Klinkenborg Kopykats: David Brooks, "The Great Escape"

Every now and then, another columnist will run out of ideas and try to jump on Verlyn Klinkenborg's patented schtick. But they rarely get away with it -- few writers can truly capture the elusive Klinkenborgness that makes Verlyn Klinkenborg's columns so uniquely Klinkenborgian. In today's New York Times, noted conservative douchefaggot David Brooks, who couldn't think of anything else to write a column about today, steals the quintessentially Klinkenborgian device of summarizing something he remembers reading a while ago (hereinafter the Summarizing-Something-He-Read Device, or SSHR Device).

Tuesday, 4/22/08, "The Great Escape" by David Brooks

Summary: David Brooks once read an essay about how people viewed the night sky in the Middle Ages. He thinks people must have had big imaginations back then, more than they do now. He speculates that this was "nice." (He's REALLY conservative.)

Notably Klinkenborgian passage:

As many historians have written, Europeans in the Middle Ages lived with an almost childlike emotional intensity. There were stark contrasts between daytime and darkness, between summer heat and winter cold, between misery and exuberance, and good and evil. Certain distinctions were less recognized, namely between the sacred and the profane.

Similar Klinkenborgs: The real Verlyn Klinkenborg frequently relies on the SSHR Device, but the most archetypal example is "White's 'Memorandum,'" which, like a grade-schooler writing a book report, he didn't even bother to give a real title.

10/10/05, "White's 'Memorandum'"

Its opening is classic Klinkenborg:

One of my favorite E. B. White essays is the one called "Memorandum," which he wrote 64 years ago this month. I never understood it until I'd been living on this farm for a while.

Has Klinkenborg been out-Klinkenborged? In this case, no. Brooks deserves credit for coming close, but he makes a few beginner's errors. Most notably, he foolishly makes a tortured attempt to connect his topic to current events, thus sacrificing the sheer irrelevance that is the hallmark of a true Verlyn Klinkenborg column. You can practically hear the screech of the truck driver's gear shift as Brooks suddenly yanks us back into the real world:

Material things were consecrated with spiritual powers. God was thought to live in the stones of the cathedrals, and miracles inhered in the bones of the saints. The world seemed spiritually alive, and the power of spirit could overshadow politics....We tend to see economics and politics as the source of human motives, and then explain spirituality as their byproduct — as Barack Obama tried artlessly to do in San Francisco the other week. But in the Middle Ages, faith came first. The symbols, processions and services were vividly alive.

What a gaffe! The real Verlyn Klinkenborg doesn't even know what year it is (though he is infallibly up to date on the seasons).

Also, Brooks betrays his want of a Klinkenborgian literary background when he misses an opportunity to invoke Robert Frost:

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is.

And then he just goes on, without even alluding to Robert Frost! If Verlyn Klinkenborg had read this column (which he didn't, because he doesn't read the paper), he would have done a spit-take. It goes without saying that he would have used up the rest of the column's word-count by reprinting Frost's poem "Choose Something Like a Star":

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

In the end, Verlyn Klinkenborg is like the speed of light: you can't truly surpass or even equal him, and the harder you try, the closer we come to the end of the world.