Kvetching

David Brooks’s NYT editorial today puts Gen. McChrystal’s removal in cultural context.  Everyone in DC and in the military kvetches, Brooks says; it’s part of the culture, part of the way political groups maintain their cohesion over against everyone else.  It has always been so.  What has changed in the last few decades, though, is the development of a media ethic of exposure that replaced the ethic of reticence sometime after Vietnam.

Brooks concludes: “The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

“Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.”