Spiritual Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the Pagan Ethos and ‘The Callous Tolerance of Cruelty’)

“The callous tolerance of cruelty is a river that runs through human history. It was dammed up, somewhat, only by millenniums of hard civilizational work. The pagan ethos — ancient or modern — always threatens to unleash brutality once again. The pagan ethos does not believe that every human was made in the image of God, does not believe in human equality, is not concerned about preserving the dignity of the poor. It does not care much about the universal feelings of benevolence, empathy and faithfulness toward one another, which, it turns out, are absolutely required for a democracy to function.”—Columnist David Brooks, “How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact,” The New York Times, May 2, 2025

Even without David Brooks naming Donald Trump within the first few paragraphs of this article, one would have guessed that the attributes that the columnist lists for “the pagan ethos”—"power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess”—have been projected by the President. All of these are the exact antithesis of the humility and charity that Pope Francis practiced daily.

All the more infuriating, then, that Trump posted to Truth Social an AI-generated meme of himself depicted as the pope. The act was so outrageous, even for him, that many social media users, even those who loathe him, refused to credit it at first, demanding proof.

By now, it’s hopeless to expect the President to recognize that this image has needlessly offended thousands of people, let alone apologize for it. As former GOP National Committee chairman Michael Steele has noted, the post just demonstrates “how unserious and incapable [Trump] is”—a 78-year-old acting like a 10-year-old.

No, my disappointment is with fellow Catholics, like Vice President J.D. Vance, who pass this episode off as a joke, handing Trump a moral get-out-of-jail-card they never would have provided Barack Obama and Joe Biden if they had pulled a similar stunt.

To its credit, the New York State Catholic Conference swiftly and correctly condemned the post, disputing that there could be anything “clever or funny about this image.”

“We just buried our beloved Pope Francis,” the statement continued, “and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.”

I would not be surprised, however, if Cardinal Timothy Dolan stays silent, preferring to hide behind this institutional statement and the need to prepare for the upcoming conclave. As I noted in this prior post, he never came to the defense of The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde when Trump tweeted that she was “nasty” for urging him in January to display compassion for undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

My guess is that, like prominent lawyers and universities that have knuckled under to Trump’s legal threats, Cardinal Dolan will fear the President’s “retribution”—as un-Christian a behavior as one can imagine.

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on Moderates Vs. a Narcissist Who Will ‘Reap a Whirlwind’)

“Moderates don’t operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons. They are unafraid to face the cross currents, detached from clan, acknowledging how little they know. If you have elected a man who is not awed by the complexity of the world, but who filters the world to suit his own narcissism, then woe to you, because such a man is the opposite of the moderate voyager type. He will reap a whirlwind.”—Opinion columnist David Brooks, “What Moderates Believe,” The New York Times, Aug. 22, 2017

Very interesting to come across this, nearly eight years later. Sadly, it hasn't dated a bit.

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on ‘The Smallest Acts of Daily Life’)

“The fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life. That means being a genius at the close at hand: greeting a stranger, detecting the anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to talk across difference. More lives are diminished by the slow and frigid death of social closedness than by the short and glowing risk of social openness.”— Conservative commentator David Brooks, “Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be,” The New York Times, Aug. 26, 2022

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on Office Parks at the Turn of the Millennium)

“Office park buildings are five- to eight-floor layer cakes of tinted glass and composite stone. They have labor-unintensive flower arrangements out front and dwarf-trees inside their deserted lobbies. There are take-out cafes near the atrium, FedEx drop-off boxes just off the main driveway, and rows and rows of open parking. Airport shuttle vans cruise by throughout the day, and there's usually one of those suburban strip mall restaurants like Chi-Chi's or Outback Steak House a short drive down the road.

“Office parks are very quiet. There's no street life except for the huddles of smokers by the front doors. All the action is inside, among the scientists, the techies, and the entrepreneurs. Office parks represent the marriage of science and commerce, and the withering away of just about everything else. And when you hang around them, you sometimes wonder, what is this office-park culture doing to the American character?” —Conservative commentator David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” The Weekly Standard, October 23, 2000

Sometimes, you can’t help re-reading something from some years ago and wonder what happened in the interim. That was my sense when I came across David Brooks’ speculation about which Founding Father would feel most at home in suburban office parks.

Let me give you a hint: it’s in that phrase, “the marriage of science and commerce.” If you’re thinking of Ben Franklin as the Founding Father in question, you’d be correct.

But trends of the past two decades put paid to any notion that the office park indicated anything much about the changing American character. Nowadays, it looks less like an instinct towards bringing people together for work in the suburbs than a real-estate bubble reaching its zenith just when the market need for such space was outstripped by the rush toward this outlet for capital investment.

More or less starting in the early postwar period, the office park reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s. But the rise of the computer and the Internet meant that sole-proprietor businesses, for instance, could function just as well at home as in a larger space outside, and COVID-19 left many of these corporate boxes empty.

We’re going to see whether the accelerating back-to-office movement picks up momentum. But my guess is that new environmental and demographic trends—some in only the barest of outlines at the moment—will mean that the office park (including several out here by me in New Jersey) will not flourish as it once did.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on 21st-Century ‘Globe-Spanning Holy Wars’)

“Over the last several years something interesting happened: Authoritarians found God. They used religious symbols as nationalist identity markers and rallying cries. They unified the masses behind them by whipping up perpetual culture wars. They reframed the global debate: It was no longer between democracy and dictatorship; it was between the moral decadence of Western elites and traditional values and superior spirituality of the good normal people in their own homelands.

“The 21st century is turning into an era of globe-spanning holy wars at a time when the appeal of actual religion seems to be on the wane.”—Columnist David Brooks, “When Dictators Find God,” The New York Times, Sept. 10, 2021

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the 4 Types of E-mail Lists)

“If Aristotle were alive, he would note that there are four types of E-mail lists. There are lists that remind you that the sender went to a better college than you did. There are lists that remind you that he has a better job than you do. There are those that remind you that he has more sex than you do. And finally, there are those that remind you that he is better than you in every respect: spiritually, professionally, and socially.”—Conservative columnist and TV political commentator David Brooks, “Shouts and Murmurs: The A-List E-List,” The New Yorker, reprinted in Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from “The New Yorker,” edited by Henry Finder (2001)

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the ‘Distrust Doom Loop’)

“Once it is established, distrust tends to accelerate. If you distrust the people around you because you think they have bad values or are out to hurt you, then you are going to be slow to reach out to solve common problems. Your problems will have a tendency to get worse, which seems to justify and then magnify your distrust. You have entered a distrust doom loop.”— Columnist David Brooks, “Our Herd Immunity Failure,” The New York Times, May 7, 2021

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on How the Social Fabric is Ripped or Woven)

“Whenever I treat another person as if he were an object, I’ve ripped the social fabric. When I treat another person as an infinite soul, I have woven the social fabric. Whenever I lie, abuse, stereotype, or traumatize a person, I have ripped the fabric. Whenever I see someone truly, and make them feel known, I have woven the fabric. Whenever I accuse someone of corruption without evidence, I have ripped the social fabric. Whenever I disagree without maligning motives, I have woven it. The social fabric is created through an infinity of small moral acts, and it can be destroyed by a series of immoral ones.”—New York Times columnist and broadcast commentator David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (2019)

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on Dorothy Day)

"One of the heroes of the book [that Brooks was writing] is Dorothy Day. She led this morally strenuous life all of her life, self-criticizing and writing and praying over her sins. But at the end of her life, she had achieved an impressive fullness, a centeredness and an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

“One day she sat down to write a memoir. She told Robert Coles what happened next: ‘I wrote down the words, “a life remembered,” and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most — but I couldn’t do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!’”—Dorothy Day quoted in David Brooks and Gail Collins, “Happy New Year, Politicians. Seriously,” The New York Times, January 5, 2014

Yesterday would have been the 120^th birthday of Dorothy Day, journalist and social activist.  Her devotion to the poor and nonviolence, as exemplified in the Catholic Worker movement, sparked a movement for her canonization following her death in 1980. Anne Stricherz discusses her conversion story in this blog post.

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on GOP Prospects in the Near Future)

“I think Republicans have a decent chance of taking control of the Senate. Then the party will nominate Rand Paul in 2016, and the Paul-Rubio ticket will carry several important counties in Alabama and Mississippi and the Republicans will lose Congress again.”—David Brooks (pictured), quoted in David Brooks and Gail Collins, “Happy New Year, Politicians. Seriously,” The New York Times, January 5, 2014

Somehow, it seems appropriate that the man who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary had the surname Brat. It speaks volumes about the unruly nature of political debate in the GOP these days.

Republicans may rue the day they nominated political neophyte Dave Brat, just as they did in the months after Christine (“I’m not a witch”) O’Donnell’s 2010 primary win over the more electable former governor Mike Castle for U.S. Senator from Delaware. Amazingly for an economics professor, Brat had to tell NBC’s Chuck Todd that he didn’t “have a well-crafted response” to his question on the minimum wage. Then, according to an article on the interview in The Huffington Post, Brat scrambled: “I thought we were just going to chat today about the celebratory aspects" of his victory.

Uh-oh. Most politicians complain that reporters don’t ask enough about policy, only the trivial horse-race aspects of campaigns. Here was about as policy-oriented an issue as you can get—one that Prof. Brat has surely thought about, maybe even discussed in his classes—but he has no coherent response.

It makes all the more laughable Rush Limbaugh’s claim about the victor of the race in Virginia: “Brat is not a wacko. He's not a kook. He's an economics professor. He's an economist.”

Rush, as they say, is right--this time. Brat is an economist. His craft has been nicknamed “the dismal science.” But I’m afraid that if the good professor doesn’t learn to talk coherently about his life’s work, he will help the GOP blow its chance to establish a more commanding Congressional bulwark against President Obama. In the process, they will have moved one step closer to the scenario envisioned by David Brooks above.

Put it another way: When Cantor, who was widely viewed as the tip of the conservative spear in Congress a few years ago, is now heralded as a lost possibility for moderation, then the Tea Party has truly, to paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "defined moderation down."

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the ‘Spirit of Bipartisanship’)

“First the Republicans gave Democrats the gift of the government shutdown. Then the Democrats reciprocated by screwing up Obamacare. Nothing so demonstrates the spirit of bipartisanship as the willingness to commit political suicide on behalf of your opponents.”— David Brooks quoted in David Brooks and Gail Collins, “Happy New Year, Politicians. Seriously,” The New York Times, January 5, 2014

Song Lyric of the Day (The Beach Boys, on the Surfing Craze)

“Let's go surfin' now

Everybody's learning how

Come on and safari with me.”—“Surfin’ Safari,” written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, performed by the Beach Boys, from their Surfin’ Safari LP (1962)

Though released as a single two months before, “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys entered the Billboard charts on this date in 1962, eventually peaking at #14. It would become the centerpiece of the group’s first album, released two months later.

“Surfin’ Safari” (labeled “Surf and Safari” at the time) was one of the songs featured on the demo tape that Murry Wilson, father of the three sons  that comprised the heart of the group, used to promote the young musicians to Nik Venet of Capital Records, who signed them almost immediately after hearing the demo in April 1962.

It was a fun (or, as the musicians would later put it, “fun, fun, fun”) record, brimming with influences such as the Four Freshmen and Chuck Berry. It’s also, indisputably, a song born of a time, place and mood unique in American life.

It’s hard to believe for a state with such a rocky economy these past several years, but Southern California in the early 1960s symbolized good times, in every sense. The defense and aerospace industries in the state were riding the wave of a postwar boom. Somehow, it seemed appropriate that, for the children of the white-collar workers at the heart of this boom, “catching a wave” came to have literal force, as a whole youth culture flocked around the state’s beaches.

Brian Wilson might have been the group’s principal songwriter and troubled genius (though not yet cracking under the effects of his abusive father), but it was younger brother Dennis Wilson who was the group’s only actual surfer. It was he who tipped off Brian and cousin Mike Love about the growing surf trend: “You guys ought to write a song about it,” he urged.

A month and a half ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks marveled over “The Power of the Particular”: “If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place, if you embody a distinct musical tradition, if your concerns are expressed through a specific paracosm, you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up in the far-flung networks of pluralism and eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft boundaries, or none at all.”

The inspiration of this epiphany was the columnist’s astonishment over how Europeans could embrace so readily Bruce Springsteen, whose songs (particularly the early ones) are spiked with references to his home turf of the Jersey Shore. But the same applies just as much (perhaps even more so) to the Beach Boys.

Consider this: In “Surfin’ Safari,” the group summoned such California places as Huntington, Malibu, Rincon, and  Laguna. In another early group tribute to surfing, “Surfin’ USA,” the place-dropping was even more vigorous, with 11 different beaches in the state mentioned. It was all more than just a rock ‘n’ roll adaptation of the kind of “list song” that Cole Porter had made famous. No, this evoked an entire world—one that people all over, at that time, couldn’t wait to join.

A little over a decade later, the California Dream had already started to curdle, perhaps evoked nowhere more savagely and poignantly in The Eagles’ Hotel California song, “The Last Resort”: “They called it paradise/The place to be/They watched the hazy sun, sinking in the sea.”

The early 1960s were the Beach Boys’ sun-kissed moment—before Brian’s breakdown, before the band’s late ‘60s slide into an oldies group, before the death of the one true "beach" boy, Dennis in 1983. In 1962, with “Surfin’ Safari” and other tunes that Brian began to crank out (and soon tire of as formulaic), they were about to become America’s Boys of Endless Summer. None of the boys had any idea of the stress and storms waiting for themselves, their state, and their country in the next decade—and half-century.

(The photograph shows the Beach Boys at their so-called “Lost Concert,” 1964, a performance believed lost for 35 years.)

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on GOP Possums)

“The wingers call their Republican opponents RINOs, or Republican In Name Only. But that’s an insult to the rhino, which is a tough, noble beast. If RINOs were like rhinos, they’d stand up to those who seek to destroy them. Actually, what the country needs is some real Rhino Republicans. But the professional Republicans never do that. They’re not rhinos. They’re Opossum Republicans. They tremble for a few seconds then slip into an involuntary coma every time they’re challenged aggressively from the right.”—David Brooks, “The Possum Republicans,” The New York Times, February 28, 2012

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the Impact of Exile)

“If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.”—David Brooks, “The Limits of Policy,” The New York Times, May 4, 2010

The immediate antecedent for Times columnist Brooks (tipped off by the word “tribes”) is the case of Native-Americans, which he supports with this statistic: “The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.”

However, it’s not hard to find similar cases of exile—and similar multi-generational traumas—in other groups that did not go to “arid lands,” notably African-Americans (many exiled twice—initially from Africa, then, as noted in Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land, from the South to the North, following the mechanized picking of cotton, beginning in the 1940s) and Irish-Americans (the archetypal immigrant group, in terms of traumas suffered and coping mechanisms pioneered, following the Great Famine of the 1840s).