Fascinating. I know exactly what’s Brooks is talking about. He even mentions my own town, Greenwich, which, like the US as a whole, is rapidly becoming a place of the very rich and the very poor. Just like Brazil or any other degenerate third world banana republic.

In the last several years, many of my friends and acqaintances have fled the Northeast for those “Sprinker Cities” Brooks so smugly derides: towns in Tennessee, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona. When talkling about these people Brooks deploys his standard patronizing tone. But can they be faulted? I don’t think so. The problem is, what happens when white middle-class Americans — who are in reality a kind of internal “exile” — run out of room? Where are they supposed to go then? Something, or someone, is going to have to give.

Honestly I don’t know why Brooks is lumped in with the conservatives. He comes across as just another smug, arrogant liberal Manhattanite who, convinced of the superiority of life in Calcutta-by-the-Hudson, looks down his nose at life in the American heartland. His relentless talk about “Patio Man” flipping burgers on the barbeque gives the game away.

Please, Mr. Brooks, go away.

I would have also added a commentary on the fact that suburbs tend to be more religious than urban areas, which would take the sting off of the materialist tinge to Brooks’s piece. Overall, though, I would argue that the suburbs are largely as he says. Sure, the human relationships are far more complex than he lets on, but if there weren’t any financial pulls, the suburbs wouldn’t be as much a fixture of American life as they are today.

People devoid of materialism tend to gravitate towards whatever is chic or eclectic without regards to living costs, and dress like flood victims. They generally move to urban neighborhoods, don’t raise families (or, if they do, raise disfunctional ones), vote Democratic, and spout platitudes against “gentrification” if any attempts at urban redevelopment are made. With this being the main alternative, its small wonder the suburbs appear as the doppelganger of urban life.

At the very least that is what I took from Brooks’s piece. “Sprinkler cities” have endured as the last embodiment of the American Dream, the heart of which is ownership of property, a nice, stable nuclear family, two cars and other good material possessions. I wouldn’t consider that “Hell,” although Brooks may make it seem far more dull than it truely is. He doesn’t quite do the suburbs justice, although I commend him for defending them.

I would not take Brook’s description of “Sprinkler Cities” as complimentary. He regards their inhabitants with a zoologist’s eye. To him, they are alien creatures, out there beyond the world of Washington and New York where those who count are. There are enough of these specimens that our rulers (for whose attitudes Brooks can serve as a proxy) need to know something about them in order to judge how they will react to the many unbidden upheavals the elite foists on them. Sadly, most seem to take it on the chin, shrug their shoulders (if they even notice) and move on.

I thought Brooks’ characterization of what are, with all their imperfections, fairly typical successful Americans oozed condescension. If one wants to know what the Weekly Standard neo-con crowd actually think of most Americans, reading Brooks is not a bad way to find out. While he notes that many Americans find themselves squeezed out of their former residences by the pressure of the very rich on the one hand and the multiplying - mostly foreign - poor on the other, that does not seem to trouble him. I think his wit and interior decorator’s eye for fashion details mask a profound contempt for ordinary Americans. HRS