Despite what you have been told, David Brooks is not an actual human being. Every week columnist for The New York Times punches into work before reviving the role of celebrated and commonsensical populist. It's this farce that allows him to churn out perpetual twaddle on the evils of the elite class while offensively serving as ventriloquist for the unwashed masses, explaining that they have turned to right-wing policies after years of enduring snotty putdowns from urban cappuccino sippers.The actor's actual existence involves things like paying almost $4 million for a fucking house, as The Washington Post recently reported: “The New York Times op-ed columnist and wife Sarah are trading up — from their longtime home near Bethesda's Burning Tree Club to a century-old (exquisitely renovated) five bedroom, four-and-a-half bath house in Cleveland Park. It includes a two-car garage, iron and stone fence, generous-sized porch and balcony, and what appear to be vast spaces for entertaining. The timing seems to have been right: After only a few days on the market, their old place (which also boasts five bedrooms) is under contract for $1.6 million.”
Rest assured, I am not attacking Brooks when I identify him as a conniving entertainer. On the contrary, I'm trying to be incredibly fair here. If Brooks actually believed half of what he wrote, there is no way he could have submitted his last column to The Paper of Record, unless sufficiently drugged and/or pulling some sort of elaborate prank. In fact, he could not have so much has typed the first half of his first sentence, which is this: "They say you've never really seen a Bruce Springsteen concert until you've seen one in Europe …"
Brooks goes on to detail a Springsteen concert he saw in Spain whilst rolling out all the predictable staples of his tired act. The farcical waste of ink has been brilliantly diced to shreds throughout various corners of the Internet, most notably by Mobuto Sese Seko on Gawker: "What’s cool about someone like David Brooks is not only that he thinks he’s stumbled on some earthy American understanding of rock and roll by hopping on a transatlantic flight to Iberia to catch a Springsteen concert, but that he also understands that Springsteen isn’t some “American” thing. He’s flown over, spent a day, then flown back, and what really makes Springsteen cool is trans-nationally marketable/fungible corporate terminology."Brooks is hung up on "the oddest moment" of the show, when a bunch of Spanish people began singing along to the most famous song of the performer they had paid to see: "I looked across the football stadium and saw 56,000 enraptured Spaniards, pumping their fists in the air in fervent unison and bellowing at the top of their lungs, 'I was born in the U.S.A.! I was born in the U.S.A.!'…Did it occur to them at that moment that, in fact, they were not born in the U.S.A.?"
Yes, it did. However, Brooks spins this nonsensical observation into the thrust of his travesty, explaining how the good people of Spain are, in fact, just big fans of New Jersey. He uses the word "paracosms" and refers to "Tupac Shakur's Compton." I think our beloved pretender's point is some hackneyed, conservative sentiment about how you should join a bowling league, but who really knows?
It's interesting that Brooks only examined the moment in which the concertgoers were singing the chorus, thus avoiding a discussion about whether or not they passionately shouted along with the rest of the lyrics. Nearly everyone, with the exception of Reagan's 1984 campaign handlers, knows that "Born in the USA" is a song about a man from a forgettable town who joins the military after running into trouble, then returns to his lonely country, and wonders what it was all for; that is to say, it's an anti-war song.Why would people in Spain be singing enthusiastically? Proportionally the country has suffered one of the highest casualty rates as a result of the "War on Terror" and the public has been critical of the United States' military interventions from the beginning. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's election win was, largely, achieved as a result of his opposition to the Iraq War, occurring shortly after the terrorist bombings in Madrid. According to a Wikileaks cable released in 2010, the Bush administration was concerned that Zapatero was consorting with "pacifists" and "running out of patience" with his consistent public criticisms of the disastrous war.If you don't remember Brooks' opinions on the invasion of Iraq, let me refresh your memory: "Bush gave Saddam time to disarm. Saddam did not. Hence, the issue of whether to disarm him forcibly is settled. The French and the Germans and the domestic critics may keep debating, which is their luxury, but the people who actually make the decisions have moved on to more practical concerns …"Ah yes, practical concerns, like how to increase terrorism in the region and solidify all those Blackwater contracts. Brooks has never formally apologized for being completely wrong about the biggest foreign policy blunder in a generation, merely explaining that the robust defense of a vast and stupid war crime was "an unfortunate deviation from my core philosophy." Perhaps, these opinions dissuaded him from the sticky task of reckoning with the message of the entire song.
Why do I think the people of Spain were singing along to Bruce Springsteen? Because Bruce Springsteen has great songs and they like his music, maybe some of them were thinking about war and some of them were thinking about New Jersey, but most of them were probably thinking about their personal connections to the song and the artist.That's the thing about music: we project our own deep, specific narratives on something someone else has made. It's a practice that is hard to articulate yet anyone can grasp its essence by watching an audience interact with a performer. Besides, perhaps, those looking down on the show from the luxury boxes.
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