The royal "we"

When making witty social observations, it's best if you do not offer yourself as the one main example of a phenomenon. David Brooks would, it seems, disagree:

Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine's. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty - fish, then crab, then steak.

Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called "devil's brew." A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.

The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:

"Is it decaf?"

Now from this, Brooks concludes that "we live in the age of the lily-livered, in which fretting over things like excessive caffeination is built into the cultural code."

We do? Who are "we"? President Bush is the only actual person, other than Brooks himself, provided as an example of modern-day anti-decadence. We the readers learn that "the higher reaches of corporate America are filled with tightly calved Blackberries in human form, who believe that extremism in pursuit of moderation is no vice," and that "the White House is staffed by tidy-desked, white-shirted, crisply coiffed StairMaster addicts, whose idea of sensual decadence is an extra pinch of NutraSweet in the lunchtime iced tea."

This is all just free-association on Brooks's part. Having commuted to NYC's financial district every day for four years, I saw plenty of businessmen, and believe me, there was nary a tight calf in sight. And, though I don't claim to know the inner workings of the White House, I take it that the NutraSweet comment is not to be taken too literally. But it's one thing not to be literal, and another entirely to make these grand statements and not back them up. In fact, Brooks's whole story about asking for decaf suggests that he was the exception, not the rule, among his friends, which completely contradicts his point.

But, to be fair to Brooks, I think he's onto something about today's culture of nutritional purity, at least among a certain subset of the population. There are plenty of concrete examples out there: The fact that an article on the virtues of oatmeal made it to second-most-emailed article at NYT online. The very existence of Jane Brody's "Personal Health" column. The new federal dietary guidelines, which are all but impossible to follow. The popularity of the Whole Foods chain. The intricate and hard-to-follow ways in which foods are now labelled. The Carnegie Hill coffee shop Yura, where there are, quite literally, mini-cupcakes, mini-sandwiches, and mini-people.

(I could offer my own semi-rational fear of trans fats, but that would, as I noted above, not serve to prove a larger point).