I really should know better than to read David Brooks in the morning. But I never seem to learn. In the event, I choked when I read this in
Brooks' column today (reg'n required):
The Battle of Corpus Christi is but the latest example of our capacity to transform fact into stereotype.
On a personal level, the Cheney-Whittington accident was a sad but unremarkable event. Two men go hunting. Both are sloppy, and one friend shoots another. The victim is suffering but gracious. The shooter is anguished in his guilt.
...
In normal life, people would look at this event and see two decent men caught in a twist of fate. They would feel concern for the victim and sympathy for the man who fired the gun.
I couldn't stand it. I fired off the following to the New York Times and Brooks himself. It's there, in it's full glory, below the flip. Hopefully the NYT will print it.
Mr. Brooks, I hope you have a good sense of irony. According to wikipedia, "dramatic irony occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate". You may as well post your 2/16 column on Wikipedia right next to this definition.
You write about "our ability to unfailingly play our assigned roles." You then, with a straight face, go on and start to spin Cheney's shooting of his friend as "[t]wo men go hunting. Both are sloppy, and one friend shoots another. The victim is suffering but gracious... In normal life, people would look at this event and see two decent men caught in a twist of fate. They would feel concern for the victim and sympathy for the man who fired the gun."
I don't have a lot of sympathy for sloppy hunters... or for people who are rich enough and powerful enough to own 50,000 acre ranches or have enough time, money, or inclination to shoot birds on a weekend - I'm too busy trying to earn enough money to live in my neighborhood, save enough money for retirement, and to offer the best possible opportunities for my son. My sympathy for a billionare accidentally shooting his equally-rich and connected buddy is, shall we say, limited.
So, after you, Mr. Brooks, proceed to lecture members of the blogosphere and the "liberal media" on how to report a story - how "pundits had to live up to their responsibility to manufacture a series of unsubstantiated allegations" and "[m]eanwhile over at the blogosphere, the keyboard jockeys had a responsibility to sniff up vast conspiracies". You may as well add another paragraph to your piece: "Finally, dear reader, conservative pundits like myself will attempt to blame the media for pushing a liberal agenda and painting 'our Vice' as some sort of tragic, latter-day Saint." You have to admit, it fits into your piece perfectly.
You can even close it with the same sentences: "We have our roles, dear audience. Ours is not to feel and think. Ours is but to spin or die." The irony is that you refuse to see your own role in the media coverage. The character onstage is ignorant, while the audience knows his fate, or in this case, who he is.