Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A very stupid op-ed by David Brooks, published originally in the New York Times, that’s been e-mailed to me by a friend. “Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don’t even notice until it has almost disappeared,” Brooks blusters on. “Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness. … Today parents don’t seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives. … People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts. … Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state.” Don’t see why he wants to drag in that “goodness” notion–perfectibility‘s the usual Enlightenment-hating rubric–when all that’s actually at stake is a kind of ameliorative response: better to have food than not, a job than not, an economy that’s not a priori punishing to more than 30 percent of the people subject to it, and so on and on. Plus now we learn that Ronnie the Gipper was actually an “Emersonian liberal” in disguise: so what’s the effect on Brooks’s pantheon of “Tragic Vision” thinkers, “many of them … conservative”? But I’m sure he’d be more than willing to welcome the “strong order-imposing state” into his own presumably upscale, comfortable life … What, you mean it’s not just for all “those others”?
“Pan’s Labyrinth won for Best Cinematography,” Cheryl’s come down to tell me. O crap, that cinematography’s just plain bad. “Yeah, I know,” she agrees with me for once, “and I liked another one better.” Except she can’t remember what the other one was.
Emcee Ellen DeGeneres applies the vacuum to the carpet in the theater’s front row and Penelope Cruz obligingly shifts her feet. Hoping against hope that everyone else in the row sits tight …
