms control concession out of Leonid Brezhnev.

Your only strategy is evasive vagueness, conversational rope-a-dope until you can figure out who this person is. You start talking in the tone of over-generalized blandness that suggests you have recently emerged from a coma.

Sensing your pain, your enemy pours it on mercilessly. “And how is Mary, and little Steven and Rob?” People who needlessly display their knowledge of your kids’ names are the lowest scum of the earth.

You’re in agony now, praying for an episode of spontaneous combustion. But still she drives the blade in deeper, “That was some party the other night wasn’t it?”

You lose vision. What party? Did you see this person at a party? By now, articulation is impossible. You are a puddle of gurgling noises and awkward silences. After the longest of these pauses, she goes for the coup de grâce: “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

You can’t tell the truth. That would be an admission of social defeat. The only possible response is: “Of course, I know who you are. You’re the hooker who hangs around on 14th Street most Saturday nights.”

The dawning of the Bad Memory Century will have vast consequences for the social fabric and the international balance of power. International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments.

There will be new social movements and causes. The supermarket parking lots will be filled with cranky criminal gangs composed of middle-aged shoppers looking for their cars. As it becomes clear that a constant stream of blog posts and e-mails decimates the capacity for recall, people will be confronted with the modern Sophie’s choice — your BlackBerry or your mind.

Neural environmentalists will emerge from the slow foods movement, urging people to accept memory loss as a way to reduce their mental footprint. Meanwhile, mnemonic gurus will emerge offering to sell neural Viagra, but the only old memories the pills really bring back will involve trigonometry.

As in most great historical transformations, the members of the highly educated upper-middle class will express their suffering most loudly. It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most. First they lose the subjects they’ve only been pretending to understand — chaos theory, monetary policy, Don Delillo — and pretty soon their conversation is reduced to the core stories of self-heroism.

Their affection for themselves will endure through this Bad Memory Century, but their failure to retrieve will produce one of the epoch’s most notable features: shorter memoirs.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Comments

[max]

A decent human being would sense your distress and give you some lagniappe of information — a mention of the church picnic you both attended, the parents’ association at school, the fact that the two of you were formerly married.

Useful phrases for socially retarded neo-cons: 'I'm having a bad brain [*] day, your name is not coming to me, help!'

[*] Even better: this phrase is true everyday at the Weekly Standard... er, New York Times!

max
['The blockquoting is broken on your third paragraph there, Brad.']

[bugly]

Yeah, I thought it was pretty funny too. The most remarkable thing is that I actually Remember having people do that name thing to me. Needless to say, I may not remember their names, but you can bet I'll never forget that I don't like them very much.

[Roger Bigod]

Shorter David Brooks: my prose causes brain damage.

[Padraig]

Somehow I feel as if this is every David Brooks column, stripped of all the enamel of respectability and laid before us bare. Has he always been this petty? This self-absorbed? This amazed at the trials that life and people throw at him in the supermarket?

Has David Brooks actually been Andy Rooney in button-down drag this whole time?

[Neal]

He only wishes that everyone would forget.

George Santayana: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'

[Kate G.]

Is this Brad, or Sadly, NO?

Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots. On the one side are these colossal Proustian memory bullies who get 1,800 pages of recollection out of a mere cookie-bite. They traipse around broadcasting their conspicuous displays of recall as if quoting Auden were the Hummer of conversational one-upmanship. On the other side are those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.

Golf claps. And yes, padraig, david brooks is andy rooney in drag, if andy rooney were a wholly owned subsidiary of the republican party machine whose only function was to distract the rubes.

[sean]

To be fair to Brooks I think he has written some good columns sometimes. But this is indeed an horrendously bad column. As for the question "Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?" -- the people get the press corps they deserve.

[John Emerson]

Thanks for the low hanging fruit, Brad! Republican memory loss is long-established as a major factor in American life. For example, testifying before Congressional committees, or in courts of law, former public officials often forget what they did during their years of greatest success. And if she lives long enough, even Barbara Bush will probably forget that she fully supported her beloved son during his time in office.

The Iran-Contra hearings were a milestone in the history of creative forgetting, and Michael Deaver was probably the champion. Alcoholism caused him to forget everything that happened during a crucial 1 1/2 year period, causing him seemingly to lie under oath. After the poor man was given a suspended sentence and went on to great success in the business world.

"....in 1987 he was convicted on three counts of perjury for lying to a House subcommittee and a federal grand jury about efforts to use the White House in his lobbying efforts. Mr. Deaver, who blamed alcoholism for a faulty memory of events and bad judgment, was fined $100,000 and given a suspended three-year prison sentence and probation. Reagan’s diary, published this summer, made it clear that just before leaving office in 1989 he considered pardoning his old friend, 'but Mike has [one of nature's noblemen!] passed the word that he won’t accept a pardon.'"

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/washington/19deaver.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin

A more fulsome tribute: http://www.edelman.com/Michael_Deaver/

No memory, no consequences, no accountability.

[John Emerson]

"The people get the press corps they deserve."

It would be rude to blame Sulzberger for anything. Like Deaver, he's such a nice man.

[anne]

Sickening column, but no surprise there.

[zewei]

"Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?"

wait, wait. who's the economist here? you tell us why.
or make it a homework assignment in your econ class and let your students tell us why. :-)

[Jay Livingston]

Brooks's column wasn't just low-hanging fruit. It had fallen to the ground and was already rotting. So why bother stepping on it? Why not just ignore it? The poor schmuck has to grind out two 750-word pieces a week plus work on his next book and prep for his commentaries on public TV and radio. So every once in a while he tries to pretend that he's Dave Barry but with a touch of political relevance and instead comes up with feeble drivel like this. And for all we know, maybe there are actually some readers who like these columns.

[John Emerson]

I used to know a mental health worker who was pretty much identical to me in size, shape, color, hair style, and style of dress. Once one of his clients came up to me on the street, calling me by his name. Since I knew the guy he thought I was, I played along successfully and we were both happy.

To me, an unusual but amusing event. To Brooks, an everyday experience. I guess that's what happens when writers are selected for loyalty to the cause rather then for talent.

[John Emerson]

Brooks writes less than Brad does, and easier stuff -- 1500 words a week would not be regarded as onerous by most. Flaubert wrote 250 words a day. He could have written Brooks's columns while still taking Sunday off to profane the Sabbath (as was his wont).

This is the Kali Yuga, Jay. The Lat Days. Disdainfully ignoring the swinish rabble does not work. You have to pitch in and thump them good and hard on their manure-encrusted butts. Emily Dickinson behavior is not appropriate in the world we live in.

[Maynard Handley]

People now use the skills they have in higher measure than those around them to engage in one-upmanship?
I'm shocked, *shocked*, I tell you.
This is clearly something new and unprecedented in the history of social interaction.

[Jay Livingston]

To John Emerson: I was trying to be ironic about Brooks's workload. In rereading what I wrote, I realize the tone didn't get onto the page. It often seems to me the Brooks is running on empty and just filling up the space.