Heralding the kings and queens of this golden age

David Brooks has written, scribed, limned, whatever, many, many stoopid, intellectually frail, and accidentally self-revealing columns in his day. Today's piece of effervescence is the Platonic Form of a Brooks column. Apparently, he is outraged that lowly "gutter-cleaners" -- mere lawyers and Democratic presidential aides -- have the temerity to point out the outrageous behavior of our modern American nobility.

In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can’t afford full-time household help.

Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

In short, people in Ward Three disdain three things: cleavage, hunting and dumb people who are richer than they are. Rich people have to learn to adapt to the new power structure if they hope to survive.

First, try to submit to the new sumptuary codes. People in Ward Three have nationalized extravagance and privatized Puritanism. Under their rule, the federal government is permitted to throw hundreds of billions of dollars around on a misguided bank bailout, but if a banker like John Thain spends $1,500 on a wastepaper basket then all hell breaks loose. Dazzling personal consumption is out. Middle-class drabness is in. It’s sad, but there’s nothing to be done.

Disdain New Yorkers? Good bone structure? Fuck the heck?

After privatizing reward and socializing risk, we are not to question the spending habits of those whose banks, holding companies, and institutionalized Ponzi schemes the American people now have an extraordinary stake in -- a stake, mind you, provided by the Bush Administration.

What. A. Wank. Fest. But don't take my word for it. Speak, oh Riley, of dishonest New York Times columnists:

I'm sorry; is there someone at the Times who can explain how this constitutes an argument. Or even a simulation of one? If not there, how 'bout the University of Chicago? Just answer one of the following:

1. Who fucking came to whom with their hands out? Whose administration was it?

2. Is it conceivable that one can be both a Free Market Privateer and wholly innocent of the very concept of government regulation, let alone the fact that the great majority of non-hallucinatory Americans support it in some form or another?

3. Is he fucking serious?

Last week Brooks wrote a piece which seemed to argue for a return to Enlightened Surfdom; now he seems to be suggesting that the real economic problem we face is that a few peasants have grown wealthy enough to install gutters. It is, we think, a lot like arguing that David Brooks' ideas must be good, since they're published.