I am an admirer of David Brooks, one of the regular opinion
writers for the New York Times. He used to be the token “conservative” on
that paper’s editorial page, but he is so disgusted with Donald Trump that he
appears to have abandoned partisan representation and political advocacy
altogether to become a one-man Greek chorus of generalized lamentation. Though I frequently agree with Brooks, it is
not actually his opinions that attract me.
I find there are more ideas
per square column inch in one of his essays than in any other part of the
paper. Very often these are other
people’s ideas—always scrupulously credited—gathered from his impressive weekly
reading. Many years ago a cynical senior
colleague, anticipating my tenure review, gave me what he considered sound
advice. There are two kinds of
professors, he said: those who read books and those who write books. Neither the advice, nor the bizarre
intellectual aberration in which it was based, escaped me.
One of
Brooks’s recent columns is entitled “Is Our Country as Good as Our Athletes Are?” In it he confronts a widely shared and often articulated
sense of “American malaise” with the outstanding success of America’s athletes
in the Olympic Games at Rio de Janeiro.
That our country faces repeated humiliations, that we are in economic
decline, that we “don’t win anymore” are propositions central to Donald Trump’s
campaign. “Yet when you watch the
Olympics, we don’t seem like some sad-sack country in terminal decline,” wrote
Brooks. “If anything, the coverage gets
a little boring because we are always winning!
And the winners have such amazingly American stories and personality
types (Biles, Ledecky, and, yes, Lochte).”
Brooks’s essay was published, I believe, on August 19, by which time we knew, or could have known, some of the precise details of the “amazingly American” personality type Ryan Lochte, the famous swimmer, exhibits. After partying all night Lochte and some of his team-mates were returning to their billets in the Olympic Village when their cabbie stopped at a gas station to refuel. The passengers took advantage of the pit stop to visit the toilet. One or more of them exercised, noisily, the drunken frat-boy privilege of vandalizing bathrooms, breaking furnishings, and peeing on the results. The armed security guards at the gas station detained the incontinent revelers. There was the matter of reparations. Much of the episode was captured on closed-circuit television.
The account
of the gas-station stop given by Lochte—perhaps one should say accounts in recognition of the
considerable narrative evolution—was that he and his mates had been robbed at
gunpoint by criminals dressed in police uniforms. The gunmen had relieved the swimmers of their
wallets. This was a bald-faced lie
apparently invented by Lochte but, sad to say, supported by at least some of
his team-mates. It was also a gross,
injurious insult to the Brazilian hosts of the games. That American Olympians are world-class
athletes is implicit in their having been chosen from large numbers of talented
competitors to represent our country.
That they should also be world-class jerks and liars is a matter of individual
ethical choice deeply shameful to any, should they still exist, so
old-fashioned as to think there might be more to sportsmanship than winning.
What about
the politicians who propose to be our leaders?
Are they more the political equivalents of a Simone Biles or of a Ryan
Lochte? Donald Trump is such a fabulist
that one hardly knows where to begin. He
got to know Vladimir Putin “very well,” though he later had to allow he had
never actually met him. He was an
apparently unique eye-witness to the festival reaction of large numbers of
Muslims in Jersey City as the Twin Towers crashed to the earth. One of Mr. Lochte’s claims was that although
one of the robber-cops put a gun to his head, he refused to “comply”. Thus
did he refute Wayne La Pierre. The real answer
to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with an--attitude. So far as I know
Mr. Trump has not sought to exemplify his personal courage with reports of his
indifference to bad guys with guns, but it is surely only a matter of time.
However,
his adversary Hillary Clinton has stolen a march on him here. By now her famous account of her dramatic
arrival at Tuzla Airport in Bosnia has gained canonical status in the World Anthology of Greatest Fibs. “I remember landing under sniper fire,” she said. “There was supposed to be some kind of a
greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down
to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
The ceremonial arrivals of famous visitors tend to attract even more
elaborate video coverage than the bathrooms of Brazilian convenience
stores. What greeted Mrs. Clinton upon
her arrival was a fawning welcoming committee including the obligatory
schoolgirl with a bouquet of flowers.
Hillary Clinton might appropriately hang her head down, though not out
of fear of sniper fire.
Mr. Lochte eventually
pleaded guilty to “over exaggeration,” but that was to misunderestimate the
gravity of his offense. He embarrassed
our entire nation. But we must get back
to David Brooks’s implied question. Are
those who present themselves for presidential leadership as good as the
athletes who present themselves as our representatives in sport? One has to give the nod to the athletes. Only some of them are
liars.
