Mr. Brooks receives mail

As Somerby implies, citizens are no longer taking the rampant Gore bashing at the Times lying down.

David Brooks (“The Vulcan Utopia,” column, May 29) criticizes Al Gore’s style (although the sentence he cites is clear and perfectly understandable), speaks disparagingly of Mr. Gore’s “best graduate school manner,” pans his knowledge of history and distorts the central message of Mr. Gore’s new book, “The Assault on Reason.”

My question to Mr. Brooks: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who read and understood history, who could write a book (“An Inconvenient Truth”) that has captured the imagination of the world, who takes time to look into the future and who respects reason?

Mr. Gore’s call for more rational discourse in light of an administration that seems to have abandoned such discourse in favor of extreme partisanship, blind authoritarianism and faith-based foreign policy seems exactly the kind of clarion call our nation needs.

An earlier Age of Reason, also called the Enlightenment, countered the excess of superstition, emotion and irrationality that had prevailed in the previous centuries and paved the way for much of the progress in the West since.

Robert A. Rees
Brookdale, Calif., May 29, 2007

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To the Editor:

Here we go again! Al Gore isn’t even a candidate (yet), but the attacks are already happening.

David Brooks suggests that Mr. Gore doesn’t relate to people, just to machines. At least Mr. Brooks isn’t accusing him of claiming that he invented the Internet, just wondering if he ever “actually looked” at it.

Also, how awful that Mr. Gore writes in his “best graduate school manner.” At least the “almost president” can write.

One can only imagine what the Republicans will dredge up about him this time.

Of the two candidates who ran for president in 2000, the one with the true intellect, who can actually write a coherent book, is the one bombarded with these absurd attacks.

Gloria Sklerov
Woodland Hills, Calif., May 30, 2007

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To the Editor:

Regarding David Brooks’s critique of Al Gore: a chilly worldview, maybe. But I bet a Vulcan Utopian president would have listened to, and not squelched, professional scientists; would have consulted scholars, and not cronies, before invading a country; would have regarded other nations with respect, and not with pridefulness; and would have made appointments on the basis of competence, not loyalty. Sounds to me like a pretty good way to “live long and prosper.”

B. A. Krostenko
South Bend, Ind., May 30, 2007

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To the Editor:

It seems that David Brooks couldn’t provide constructive criticism of “The Assault on Reason,” so he had to resort to ad hominem attacks, calling Al Gore “exceedingly strange” and pompous. Even if he were, that does not change that Mr. Gore was right on the war, the environment and the deficit.

Mr. Brooks implies that leaders who are emotionally absent and concentrate only on reason and logic make bad decisions. I think that his thesis could much more fruitfully be applied to Dick Cheney, a poster-boy for both emotional numbness and bad decisions.

Aurora Mendelsohn
Toronto, May 29, 2007

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To the Editor:

In “The Assault on Reason,” Al Gore asks, “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” I might ask David Brooks a similar question because I cannot see why Mr. Gore’s ideas provoked such a visceral response. In fact, it seems a perfect example of his point that ideas are attacked harshly before they can be fairly discussed.

Frances Briggs
Austin, Tex., May 29, 2007

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To the Editor:

I learned exactly one thing from David Brooks’s column: the Republicans are afraid of Al Gore.

Bruce Hunt
Austin, Tex., May 29, 2007