Which is saying something.

(Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am regularly irritated by Kristof’s combination of sanctimony and careless disregard for the truth.)

In a column titled “Where’s the Empathy?”, Kristof, the self-styled savior of the world’s dispossessed, whose righteousness has not been slowed by serious flaws in his reporting, tells the tale of a high school friend of his, Kevin Green. They went to high school together in Oregon, ran track together, and Kristof appears to stayed in occasional touch with him. In the meantime, Green labored at low-paying jobs, then “hurt his back”—we don’t learn any more details—got laid off and never again found legal work. His girlfriend and mother of their twin sons left him, and Green apparently grew depressed and fat—his weight soared to 350 pounds. He couldn’t find another job, started growing and selling pot to make some cash, and got arrested. His health was lousy, and he died a few days ago at age 54.

This is a sad story, of course. It is tragic when someone’s life doesn’t turn out the way they hoped and they can’t recover from setbacks; we all know people that this has happened to, and it’s heartbreaking.

But Kristof being Kristof, he can not help but turn this story into a morality play in which he can lecture to the rest of us.

In the third sentence of his column—the third sentence—Kristof shifts from telling us what happened to his old friend to telling us why it’s our fault.

Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin — obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on disability and food stamps — as a moocher. They would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t you look after your health? Why did you father two kids outside of marriage?

That acerbic condescension reflects one of this country’s fundamental problems: an empathy gap.

Talk about condescension! Talk about judgmental! We’ve barely met this man, and Kristof is already telling us how we’d feel about him and why it reflects poorly on us.

He does, however, go on to suggest that his relationship with Green reflects well on him, noting that “my kids would see Kevin and me together and couldn’t believe he had run cross country with me, and that he wasn’t 20 years older.” Look at me, Kristof says! I’m in great shape, but I haven’t forgotten my humble roots, or the humble people who didn’t make it out the way I did!

Kristof goes on to detail Green’s life, and it certainly sounds like a difficult one; though Kristof doesn’t emphasize it, Green didn’t go to college, a fact that probably worked against him in his quest for financial stability. Instead, he worked in various blue-collar jobs which sound (and apparently were) vulnerable to economic shifts. Kristof writes that the local glove factory and feed store closed in a way that implies that Green worked at those places—but if you read closely, it actually sounds like he didn’t. They’re just used as examples of places where Green might have worked but couldn’t, because they went out of business. Kristof also says that the Greens had a family farm, but he doesn’t say what happened to it, or whether it was of sufficient size to support the family. The only job Kristof definitively describes Green as taking is a non-union construction job.

It certainly sounds like Green had the misfortune to be born into rural poverty and, without any higher education, couldn’t do much to escape it. But Kristof just doesn’t tell us enough about the man as an individual for us to have any real understanding of what went wrong in his life. To Kristof, Green is more a symbol than an individual.

So, Kevin Green, R.I.P. You were a good man — hardworking and always on the lookout for someone to help — yet you were overturned by riptides of inequality. Those who would judge you don’t have a clue. They could use a dose of your own empathy.

Who’s judging him? The idea that millions of people are sitting in judgment of this man is just a straw man allowing Kristof to scold us all.

To my mind, it sounds like Green could have used empathy not just from Americans in general, but from Nicholas Kristof in particular, perhaps in the form of a column before he died. But Kristof had more romantic victims to save.

We all need to be empathetic to the possibility that Gree was a victim of shifting economic riptides. But because we don’t know the details of Green’s life—and Kristof, even when he does give us information, is far from a reliable narrator—it feels as if Nicholas Kristof is exploiting his friend, using him as grist for his political mill. And that’s not empathetic at all.