David Brooks and Me
I am a fan of David Brooks, a journalist you may know from his many years of writing, from The Wall Street Journal to the New York Times. Prior to a William Buckley appearance on the University of Chicago campus, Brooks was writing satire for the campus magazine, The Maroon, and hilariously wrote of Buckley that “In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping.”
That did much to endear me to David, as I have always personally felt that William Buckley (on Firing Line and elsewhere) was the perfect definition of sanctimonious self-centeredness.
But we are different in some ways, David and me
I am 26 years his senior and had a career in the business world when success was easier and we paid our taxes, while his is in journalism. Our roots are deeply planted in dissimilar national soil, mine in the late years of the Depression and World War Two, his in Woodstock and the se…