BOBOS IN PARADISE

Bobos in Paradise



Bobos in Paradise

Introduction

This book is a portrait of the evolution of American society since the 50 election victory to Bush II. So far no big deal: The U.S. has a very powerful cultural industry that is constantly exported visions of his own navel as a book or movie. But this time is different. If there is a prize for the best essay Light year would take David Brooks for having written a few pages so full of life, of lucidity and resentment. To get them, has required the coincidence of various circumstances. First, the author is Jewish. As Brooks points out, American Jews suffered serious discrimination in the interwar period. At universities was limited presence of students and teachers in their classrooms. That fact disappeared when, after World War II, the campuses were opened to the intellect, forgetting the descent. Nevertheless, several Jewish intellectuals and academics have kept on alert their capacity for social analysis. Second, Brooks turned to the East Coast after spending four and half years abroad, in a moment that crystallized a new way of life. Suddenly things did not quite fit. Posh neighborhoods in the suburbs were full of cafés where you could hear alternative music and ties were gone. At the same time, the centre of cities, old and Bohemian areas had been studded with expensive lofts and garden stores. Something had to be going for the lawyer of a fashion firm who carry tiny wire-rimmed granny glasses of the kind that Kafka could have led through the streets of Prague

Discussion

Today's elite class is the creation of two apparently opposing legacies of the late 1950's and 1960's. It was during this era that the leading universities in the U.S. became significantly more meritocratic, implementing standardized tests and admitting students "on the basis of brains rather than blood." Out went the gentlemanly "mediocrities from the old WASP families" and in came unprecedented numbers of, among others, Jews and women (Stansell, 2001).

However, these institutions were raided by a powerful countercultural rush. Politics and gender were the basic elements in this wave, Author concedes, but at its dept was “a challenge to conventional notions of success," Repelled, or so they said, by a social code based on income, possessions, and respectability, the student radicals of the 1960's declared their determination to lead lives grounded in "spiritual and intellectual ideals." Their new cardinal virtue: "self-expression (Brooks, 2000)."

As an added element to these two circumstances is the fact that a seasoned journalist and work in The Weekly Standard and Newsweek. Daily newspapers and magazines are great places to observe the world. With all this, Brooks began to shape their perception of change in American society. Social morphology, in the twenty-first century, had changed. The mating ritual, values ??central nervous system of people, was different. For Brooks the middle class or the upper middle class consists of 50 by white Anglo-Saxon and Protestant Episcopalians had opened, mixed and given way to a new group composed of ...