When David Brooks isn’t fulfilling his role as the earnest, friendly face of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard (his true intellectual forebears), he writes meandering, often soporific musings from a conservative perspective for the New York Times editorial page. His latest “feature” piece, however, appears in that paper’s “T” Style Magazine as it involves some very stylish travel. According to the Times’ Public editor, the Times afforded Brooks the opportunity to “temporarily" participate in a $120,000 vacation, hobnobbing with members of the 1%. He reported back to the Times on his experiences twirling in the lap of luxury.
The piece, which appeared in T, the Times’ style magazine, described Brook’s jaunt on a new round-the-world tour created by Four Seasons for well-heeled clientele. For $120,000, participants can travel around the globe for 24 days on a private jet, stopping off at Four Seasons locations in cosmopolitan centers like Tokyo, New York and Marrakesh.
During his trip, Brooks faced challenges like being forced to accept two complimentary bottles of champagne from hotel staff at the Four Seasons Istanbul and having insufficient time to reflect on a Rembrandt painting he was struck by at St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum. Though he was impressed by the amenities, overall, he seemed to find the experience wanting.
Twitter is having a field day with this, and Brooks is, probably deservedly, being ripped to shreds for some of the “observations” contained within this article, Here’s Olivia Nuzzi of the Daily Beast:
Clara Jeffrey, Co-Editor of Mother Jones:
And our own Vann Newkirk II (Click on the pic):
But there's a metaphor to be found here that extends beyond the tone-deaf quality of some of Brooks' attempts to relate his experience. It's captured in his last paragraph, which he obviously intended to be humorous:
Of course, we all have a responsibility to reduce inequality in our society. But maybe not every day.
As an aside, the fact that Brooks stayed at the Four Seasons in Istanbul is interesting. Some of you may recall a film titled “Midnight Express,” the harrowing true story of Billy Hayes, a young American student busted for trying to smuggle four pounds of hashish taped to his body out of Istanbul airport in 1970. After some horrible experiences at the hands of sadistic guards he manages to escape and makes it back to the United States. At the time the movie, featuring one of Oliver Stone’s early screenplays, was released, it scared the bejesus out of me and every other 14 year old pot-smoking kid. There was no way I was ever going to Turkey.
So it was with some shock that when my then-girlfriend (now my wife) and I traveled to Turkey a few years ago we were told that what was now the Four Seasons was the site of the same prison Hayes was kept in. That turned out to be almost true—but not quite. While the Four Seasons Istanbul is in fact built on the site of a notorious Turkish jail, it is not the same notorious Turkish jail Hayes was imprisoned in. It’s just another run of the mill chamber of horrors of the Turkish penal system.
But getting back to that “metaphor” thing, here’s Brooks’ vantage point while on his $120,000 vacation:
When you are on the Four Seasons round-the-world tour, you leave your luggage outside your hotel room in the morning and it appears in your new room in a distant city come dinnertime. The staff fills out those customs forms so you don’t have to bother writing down your name and passport number. A van takes you to a private part of the airport, where you whisk through border control and onto the tarmac, where your plane’s crew — the 15 friendliest people in the history of Great Britain — stand smiling at the foot of the stairs. The plane takes off when you are ready. The tour accomplishes in 24 days a journey that if you tried to do commercially, might take 90.
Four Seasons and its partner, TCS World Travel, a private jet tour company, have taken every measure to reduce your cognitive load. When you land at each new city, you’re handed an envelope with a little local currency in case you want to buy some souvenirs. There’s a squad of local greeters pointing you toward the vans so you don’t have to exercise a neuron figuring out where to go. A 757 normally accommodates some 250 passengers, so each of the 52 guests gets a big leather lounging chair. There’s champagne and superb snacks and a very cool on-flight chef.
This is about as removed an experience from the way 99% of us experience travel as can be imagined. When my wife and I were in Turkey, we didn’t stay at the Four Seasons. We stayed about 100 feet away in a guesthouse where we had our own room, our own bathroom, and a Turkish host who who laid out a cheese and olive breakfast for everyone in the morning. All told this cost 23$ U.S. a night. Nobody waited on us, and any souvenirs we had to find and buy ourselves. Most importantly, to negotiate ourselves around we had to learn some Turkish, so we did a lot of talking to people like waiters and cab drivers. Yes, some people spoke English but many did not. Nobody told us “where to go” or more importantly, how to get there. We had to figure that out ourselves from Fodor’s or other similar tour guides. No one exchanged currency for us. We had to find a bank and do it ourselves (and we received some courtesy tea in the process). That is the beauty of traveling in a foreign country, and that’s where the real experience of travel lies. As Brooks acknowledges, you’re not exactly immersed in the culture when you’re being waited on hand and foot. You lose touch with everything outside your bubble.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “the rich are different from you and me.” One of the reasons for that difference is that the rich, like Brooks on his $120,000 vacation, are both physically, mentally and emotionally removed from the day-to-day concerns of those living considerably lower on the financial ladder. In his article Brooks himself makes the point that you can’t possibly understand a foreign culture by being shepherded through it by people who literally and figuratively speak the exact same language that you do. He might as well have been talking about the U.S. Congress, many of whom are millionaires or multimillionaires and have simply lost touch long ago with what it means to make a minimum wage, need affordable child care just to work, or have to worry how to manage retirement while putting your kids at least part of the way through college, or managing the life of a sick or disabled older parent with no assets to rely on except Medicare or Medicaid. They’re a million miles away from having to choose between paying the electric bill and paying for medicine. They’re all on that $120,000 cruise talking to each other instead.
Brooks didn't really experience Istanbul. He doesn’t mention the constant badgering for money Americans encounter in countries like Turkey that are perpetually struggling economically. He doesn’t mention bargaining for everything. My guess is that he saw none of that. He also didn’t get ripped off by cab drivers who spot Americans as easy marks. He didn’t get lost at night in the complex, circuitous city, where minarets you once used as reference points multiply confusingly so much that you get lost after dark trying to find your way back to the guesthouse, while peering nervously into basements where "refugees" gather after the sun goes down. When Brooks took his boat ride up the Bosphorus, that boat (pictured in the article) was obviously equipped with more than just a hole in the floor as a restroom (for both men and women), which is all you find in many public places.
One has to wonder though, if this go-to mouthpiece for conservative theory finally recognizes the irony involved when he makes this observation:
Sometimes money backfires. People buy a house with a huge yard, but they are so far removed from their neighbors they never really experience community….
But sometimes money allows you to see too many things, too quickly. Sometimes if you seize all the opportunities your money affords, you may end up skimming over life and nothing is deep enough to leave a mark.
That is, in a microcosm, what has happened to the U.S. in the last thirty years, helped along with the ascendancy of conservative economic theory increasingly favoring the wealthy and uber-wealthy. We’ve become a nation where the so-called "important" people live in a few isolated gated communities in New Canaan, Connecticut and Houston, Texas, mingling only with others in their zip code and making huge collective political donations, mostly to Republicans, through contrived corporate fictions to preserve and expand their wealth. Meanwhile the huge disparity between the very wealthy and vast majority of Americans stagnating away in their increasingly tenuous middle-class existence continues to widen, as their government is slowly bought out from under them.
The political parties, most especially the GOP, are as removed from the concerns of ordinary Americans as are their patrons, all of them busy making the most out of their $120,000 vacations, and utterly oblivious to anything else.
Update: The Times’ lack of clarity on the "arrangements" for Mr. Brooks’ trip prompted its Public Editor to issue a statement Monday:
Many readers wanted to know the arrangements behind David Brooks’s participation on part of a $120,000 luxury trip, which he wrote about for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Many on Twitter and elsewhere charged that this must be a junket — a free trip for a journalist, which is, of course, an ethical no-no. (Others objected in strong terms to the article’s concept, its tone, and the The Times’s relative wisdom of spending a large sum of money for this purpose.) The Times’s standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, assured me late Friday that the company had paid for the portion of that trip for which Mr. Brooks was present. (Yes, that covered both bottles of champagne.) A sentence in the article making the arrangement clear to readers would have been a good idea.