Brooks a poor commencement speaker pick

By Alex Buckey     9/2/10 7:00pm

This past Friday, I got a nasty shock when I read in the Thresher that The New York Times columnist and talking head David Brooks would be the class of 2011's commencement speaker. As a Times reader, political science major and longtime non-admirer of Brooks, I'm disappointed both by the choice of speaker and the embrace of indulgent intellectual mediocrity that it represents. Brooks first came to my attention when I was a bored and nerdy high schooler. While my classmates with good TV reception and social skills caught up on "The OC," I sat at home with my parents, watching "The NewsHour" with Jim Lehrer on PBS. At the end of the hour, the program often had two commentators to come on and debate political issues, and Brooks would represent the conservative viewpoint alongside his liberal counterpart Mark Shields. I remember slowly noticing off-putting patterns in Brooks' style: I didn't like his smug snipes at his debate partners, his obviously premeditated jokes or his confident blusters through long strings of tautologies. Later on, I learned that he wrote a column twice a week in The New York Times and appeared regularly on national public radio. A July profile of Brooks in New York Magazine reported that President Obama pays close attention to the columnist's opinions and courts his good opinion. Clearly, David Brooks is an influential writer with a very large platform. But he's not the kind of political thinker our country needs, and he's not a good choice to speak at Rice this spring.

Brooks markets himself as liberals' favorite conservative - someone who eschews the starry-eyed, frou-frou excesses of the northeastern liberal elite, but who still has the good sense to be creeped out by conservative AM radio. But that label not only presumes his personal popularity, it is subtly, deeply false. Brooks embodies the political philosophy that, next to more obvious candidates like fascism or objectivism, I have always hated most: the one that hides behind labels like "independent thinking" or "sensible moderation" as a way of refusing to engage with the political process. He wants to be respected as an intellectual without ever having to make a potentially risky commitment to a policy or idea. In the rare case that he does spell out a clear allegiance to one side of a controversy - I'll give him credit for supporting gay marriage, for example - he always makes sure to sneer at those whose passion and support is stronger, and thus more contemptible, than his own. He's like the kid who interrupts a brilliant lecture in order to point out a spelling error on a PowerPoint slide.

Passion is not anathema to reason, and, more importantly, a lack of strong political leanings is not proof of superior intelligence or taste. As Daniel Okrent, former public editor of The New York Times, famously said: "The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true." While David Brooks' tired cultural stereotypes and truly obnoxious sociological observations may appeal to the more masochistic among the Times' readership, they do nothing to advance substantive conversations on political or social issues. Brooks thinks that his perpetual seat on the fence puts him above those working in the trenches. But the truth is that there are plenty of smart politicians who realize that the government is imperfect, that not every issue is black and white, and who nevertheless decide to wallow in the political mud because they believe that progress is possible. After five and a half years of college, some of them here and some elsewhere, one thing I've come to love about Rice is its embrace of a sort of good-spirited, un-selfconscious weirdness; students here aren't afraid to tackle all sorts of odd and fascinating intellectual pursuits. Rice's nerdy and warm individuality is, I believe, its best quality, and one of the reasons why Brooks is a bad choice to address us at commencement. Far from a fresh, brave journalistic voice, he practically has bedsores from a career's worth of laurel-resting. His calls for moderation and sanity are really bursts of complacency and self-satisfaction. His writing is the typed equivalent of grocery store soft jazz - it lacks originality, complexity and sharpness, yet it has a unique power to irritate. It's a shame, because if I had known the administration was looking for a speech that was long on pretension and short on solid thinking and research, I could have read from a selection of my freshman philosophy papers and saved everyone the speaker's fees. Besides, my parents are going to be in the audience at commencement, and I know they're going to be disappointed that, after all those tuition checks, we couldn't at least get Thomas Friedman.

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Alex Buckey is a Hanszen College senior.

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