Satire: ‘I Smoked Pot With David Brooks’

If you’ve read David Brooks’ column about weed, in which The New York Times scribe presents himself as a once-cool kid who got wise and found more fulfilling and morally sound pleasures in the conservative movement, then you know it’s begging to be made fun of.

And so someone has done us the favor.

First, it’s important for background to understand that Brooks presents his high school marijuana credentials as proof that he has insight into the bacchanalia now threatening Denver, where voters recently ended pot prohibition.

“We gave it up,” Brooks writes of his high school self and friends, “because one member of our clique became a full-on stoner. He may have been the smartest of us, but something sad happened to him as he sunk deeper into pothead life.” The columnist also says that “most of us developed higher pleasures.”

And that’s where the satire, written by Gary Greenberg, takes off:

Funny thing. I didn’t know before this morning that I was the “full-on stoner” who was one of the four reasons Dave gave up weed. Sorry as I am to hear that our frolics are now his shameful 4 a.m. memories, after all these years of silence, it’s nice to know I mattered to him, that I was a significant part of the moral life of someone so important and with such a strong “sense of satisfaction and accomplishment”—an achievement I guess I made possible by teaching him that “one sort of life you might choose is better than another sort of life.”

— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer