Column of the Week - David Brooks

What do Rep. Joe Wilson, Michael Jordan, and Kanye West have in common? David Brooks calls it a "High Five Mentality". Instead of the humility shown by past generations, our culture has embraced the cult of immodesty:

Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.