Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

Smartmom wants to know: does New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks know anything about Park Slope?

This
Sunday, the neo-conservative writer and enthusiastic supporter of the
U.S. intervention in Iraq (on moral grounds, no less!) ranted against
hipster parents in his article, “Mosh Pit Meets Sandbox.”

In the
process, he insulted an entire generation of counterculture parents,
who buy Ramones t-shirts for their kids, log onto Urban Baby, and
prefer that their kids listen to Dan Zanes and Music for Aardvarks than
Disney fantasy garbage.

As if that wasn’t enough, the author of
“Bobos in Paradise” managed to conflate Brownstone Brooklyn with
Williamsburg and dig his sharp pen into the parents of Park Slope.

“Can
we please see the end of those Park Slope Alternative Stepford Moms in
their black-on-black maternity tunics who turn their babies into
fashion-forward, anti-corporate, indie infants in order to stay one
step ahead of the cool police?” he wrote.

Hold on there! Brooks
may have a penchant for clever coinage, but he also suffers from
out-of-control generalizations. He certainly isn’t talking about the
Park Slope that Smartmom knows and loves (and, yes, sometimes thinks is
ridiculous).

In fact, Brooks is so off the mark, Smartmom wonders
if he even knows the difference between Williamsburg, Park Slope,
Cobble Hill and Fort Greene. (Why he decided to bring up the title of a
1970s movie about desperate and robotic housewives is anyone’s guess).

In
Park Slope, the moms are pretty darn conventional — they care about
good schools, neighborhood sports, and, damn it, they even want their
Bank of America ATMs un-littered.

Park Slopers are probably more
conservative about “child-rearing” than Brooks — except, of course,
Slopers insist on gender neutrality, race diversity, and eco-friendly
toilet paper in the bathroom.

If anything, Park Slope parents are the uber-parents that the hipster parents from Williamsburg love to hate.

Obviously,
there are plenty of reasons for Brooks to rant against Park Slopers.
But turning their babies into “fashion-forward, anti-corporate, indie
infants” isn’t one of them.

The fact is, no one could ever accuse Park Slope parents — or their offspring — of being particularly fashionable or cool.

Everyone knows that Park Slope is the schleppy capital of Brooklyn.

“Most
of the women I see at drop-off are hardly hipsters,” Mrs. Cleavage told
Smartmom over lattes at the Cocoa Bar. “They all need fashion
makeovers. The fashion faux pas are rampant. No lipstick, no make-up.
I’m sorry. Everything is shapeless and drab.”

Smartmom immediately put on some lipstick.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t fashionistas around here. But they stick out like a Fresh Direct box at the Food Co-op.

Smartmom isn’t knocking schleppy. It’s just that Seventh Avenue isn’t exactly Bedford Avenue, if you know what she means.

Come
on. Williamsburg is where the hipster parents live. If Brooks would
just leave his office at the Times and hop an L-train (it leaves
Manhattan, David, so you may want to grab a map), he could visit groovy
playspaces like Mama Lou’s and hipster tot shops like Flying Squirrel
and Mini Jakes.

It seems that Brooks has really fallen under the
spell of writer Adam Sternbergh, who recycled the not-very-flattering
word, “grups,” to define a generation of New York parents who who look
and act like 22-year-olds.

Why does Brooks rely on the
observations of a New York Magazine writer when he could just read The
Brooklyn Paper or, Buddha forbid, come out to Park Slope himself (don’t
forget your map, Dave)?

Sternbergh took the term from an episode
of “Star Trek” in which the crew lands on an adult-free planet ruled by
children. (It doesn’t stop Kirk from falling in love with one of the
kids, but that’s another story.)

While Park Slope does sometimes
feel like a planet ruled by children, Smartmom doesn’t think the
parents around here are quite that youthful.

But if Brooks thinks she and her contemporaries look and act like 22-year-olds — she’ll take that as a compliment.

Even
when it comes to cyberspace, Brooks gets Park Slope wrong. Contrary to
Brooks’s generalization, no one around here reads UrbanBaby.com, which
describes itself as “a dose of hip info on where to shop, play, eat,
travel and have fun with your kids.”

Park Slope Parents is more like it. Has Brooks even heard of it?

He
even is wrong about the books Park Slopers read. “In a sign that the
hip parenting thing has jumped the shark, the movement gets it own
book, the indescribably dull ‘Alternadad,’ ” Brooks wrote.

That
was the last straw buddy. Park Slope is one of the most literary
neighborhoods in New York City and “Alternadad” is not even in the
window of Community Books. Didn’t he read Smartmom’s take-down of Neal
Pollack a few weeks ago in these very pages? Smartmom thought the Times
had editorial researchers to make sure the columnist didn’t make such
glaring errors of omission.

The funny thing is this: Brooks could have found loads to object to in Park Slope if he’d really done his research.

For
starters, most of the people around here opposed the war in Iraq (from
the start) and are disgusted with Bush’s plans for escalation.

And Park Slopers by and large oppose the Atlantic Yards because they care about contextual architecture and human scale cities.

Thousands
of Park Slopers are willing to work three hours every four weeks as
members of the Food Co-op to shop for inexpensive organic food and
green products.

Instead, he falsely blamed Park Slopers for leading the gruppy brigade. And that’s just plain wrong.

It
reminds Smartmom of Brook’s support of the war in Iraq. Like Bush, he
picked the wrong enemy — Iraq — as responsible for 9-11.

As for
his other criticism that hipster parents are turning their offspring
into “miniature reproductions of their hipper-than-thou selves,”
Smartmom had one comment: Isn’t that what parents do?

Whether
they’re living in Brooks’s halcyonic 1950s suburbia, a hut in the
Sudan, or an apartment in Bensonhurst, parents everywhere try to make
their children just like them.

It’s up to the kids to reject
their parent’s values — and whether they’re rejecting Lawrence Welk or
Patti Smith — what’s the difference?

Yes, Park Slopers do so many
things that would make a conservative like Brooks go ballistic. But why
are they getting blamed in the New York Times for being hipster parents
when they’re not really that hip at all?

You just can’t win.