Considering how many Moore-lovers accused me of “elitism” for my column yesterday, I found David Brooks’ column particularly enjoyable. An excerpt:

Like Ernest Hemingway, Moore does his boldest thinking while abroad. For example, it was during an interview with the British paper The Mirror that Moore unfurled what is perhaps the central insight of his oeuvre, that Americans are kind of crappy.
“They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet … in thrall to conniving, thieving smug [pieces of the human anatomy],” Moore intoned. “We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don’t know about anything that’s happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing.”
It transpires that Europeans are quite excited to hear this supple description of the American mind. And Moore has been kind enough to crisscross the continent, speaking to packed lecture halls, explicating the general vapidity and crassness of his countrymen. “That’s why we’re smiling all the time,” he told a rapturous throng in Munich. “You can see us coming down the street. You know, ‘Hey! Hi! How’s it going?’ We’ve got that big [expletive] grin on our face all the time because our brains aren’t loaded down.”