ONE NATION, MORE OR LESS DIVISIBLE

The cultural criticism of David Brooks and Thomas Frank is worthwhile precisely because it can't be taken too seriously. Unlike the insufferably dogmatic Ann Coulter and Michael Moore, Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, and Frank, the liberal founder of The Baffler, seem to be conscious of how sweeping their generalizations and rhetorical their arguments really are. Unlike Coulter and Moore, they know they're not really going to rouse anyone into action. So their observations come across as responsible gossip rather than heated argument—what they say is just what they've seen, valuable for getting a general impression of a social group but far from a scientific study or political platform.

In a recent cover story of the Boston Globe's "Ideas" section, deputy editor Wen Stephenson noted the striking comparisons between Brooks and Frank: "Born less than four years (but what seems a full generation) apart, Brooks, 42, and Frank, 39, both emerged from the University of Chicago … to become keen, witty, and extravagantly wide-angled cultural critics." Stephenson says both authors "prefer the sweeping vista and the grand statement to the finely tuned argument" and "attempt nothing less than to explain why whole classes of Americans are the way they are today."

Brooks's latest book examines (and exhorts) Americans inhabiting "big-box malls … herds of SUVs, and their exit-ramp office parks." Frank excoriates (lovingly, he says) his native Kansas for abandoning its historical political populism in favor of Reagan conservatism.

Unfortunately, Stephenson refrains from speculating how the authors' "humor" and "moral instruction" is intended. Introducing a comparison of themes and excerpts from the two authors, he leaves it to readers to determine "whether they are talking to you or about you, laughing with you or at you."

• Brooks gained widespread attention with an article asserting that America is divided into Red (rural and conservative) and Blue (urban and liberal) America. John Tierney took on this thesis in the New York Times Week in Review section last week.

"Just because a state votes red or blue in a presidential election doesn't mean that its voters are fixed permanently on one side of a political divide or culture gap," he wrote. "The six bluest states in 2000, the ones where George W. Bush fared worst—Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut and Maryland—all have Republican governors." He quotes political scientist Morris Fiorina, co-author of the new book Culture War? The Myth of Polarized America, who wonders how much calmer our supposed conflict would be "if the two presidential candidates this year were John McCain and Joe Lieberman." Tierney also talks to Alan Wolfe, who wrote One Nation, After All back in 1998, and said recently: "Compared to earlier periods— the Civil War, the 1930's, the 1960's—our disagreements now are not that deep."

Related in the Times: Is Canada 'Blue' territory?

• Brooks' column last Tuesday spun America's divide differently—as the conflict between the two kind of elites Americans esteem. "The members of the aristocracy of mind produce ideas, and pass along knowledge. The members of the aristocracy of money produce products and manage organizations," he says. You can call the knowledge crowd "professionals," the products crowd "managers," Brooks adds. (Since both tend to be rich, it makes it hard to assume that most upper-income voters favor Republicans; they're actually split.) Professionals have "university skills," reading and deliberating and indulging in ambiguity. Managers have leadership skills, cutting through the bureaucratic thickness and making decisive judgments. It so happens, Brooks says, that the presidential election matches a classic "university" Democrat against a classic "manager" Republican.

Related:Brooks on the democratization of snobbery
Earlier: Brooks on exurban sprawl, Frank on commercializing the counterculture

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

MOSCOW - Oleg Tinkov sees himself as something more than Russia's "beer oligarch," as he has been called here. The 36-year-old founder of Tinkoff Private Brewery sells no ordinary proletarian suds, but premium-priced brews, as well as a sense of home-grown hip, to Russia's growing class of young professionals. (Using the two-F French spelling of his name for the beer is meant to accentuate that.) Vodka may forever be identified as Russia's national drink, but Mr. Tinkov has been capitalizing on beer's increasing popularity here. In 2003, Russians drank 53.4 liters a person, up from 36.6 in 2000, and consumption is expected to keep growing about 4 percent to 6 percent a year. There is room to catch up: last year, the British drank 99 liters a person and Czechs, 160 liters.

MILLICAN, Ore. - Deep in the high desert of Central Oregon, on a lonely terrain thick with sage brush and juniper trees where there are far more antelope, bobcats and jack rabbits than people, lies one of America's tiniest towns. With its seven residents, all members of the Murray family, Millican's population is actually booming these days. For more than 60 years it was Oregon's one-man town, a dinky outpost with one store and two wooden cabins, where two different men were, for several decades each, mayor, postmaster, hotelier and lone resident. … But now Patricia and Jay Murray, a baker and a meat-slicer repairman originally from Portland, Ore., have resettled Millican with their children and young grandchildren, a stray cat and four chickens. … The Murrays are modern-day pioneers who are trying to get back the Millican post office, the Millican ZIP code and the old Millican way of life, as they piece together the strange history of this 80-acre town through newspaper clippings and clues they found scribbled on the walls of the old jail.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• China seems well on its way to having the world's largest economy. But there's at least one problem, says the New York Times . "China is on course to age faster than any major country in history, as its median age soars from about 32 today to at least 44 in 2040." China is aging even faster than graying Europe. "Put another way," the Times says, "China will get old before it gets rich." China's one-child-per-family policy may have worked too well—it restrained the size of the nation's population but left too few youth to replenish it. Article
  Earlier: China also has too many males (second item here)
• The modestly named Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy may be less inspiring than its predecessor, the bipartisan Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, but it figures to last longer, wrote Laurence Kaplan in a recent cover story in the New Republic. Kaplan quotes scholar and realist John Mearsheimer as saying, "Realists tend not to draw sharp distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' states, because all great powers act according to the same logic, regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government." Kaplan says this kind of pragmatism stems from Cold War diplomat extraordinaire George Kennan, but the centrist New Republic, which supported the invasion (and now wonders "Were We Wrong?" ultimately rejects such an outlook. Article The article is mostly about politics, but the more interesting question (posed four years ago in B&C) is about philosophy: what are the virtues and vices of pragmatism?
• The Supreme Court just ruled to deny the Promise Scholarship to an M.Div student, saying that taxpayer-funded religious training violates the separation of church and state (without compromising religious expression). As with many court rulings, so much depends on semantics—what's a "pervasively religious institution"? But the broader issue, writes James K.A. Smith, director of Calvin College's Seminars in Christian Scholarship, in the newsletter Sightings, is the Court's view that "training for religious professions and training for secular professions are not fungible." "In postmodernity, there is no secular, because there is no neutrality," Smith writes. "Every vocation is religious in a formal sense of being committed to a particular worldview." The student in question, Smith notes, was pursuing both the ministry and a business management degree. Since "secular commitments of the market and political liberalism constitute a different religion," Smith says, shouldn't the Court "refuse to fund MBA degrees?" Entry
• So there used to be water on Mars. Where did it go? Some water, as vapor, may have dissipated from the upper atmosphere directly into space," writes the New York Times ' Science section. "Some water may be underground as ice or, possibly, as liquid. The Odyssey mission has detected a large amount of water within the top yard or so of soil in many parts of the planet." The Times says evidence suggests that "Mars may once have been much warmer and wetter, with a thicker atmosphere that would have allowed abundant surface water." Article
• If laughter is the best medicine, why aren't there any certified laughter doctors? Well, there are some certified "laughter leaders," and that's no joke. Over 1,000 North Americans have been certified as "laughter leaders" through the World Laughter Tour, says the Christian Science Monitor. There's also a Laughter Club International in India. Laughter leaders lead sessions in which people gather for the sole purpose of laughing. They don't always have to wait for something funny, either, says one leader. They "simulate laughter to stimulate laughter." Article
• Miscellaneous:Happy 100th to Joyce's Ulysses, from the Weekly Standard—More critique of The Da Vinci Codehere and here from the Christian Century and Chicago Reader (more earlier here) - P.J. O'Rourke goes to Iwo Jima for the Atlantic Monthly - Organic lawns, from the Christian Science Monitor - French government calls 35-hour work week 'disaster', from the London Telegraph.
• Previous/Archive/About/Feedback/Links/CT blog

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.