The Cold Evasions

In the long run it will probably turn out that blowing most of my meager savings on one a' them newfangled Pedantic Resonance Imaging thingies (I was vulnerable and a little hammered, and they run such enticing ads

at 3:00 A.M. ads) but until the repo guys come for it, I figured I'd get a little life out of it.

So I took Tuesday's David Brooks column and ran it through my PRI.

Imagine my surprise at the results:

When I was in college...

.Enlightenment
..Descartes
...Rousseau
....Voltaire
.....Condorcet
......Descartes
......Descartes
.......French Revolution
.......France
......Scotland
.....Britain
......David Hume
......Adam Smith
.........Edmund Burke
.....Gertrude Himmelfarb
.......French Enlightenment
..........British Enlightenment
.........natural desires
........moral emotions
.....self-love
....tribalism
.......Thomas Paine
.............Edmund Burke
..........Yuval Levin
...........University of Chicago
.........Paine
.........Paine
.......American and French Revolutions
......universal truths
.............Burke
.........British Enlightenment
.......age-old institutions
..............Burke
.......horrified
..............Burke
..............Burke
........Paine
.......Americans
.......Americans
.....French
....British Enlightenment
..Jefferson
...Hamilton

My, my, my.

Where in the world do you suppose this turgid, meandering assload of bourgeois undergrad namedropping could possibly be heading?

Where else:

"You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics."

No matter where in the whole, wide Universe he begins a column, somehow, since the Great Fraud of Modern Conservatism collapsed in blood and lies and bankruptcy, all of Bobo's roads always invariably lead to Centerville: that imaginary kingdom of the morally-conjoined fraternal twins -- "self-confident Democratic technocrats" and "self-described conservative radicals" -- who are always somehow perfectly equally and oppositely responsible for every evil, every ill and every excess.

Where, in other words, Bobo believes he can skip out forever on paying the tab for his career as an unabashed whore for the Conservative Movement by screaming "Hippies made me do it!" at the top of his lungs.

"And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance. "

Understand that David Brooks has spent his entire adult life as the mouthpiece of one of the most radical and destructive movements in American history; and as his beloved Reagan Revolution Conservatism laid waste to the middle class...destroyed not merely America's political comity, but the idea that political comity is a good thing...razed not merely the American federal government, but the idea that governance is a good thing...Bobo was there, cheering it on.

Cheering it on, and getting downright hysterical if anyone tried to pry the Gipper's actual, ugly legacy out of the vice grip of his revisionist acolytes.

It was not until the blowback came -- until the catastrophic and long-predicted consequences of his toxic and predatory ideology began washing unstoppably up on America's shores -- that Bobo suddenly discovered the Joys of Centrism, and started rifling through his yellowing undergraduate term papers and dropping them wholesale into the New York Times.

(Hearing effete, white collar, silk slipper Conservatives like David Fucking Brooks whinging on about the "self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role" Palinites is especially delicious: like watching the snake oil hustler on one side of the street bitch about how the Three Card Monte grifter working the other side is just ruining everything!)

This is also why, whatever people may claim they want, we can never have an honest, national dialogue about politics and culture in the United States.

Because, if by some miracle the Right were struck with a pandemic of uncontrollable honesty, the first question every Liberal is going to have for their newly-candid Conservative fellow citizens is going to be: "You know that everything you say and believe is about 95% bullshit, right?"

If the answer is "Fuck no, you dirty Commie!" then the conversation ends.

But if the answer is "Yes", then the very next question is going to be, "Well, if you know it's mostly evil bullshit, and we know it's mostly evil bullshit, then why in the Hell do you keep shoveling it?"

And that is the one question that no Conservative will ever have guts enough to answer honestly.