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Boy, did we open a can of worms when we asked you to interpret David Brooks' tsunami column.

We haven't read such pretentious, deeply confliced, sophomoric ramblings since college. And that was just when we re-read Brooks! High-oh!

Anyway, your responses were so good, we decided not to pick the best: you're all winners.

After the jump, readers, a haiku poet, a real live literary professor, and quite possibly Sting attempt to understand David Brooks.

* * *

Whether he knows it or not the column is about Brooks' struggle with existentialism and the realization that he is going through right now as he begins to understand for the first time that there is no active god anymore,and that there hasn't been for some time. Brooks has not yet crossed thethreshold into believing god is dead, but he's running out of excuses. Brooks'fall back to classical literature as a means of avoiding the subject of god'sdemise only serves to bolster the confusion he feels and which is readily evident on the page.

* * *

Man vs. Nature: This time, it's personal.

* * *

This about sums it up, yeah?

"I've stood here before inside the pouring rain
with the world turning circles running round my brain
I guess I 'm always hoping that you'll end this reign
but it's my destiny to be the king of pain..."

* * *

Throughout history, we humans have always had a deep, inner compulsion to bring force and meaning to our lives, often through elaborate belief systems. Theology is an obvious one; the romanticazation of nature is another.

But the tsunami was so arbitrary, and so awful, as to confound all this. Any attempt to impose "meaning" on the disaster is bound to seem ludicrous, but this won't stop us from trying. Right now, the story coming out of the press is that we're "all connected by our common humanity in times of crisis" — but this is just another pathetic way of trying to make ourselves feel better by imposing a layer of meaning on something that is beyond our ken. A more appropriate response would be to simply grieve for the tsunami's victims, and accept that we live in an absurd universe.

* * *

"Don't kid yourself: Mother nature is a cruel and wanton bitch".

Apparently, Mr. Brooks (like most senior writers from the NYT) has used the Bible, Whole Foods grocery stores, Romantic Philosophy and some of the lesser Disney musical films as talismans to protect himself from this basic reality, but last weekend's tsunamis have forced him to face the hard, cold truth.

I recommend watching a marathon of "Small Wonder" (especially episodes from seasons 1 and 2) while repeating the mantra:

"She's a small wonder
And she'll make your heart take flight
She's a small wonder,
Brings love and laughter everywhere!"

* * *

You got it backwards. Brooks thinks Thoreau is like a Neo-Con like him and the rest of them: They see war on tv and think they are battlefeild experts. Also, with that whole wrath of God thing and the bible, I think there might be some subtle homophobia going on. I could be wrong though, since Brooks wears a pink shirt and purple tie.

* * *

"It's a holiday week. Friedman and Dowd are off, how the hell did I not figure it out? Four p.m. and I gotta get over to PBS, where Shields will yammer on that the slow U.S. aid response is important in some way. Let's see, I need a quote to build some damn thought around. I'll Google something like 'savage wildness of nature.' Hey, Thoreau. First part sounds vaguely applicable; toss it in, diss the second part. More reporting needed: Where's that Webster's? Great, definition of "wilderness" gives me another sentence. More reporting needed! OK, spread these newspaper front pages around. Heavy lifting! Done!"

* * *

Man...good.
Nature...bad.

Therefore, Republican industrialists who destroy nature can claim they were acting in self-defense.

* * *

"Nietzsche's right, God IS dead... and now who can I call on when I'm up against my deadline and my clever punditry can't make sense of the world? No one, that's who."

* * *

Clearly, the "nature" that David Broder rambles on about is simply a metaphor for, well, chicks, and his inability to fathom them, let alone get laid (a common malady for the writing set). Too often when confronted with nature/women, from which he just wants to nurse, he is at a lost to understand its wily, mysterious ways - if only there was a just God to explain it all (or perhaps an older brother who had at least reached second base). Instead, when his right hand "strays from the path" (his imagination conjuring up images of a "child on a mattress" while listening to Elton John sing "Hakuna Matata") he frets still about God's "retribution." In the end, he just finds that little hussy Nature's "abyss" a bit too yucky and has to avert his gaze.

* * *
Nature: BAD. Myths and fate: BAD. Dead people: BAD. Media: BAD. Man's (or at least David Brooks') ability to comprehend nature and dead people: DEEPLY BAD.

* * *

Best interpreted not as a "column" but as an act of writing. We see this in primitive man, when his conceptions about the world and behavior of citizens and municipalities are proven to be false. David Brooks sees life and death beyond the exurbs and his world-view is shaken. Falling for the pathetic fallacy called "narrative-lack," Brooks delivers the closest thing to sputtering and gasping for words that will pass muster with the NYT's standards of eloquence and readability. Note that vocabulary words are still present: repugnant, tribulation, bromide.

* * *
I think he's saying that throughout history humans have tried to rationalize the awful by creating myths and stories to project reason on to the unreasonable. People do this so they don't have to face the fact that life is a crap shoot and sometimes fundementally unfair. It's not healthy to 'look on the bright side' of such a catastrophic situation, like the tsunami. It's better to just feel the excruciating truth that sometimes shitty things happen to people who don't deserve them. And Elton John got it all wrong. It's not a circle of life, it's more like a circle jerk —someone's always getting fucked.

* * *

Obviously a cry for help. The poor man appears suicidal and should enter a treatment facility immediately.

* * *

Brooks has written a secular, pessimistic lamentation for the victims of the Tsunami. In the past people were likely to ascribe such a disaster to the hand of God, whereas today we have an romantic, naturalist view of nature that does not take into consideration the wildness and cruelty of nature. Both perspectives have their appeal — the former places man in the center of the universe while the latter gives us an upbeat, tonic view of nature — but both are rejected by Brooks, as is the tendancy to cast this story as a celebration of human generosity. Instead we should feel deeply bad both for the dead and for those (like Brooks) who have no way of explaining a catastrophy of such proportions.

* * *

Drank too much last night.
Good thing noone reads my work.
Oh well. Here's some shit.

* * *

you know, there is a flood in the bible. god is in the bible, too, and god makes floods, and floods are also in nature. sometimes, god or nature kills a lot of people, and it makes sense in the bible. now, many people who write and read, they are not smart and do not read the bible. i have a column.

* * *

Brooks, committed to the red-state theme God is meting out retribution, realizes, at about word 367, that if he takes his idea to its logical conclusion, he will be forced to face the screaming abyss: god chose the wrong continent.

* * *

Nature can be bad.

The people who died did so for a reason, because nothing happens for no reason.

Feel bad for those who died, but god forbid you think the government should give more aid to help those who lived, or you are an evil atheist liberal who cannot understand the true meaning of this tragedy.

* * *

Non-snarky explanation: Nature doesn't give a shit about us, and there's no point in trying to look for higher meanings when you have over 100,000 dead.

Snarky (and ironic) explanation: To all those crazy Christians who voted for Bush because of his "moral values": nature doesn't give a shit about us, and there's no point in trying to look for higher meanings (like in the Bible) when you have over 100,000 dead.

* * *

This column is actually an immensely clever pitch for W's new forestry regulations which came out a few weeks a ago. As Brooks argues: flood bad, hurt people; 150 years ago, God's fault; today, Nature's fault (not fuzzy Simba, bad nature, like the tiger that bit Roy). Now the part of the logic that's implied: Nature is cruel, therefore we must punish Nature, therefore we must hack away at our National Forests with childish glee. Also, the only right way to feel about the tsunami is suicidally depressed (unless you're David Brooks, because at least you have a column in the NYTimes).

* * *

"Nature can be mean. Discuss."