Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Yet Another David Brooks/New York Times Edition)
I can't stand it. I can't keep quiet any more. Could the New York Times please replace David Brooks with a literate columnist: somebody with minimal, and I mean minimal, contact--even contact through the Cliff Notes versions alone would do--with the Western cultural heritage? Somebody who has seen, heard, or read at least one thing like Medea or Agamemnon or some version of the Song of the Waelsungs (Wagner's Ring operas would do) or Tam Lin?
It's really embarrassing when you get howlers like:
The New Lone Rangers: If you’ve been driving around listening to pop radio stations this spring and summer, you’ll have noticed three songs that are pretty much unavoidable, and each of them is a long way from puppy love. First, there’s “Before He Cheats,” by Carrie Underwood. This is a song about a woman who catches her boyfriend in a bar fooling around with someone else. But she’s not wounded or insecure. She’s got nothing but contempt for the slobbering, cologne-wearing jerk.... The second song is “U + Ur Hand,” by Pink. This is about a woman out for a night on the town, very decidedly without men.... The third song is “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne... about a woman who tells a guy to make his loser girlfriend disappear...
[T]hey’re about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song 10, let alone 30 years ago... hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fedup, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving... disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She’s also, at least in some of the songs, about 16. This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups...
It would be impossible to commit such a howler as that last sentence if Brooks had ever heard of Medea or Klytemnestra (who makes Carrie Underwood look like Little Bo Peep) or Sieglinde (who makes Pink look as genteel as Miss Elizabeth Bennett) or Janet of Carterhaugh (who unlike Avril Levigne faces down not just another "loser girlfriend" but the Queen of Air and Darkness herself).
None of them are "obviously... product[s] of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups."
I mean, all I'm asking for is minimal, and I mean minimal, contact--even through the Cliff Notes versions alone would do--with the Western cultural heritage. Is that so much to ask of a New York Times columnist? Apparently.
Cf. Dana Goldstein:
Dana Goldstein: Pop Music and Matrimony: Over at TAPPED, I look at this strange David Brooks column, which criticizes female pop stars such as Avril Lavigne and Pink for angry lyrics that perpetuate scary ideas. You know, like women should be independent from men, deserve not to be cheated on, and shouldn't have their asses grabbed (non-censensually) at bars. Brooks believes Avril and Pink are promoting an ideology hostile to marriage, at least before the age of 30....
It was fun to see that Brooks missed the fact that the young pop stars he held up as evidence of moral failure were actually married, striving themselves to live out a "traditional" ideal. But I didn't point this out just for laughs. Rather, the youthful marriages of people like Pink and Avril Lavigne, or even Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, are just as powerful a cultural influence.... Fairly tale weddings and virgin brides are still very much held up as the gold standard.... Young women are caught between a rock and a hard place. It's tough to read a column like Brooks' because young men are hardly ever subject to this same hand-wringing about sexual values. Boys will be boys, right?...
Angry women, decades of dating, and premarital sex don't scare me. I don't think they are evidence of cultural malaise. Rather, they're signs of progress: Young people today are waiting longer and preparing themselves better to make some very tough decisions about who to love, when to reproduce, and what to do with their lives...
