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David Brooks and Susan Estrich

the breakfast table
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from: David Brooks

Life in the Big City

Posted Friday, June 19, 1998, at 2:40 PM ET

Dear Susan,

It seems like one of the themes of our conversation so far is the corrosive influence of big cities--people in Washington (and I would add L.A. and New York and elsewhere) being so surrounded by corruption that they don't even notice it half the time. This is of course the theme of just about every great French or Russian novel, including two fine press novels, Lost Illusions and A Sentimental Education. I've just finished a fine book about this cultural force in America, The Simple Life by David Shi, which was published back in the mid-1980s. Shi's basic point is that every few decades America produces a great cultural surge that rejects urban corruption and material things like ambition and success, and celebrates the pastoral and simple things like tranquility and retreat. You only have to look back to the 1960s or to the 19th-century Transcendentalists to see the pattern.

As for me, in the great tension between complicated and grasping city life on the one hand and serene and natural rural life on the other, I'm on the side of cities. As a good product of the meritocratic age it seems to me that one of our goals should be to get the most out of life, and that can be done better in the diverse and ever changing city. It's better to live in the real world surrounded by corruptions than in some sort of modern monastery, whether it is a commune or a university campus. (Although I do think one should have a nice summer house to supplement the urban stress and strain).

One of the products of this approach to life is that you have to just accept that you're going to live your life ankle deep in muck. In the first few months of the Monica scandal, a lot of reporters got things wrong. In their different ways, different media types, like Glass, Brill and now Patricia Smith of the Boston Globe, get too hungry for attention and bend or break the rules. One of the striking facts about America is that despite becoming urbanized, we remain pretty moralistic, so our response to Smith or Glass is stern. In Britain, the urban media is more decadent, so they overlook a lot more, producing more entertaining newspapers but less serious discussion.

I think fatigue is making me pious, so before I slip totally off the deep end, let me just note how wonderful the New York Post is. It's owned by Rupert Murdoch who owns my magazine, so you can accuse me of sucking up, but I learn so much from the Post. For example, today it provided the best coverage of the Yale legal scholar who killed his girlfriend "Genius loses 11-yr. battle to demons inside." I learned that while Donald Trump has let his hair grow shaggy, Marla Maples has cut hers and she looks great (a rare exception to the principle that women almost always look better with longer hair). I learned that Cindy Crawford's belly button is ugly so in a recent photo spread in Elle they airbrushed it out--she is shown without one. I learned that Al D'Amato is now leading Geraldine Ferraro in the polls. I could go on.

all the best,

David

the breakfast table
entries
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from: David Brooks

Life in the Big City

Posted Friday, June 19, 1998, at 2:40 PM ET
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David Brooks is a senior editor of the Weekly Standard. Susan Estrich is a law professor at the University of Southern California.
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