You take the Egg fu yung, I’ll have the chicken lo mein, Ruthie craves charred and shiny spare ribs, and if you beat me in picking up the check at The White Rice Inn, the fortune cookies and pineapple slices slide to the other side of the table. It’s Tariff Week #2 and schnorrers to the left of me, three-card monte graduates to the right and I refuse to be stuck in the middle of the pie-eating contest from media commentators who are drooling, for a minute, before writing a column or posting on social media about how Trump makes them ashamed to be an American. It’s like an old Cantonese menu before Szechuan restaurants upended Chinese cuisine for New Yorkers in the early-1970s. Pick from column A, take a nosh from Column B, and go adventurous with shark fin soup from Column Z. It’d be swell if New York Times playtime sociologist David Brooks followed forgotten celebrity Rosie O’Donnell to Ireland, a country that boosts Hamas more than Guinness, but either he doesn’t have the guts or is afraid his “brand” might be tarnished.
I’m fairly accustomed to the gyrations of financial markets, at least more than those who memorize every word of Jamie Dimon or Jim Thanos—as if they’re not, at least right now, making pronouncements from an early-morning fantasy casino in Vegas or the Bahamas—and the current stand-off with China is a high-wire act that I watch with one eye open, but as I said last week a reasonable person can’t come to a reasonable Trump conclusion, pro or con, until 10 or so days pass, perhaps longer. I do root root root for the home team—Red Sox hubris/despair—but it’s hard to countenance the #NeverTrump legions who are barely disguising their glee at the financial tumult, such as disgraced pundit David Frum, most cheering for a brutal recession since that’d be a win for their side. It’s creepy. I don’t care for many Democratic administrations, but was never happy when financial turmoil occurred since, one thinks, that such a downturn is about more than politics.
I’m reminded of a visit made to the Upper West Side apartment of New York Press’ top salesman, Jimmy K., a smart guy who, without the benefit of a marketing degree from a prestigious university (previous job was hawking Christmas trees), could sell advertising space to almost any small retailer, often just by wearing him down with non-stop jabber. It was February of 2000, and my accountant was pissed because Jimmy K. hadn’t cashed his last six (large) paychecks and it was jumbling up his ledger. I spoke to Jimmy, who at 10 a.m. was sitting in front of his TV (tardy for work), and explained the annoyance. A good fellow, he apologized, and said, “I’m sorry, Russ, about the checks but haven’t had time to cash them, my day-trading is off the charts, I’m killing it.” Two months later, after the dotcom bubble was popped by Bill Clinton’s Justice Department pursuing a younger and Not Beltway-Approved Bill Gates, Jim was at work every day at seven a.m., trying to recoup some of his prodigious day-trading losses by… returning to his main job.
David Brooks, on April 10th made many, if obvious, reasonable points about declining literacy among American students, who can’t fathom reading, say Theodore Dreiser, Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe, never mind Robert Caro, and are slaves to their cell phones, procuring “news” and gossip from TikTok, Twitter and Bluesky. And then the Brooks descent. He pours it on: “Americans had less schooling in decades past, but out of this urge for intellectual self-improvement, they bought encyclopedias for their homes, subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and sat, with much longer attention spans, through long lectures or three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debates.”
The last example is absurd: a minuscule fraction of Americans saw Lincoln and Douglas debate, and the encyclopedias that people bought (my family included, although we didn’t gussy up bookshelves with copies of National Geographic) became dated fast and generally weren’t replaced. And I don’t remember many people sitting through “long lectures” for “self-improvement.” And then Brooks blames Trump for a badly-educated country (he doesn’t mention other first-world countries with similar problems).
Brooks: “Producing something this stupid [Trump’s tariff policy] is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime—relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence. Back in Homer’s day [Brooks puffs himself up as a 21st-century Hermes], people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.”
According to Brooks’ daydream, since civilization no longer exists, the fortunate among us will soon be shaking hands and roasting slabs of meat with Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.
The Times’ Bret Stephens joins in, mourning the lack of this country’s character today, as opposed to “the America of Huck and Jim, Bogart and Hepburn, Shepard and Glenn.” He concludes: “The habits of freedom, 250 years old, still run deep in our bones—deeper than anything [Trump] can ruin over the next few years. But that certain idea of America that once typified us, and for which we were so admired, is evaporating.”
A knife in the ribs for my daft thought that America wasn’t admired during the Vietnam or Iraq wars.
Semi-retired Maureen Dowd chimes in: “How strange, as even the dollar loses its allure, that a man long considered a branding savant has so badly mucked up the U.S. brand.”
Finally, in The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker, joining the groupthink, writes: “Mr. Trump may find all this in-your-face diplomacy satisfying now. But casting off America’s reputation as a place that reveres freedom, dignity and the rule of law will harm the brand—and not just in the long term.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023