My Apologies to David Brooks
Thanking the columnist for his wisdom
We have a literacy crisis in our country. Too few people read legitimate news publications any longer.
And too few people seem to be able to think critically.
David Brooks is one of our great bibliophiles.
He reads omnivorously.
A conservative, he is a voice of moderation, who has been willing to criticize our nation’s disgraced chief executive.
That is not to say that Brooks has not been critical of liberals.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, “The Sins of the Moderates,” he quoted Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote, “The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of the light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.”
In writing of the wisdom of a serpent and the innocence of a dove, Niebuhr was, of course, alluding to Jesus’ words in the New Testament.
And Niebuhr, as Brooks pointed out, is right that the children of the light must be aware of evil.
Brooks also noted in another recent piece that all of us are more complicated than we may seem.
In “What Are We Thinking?,” Brooks wrote thoughtfully about the “dynamic” and “interconnected” areas of the brain, which are not unlike human beings, who, as he mentioned, are multilayered, contradictory and nuanced.
We all may more closely replicate a “swirl” than a march in our individuality and our interrelated movements.
I appreciate Brooks’ sophistication and empathy about the uniqueness of each person, each soul. He is fair, and he has a great deal of wisdom.
Among other topics, Brooks has weighed in for years, as he did in today’s column, about trends in our culture that sadly have fueled a sense of nihilism and anomie in so many people, trends that predate but have been exacerbated by Trump.
Brooks, who announced today in his New York Times column, “Time to Say Goodbye,” that he will be stepping down from his post at the Gray Lady, is steeped in philosophy and history, as befits a graduate of the University of Chicago and its acclaimed Great Books curriculum.
A man of depth and character, he has in recent years written about his spiritual journey, which, like all spiritual journeys, is idiosyncratic and leads one to realize that we are part of something greater than ourselves.
I would not attempt to characterize David Brooks’ religious beliefs, but I do know that he has shown humility in his columns, which, as I say, tend to be fair and open-minded.
I have not always been so kind or modest.
It is one thing for me to criticize Trump, as I have done for more than a decade.
The solipsist-in-chief is a threat to all we hold dear, and he must be called out, if need be, with irony and satire.
But I am very sorry that I was harsh to David Brooks, when I wrote a column years ago in the Huffington Post.
I hope that David Brooks can forgive me, and I believe that he is big enough to do so.
Without overly rehashing that column, I will give a bit of an overview as to why I might have responded so cantankerously, as I did in 2012.
In a column titled “Honor Code,” written more than a decade ago, David Brooks referred to Henry V as one of the “most appealing characters” in Shakespeare.
When he wrote this, I was a bit ticked off at a personal level, and that came through in my tone, which was acerbic.
In my response in 2012, I probably should have explained to a greater degree why I have never found Prince Hal, who later becomes Henry V, to be particularly appealing.
Prince Hal strikes me now, as he struck me in high school and college, as being overly calculating and political.
Moreover, I have never accepted that he could outduel Hotspur or that he has the eloquence or depth of Hamlet, whom David Brooks also cited years ago in “Honor Code.”
Hamlet is indeed “reflective,” as Mr. Brooks wrote in that column.
If anyone had to use a single adjective to describe the prince of Denmark, I can see why some people might choose, “reflective.”
I would also argue that no one word can define Hamlet, who is beyond our grasp, so endlessly paradoxical is he.
To give the reader a bit more of my personal history, I might have been additionally cantankerous when I criticized David Brooks years ago, because I had a not so good friend in high school, who played Prince Hal in a class in the spring of 1983 when I was a senior.
This individual and I were taking a bildungsroman seminar during my last semester in high school; and he, as I say, played Hal, while I played Hotspur.
Our high school seminar was taught by Mrs. Toni Giamatti, wife of Bart Giamatti, the Yale president at the time.
Mrs. Giamatti, like Harold Bloom, one of my professors when I was in college, was no fan of Prince Hal, who abandons Falstaff, his boon friend, who has been a father figure and mentor to him.
Furthering my distaste for Prince Hal, I also had a not so pleasant classmate in college, who went by that very name.
He was a hack, who showed no loyalty to anyone or anything.
A coward with no ethics, he lied about me, the way Iago lies about Cassio and Othello. I can only hope that he has changed.
Unlike David Brooks, who has a great deal of character, the Hal I knew in college was devoid of it.
I admit that Prince Hal can give stirring oratory when he is king. And even as a prince, Hal does have some appeal when he engages Falstaff in a bit of play-acting.
“Do thou stand for my father?” says Prince Hal.
And Falstaff, who is delighted, responds, “Shall I? Content.”
I myself once paraphrased those words years ago when I was a senior in college, but I did so with more than a little whimsy and irony.
As I have written elsewhere, in one of my first exchanges with Harold Bloom, who taught “Shakespeare & Originality,” my senior seminar in college, I said, “Do thou stand for Max Bialystock!”
Like Zero Mostel’s Bialystock in The Producers, Mel Brooks’ 1968 film classic, and like Harold Bloom, Falstaff loves to play, and he does so joyfully, which, as Professor Bloom pointed out, is a quality that links him to Hamlet, as well as King David and Mel Brooks, another Brooks in the creative field, I might add.
And, like Hamlet and King David, Falstaff is also a Renaissance man of sorts, one of range and strength. As I noted, he delights in life and exudes vitality. He is also a former soldier, a valiant one in his youth, according to tradition.
Some may laugh at that.
But Harold Bloom, who served in Israel in many wars years ago, identified deeply with Falstaff. He loved Sir John, just as I love Hamlet.
I recognize that some people cannot stand either one of these Shakespearean characters, and I should have written in a much more measured tone when I critiqued David Brooks years ago.
Brooks, as I mentioned earlier, has written very soulfully of his own journey, particularly in recent years.
We are all human, and we are all flawed.
It should comfort us to know that God is very forgiving. But He does want us to show personal growth. And you can’t fake it. You have to maintain that spiritual growth for the rest of your life.
Thankfully, Jesus is not here to heal the righteous. He is here to heal the rest of us, which is to say all of us, for there is no one righteous, no, not one, as we know from the Bible.
David Brooks believes in forgiveness; and I hope, as I say, that he can forgive me for my harsh tone.
I can forgive the people, who have hurt me.
Irrespective of whether we believe in God, everyone does know the difference between right and wrong.
In 1989, when Bart Giamatti, then the commissioner of Major League Baseball, banned Pete Rose from the national pastime, Giamatti said that Rose had to “reconfigure his life.”
We all have to reconfigure our lives, if we are to achieve nirvana and ascend to heaven.
Yes, it is a long journey in the history of our souls.
And we should strive to get it right.
As it turns out, like David Brooks, who mentioned in today’s piece that he is headed to New Haven, I happen to be from the Elm City.
And, like David Brooks, I have some family members, who hailed from the Lower East Side, in my case, my paternal grandmother, who grew up on East 4th Street.
David Brooks, whose grandfather was named Bernard Levy, may descend from the House of Levi, an ancient tribe of holy priests.
As we know from the Hebrew Bible, the Levites recaptured the Ark of the Covenant from the Philistines.
And the Levites, who had extraordinary devotion to God, carried the Ark back to Jerusalem.
When they arrived in the holy city with the Ark, King David danced with joy.
David, the shepherd boy, who became king, may have loved God more than anyone before or since.
“Do good, and delight in the Lord,” he sang and wrote.
I am sure that David Brooks would agree that our country and the world would be a better place if we can return to being a culture of readers with an appreciation for the Word, for the canon, secular and ecclesiastic.
We all crave wisdom, and we all have the ability to reconfigure our lives.
It certainly helps to ask for forgiveness, as we persist in our spiritual journey until we get it right.
And we should do so with joy, with a sense of play, not unlike Hamlet or King David.