Billmon: Young Bobos in Paradise

Several people, including Brad DeLong, have taken swipes at this column by David Brooks (who increasingly resembles the stupendously clueless "Arfy" of Catch-22):

Life Lessons From Watergate

The most interesting part of this Deep Throat business is Bob Woodward's description, in Thursday's Washington Post, of the state he was in when he met Mark Felt. He had graduated from Yale and was finishing a tour in the Navy, but he had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He was plagued by "angst and a sense of drift," and stricken by "considerable anxiety."

He began networking. "I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate." Then he chanced upon Felt, an established figure in the world he somehow hoped to enter. He peppered him with questions. "Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session," Woodward writes. "I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy."

Bob Woodward, in other words, was in the midst of the starting-gate frenzy.

I'll skip through the Boboian blah blah to get to his main point (such as it is) which is that Woodward -- and by implication Berstein, although Brooks knows better than to spoil his thesis by dragging in such an glaring contradiction -- were products of the same shallow, self-referential yuppie media culture that has given us such pundits as, oh, say, David Brooks.