1. i don't think it struck the author the way you seem to think, either. he'd be fool to have read all the lit and make that argument. not surprisingly, then, he didn't.
2. i'd suggest that he's talking about a kind of careerism that can easily be taken up as an activist. so, i think that with the lens he was wearing, he'd probably see bizzy bizzy serious hardworking activists as well. he was interested in the careerist v. politico trope, afterall. he's talking about unstructured relaxing, sitting around shooting the breeze and perhaps contemplating every so often what life is all about. i really don't think this is a full-blown narrative of decline, either. close, but no ceegar.
3. from that snippet, which was an accidental paste that came off my clipboard instead of something else i'd intended, how would you know what i do? my organizing and political activism began two decades ago. i don't think i need to be lectured by you.
4. careful, if you overstuff the article, you're going to end up with straw all over your collar. ah hell, go ahead and set a match to it since what the author actually wrote really makes no difference to what you have to say. yes, it is an obvious ref to organization man. but is uppose if you gave it a little thought you can see how he's engaged in journalism, not social science and certainly not activism. he's not a sloganeer or a leninist. he's writing for The Atlantic Monthly.
At 05:15 PM 3/18/01 -0500, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>David Brooks says that when he "went to college, in the late 1970s and
>early 1980s, we often spent two or three hours around the table, shooting
>the breeze and arguing about things." Students today must be less
>involved in mass protests, etc. than in the late 60s and the early 70s,
>but it doesn't strike me as self-evident that students are less
>politically active today than in the late 70s & early 80s.
> While the very politically active (= organizers & activists = those who
> aren't happy with just spending "two or three hours around the table,
> shooting the breeze and arguing about things") are probably a tiny
> minority at Princeton (as we are at the OSU), Brooks' claim that "nowhere
> did...[he]...find anybody who seriously considered living any other way"
> is an overstatement.
>What is true is that students are busier than ever, not just at elite
>schools like Princeton but at very working-class campuses like OSU, which
>certainly curbs students' ability to get politically involved.
>
>>While some sociologists refute the significance of Ritzer's theory, those
>>who accept his evidence see an ugly, automated future, one similar to
>>that envisioned by Max Weber, the 19th-century theorist on whose
>>"principle of rationality" McDonaldization is based. "{Weber} feared that
>>rationalization would create a society of rule-bound, apolitical
>>individuals dominated by soulless corporate and government
>>bureaucracies," Crouse says, "Rationalization, for him, was an 'iron
>>cage' which would become impossible to escape. What once seemed rational
>>and liberating would, perversely, become irrational and constraining as
>>ordinary people lost control over the decision-making processes that
>>shaped their lives."
>
>If that's the theoretical premise & conclusion, why bother to wax
>"ethnographic," get politically involved, etc., though?
>
>With his title "The Organization Kid," Brooks must be making an allusion
>to William H. Whyte, _The Organization Man_ (1956). His tone is very 50s,
>very cold-war liberal, though he can't be much older than me.
>
>Yoshie