Oh How He Envies the Poor

As near as I can make out this column by David Brooks valorizes the joys of poverty by  insisting that when he spent money in "simple" camps the help treated him and his well and there were no barriers betwixt the other paying guests. On the other hand, when he spent money on the "relatively luxurious" camps there was a sterility of wealth and individualism that stymied the joy of communal poverty.  That's right, we ought not pity the "simples" their poverty but rather embrace their cheeriness and communality. For Brooks its an experience worth paying for.

But of course, it's not possible that the "simple" camps were haimish because imbeciles like Brooks want to buy an experience rather than create thus transforming an ineffable quality of any decent civilization into a commodity available to those wealthy enough to go on safari.

As to the notion that the employees of simple camps peddling haimishness were authentically haimish, I'll leave you with former slave John Little's description of joyful slaves:

They say slaves are happy because they laugh and are merry. I myself, and three or four others, have received 200 lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken; that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it—must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself—I have cut capers in chains.

Not that the cash nexus and the peddling of experience under the threat of no food is like slavery just that even slaves pretend despite a lack of pay.


UPDATE:
Matthew Ygelsias on David Brooks commending the commodification of experience:

I completely endorse this:

This being Brooks and, Ygelsias adds, that

the reality is that at the margin, Americans should invest more in vacations and less in big houses.

Because, of course, it's all about those with too much investing in "experiences" not things and really not at all about seeing to that everyone has a place to stay and decently paying job. It's the haves' world, the rest of us are just living in it.