The Plutocrat's Beat Poet

David Fucking Brooks extracted that massive piece of lumber he keeps firmly jammed up his ass long enough to use it to write another 800-word chapter in his ongoing Alternate Wingnut History of America: "Those Darn Hippies!"

Which is a little ironic, considering that when you cut out the hateful little fillet hiding at the center of his column (and trust me, you will virtually always find some bilious little right-wing slur cowering behind the quivering walls of pudding that make up a David Brooks column) and unstring the words just so, you end up with a kind of semi-passable free verse beat poetry.

From the Bizarro Universe.

Here then is Our Mr. Brooks, verbatim, from today's"Children of the ’70s", spruced up a bit with some pictures I had laying around.

Because I happen to think that a few pictures here and there can liven up even the drabbest room.

...
The crime wave



killed



off


The hippie movement.


The hippies celebrated
Disorder,


Mayhem



And the whole Dionysian


Personal
Agenda.

By the 1970s,
The menacing results


Of that agenda



Were all around.

...
The crime wave

Made it hard

To accept


The story line


That the poor


Were always


Spiritually pure,


Noble

And oppressed.

"...the story line that the poor were always spiritually pure, noble and oppressed."?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Maybe Bobo receives these divine revelations about the What Liberals Sekritly Believe during some kind of Neocon Spirit Walk after huffing the last, few drops of dusty mansweat out of Bill Buckley's underpants, but speaking as a Liberal who lives in the real world, I don't know anyone in our club who romanticizes poverty. (This is particularly true among those who have devoted their professional lives trying to end poverty in the Land of Plenty: they are generally as hard-eyed and brutally pragmatic a bunch as you're ever likely to meet outside of a battlefield.)

However I do know plenty of aging, Reagan-era wingnut relics who have spent most of their adult lives furiously rewriting their own histories into some kind of “Our Gang” adventure wherein -- by dint of nothing but their own, personal Randite awesomeness! -- they bootstrapped themselves up from life in a tarpaper shack sleeping 188 to a bed and into prosperity...

…while conspicuously ignoring the fact that the ladder up which most of them climbed into the middle class was constructed out of things like the WPA, the NRA, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the GI Bill, free public education, free school lunch, free roads, the built-in advantages that came with being born White and Male in America, rural electrification, farm subsidies, labor and workplace safety laws, and a few hundred other intrusive, Big Gummint, Socialist-y kinds of things without which they'd could just as easily have been dead of starvation or over-work or a factory owner's private goon's club to the skull before their 30th birthday.

I swear, there are times when I think that if I could have just one, big Hot Tub Time Machine wish, I would zip back to the late 60s or early 70s and arrange to have this uptight, moon-faced, wingnut apple-polisher buried under enough post-pubescent hippie pussy to keep him coitally comatose for a year. Thus sparing the World of Tomorrow the horror of David Fucking Brooks using the pages of the Times year after year to work out his barely-repressed, middle-aged, soul-rotting contempt for all the free and happy Libidenous Liberal Lasses whose laughter at his greasy, fumbling "Have you read 'The Fountainhead'?" overtures has clearly tormented him down through the decades.

Then again, if wasting my own youth in the science fiction aisle of my public library has taught me anything it is that tinkering with History is a tricky business, and one messes with the space/time continuum at one's peril.

And I definitely believe the Universe is plenty capricious enough that I would return from my temporal good deeds only to find an alternate 2010 where David Brooks was writing breezy, Bohemian essays on modern dance for "The Rolling Stone"...

...while over at the New York Times, Matt Taibbi was churning out treacly 800-word paeans to the wisdom of J. Edgar Hoover, G. Gordon Liddy and President Sarah Palin.