David Brooks Officially Becomes David Broder

Rock and Roll's Gonna Ruin Them Kids

Apparently America's kids are going to Hell!

In a hand-basket!

Dadgummit! (Our Mr. Brooks in the NYT):

If It Feels Right ...

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.
...

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.
...

Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.

Smith and company are stunned, for example, that the interviewees were so completely untroubled by rabid consumerism. (This was the summer of 2008, just before the crash).

Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that sturdy virtues are being diluted into shallow values. Alasdair MacIntyre has written about emotivism, the idea that it’s impossible to secure moral agreement in our culture because all judgments are based on how we feel at the moment.
...

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit.
...

Of course, now that Mr. Brooks has become Mr. Broder, this leaves room for the talentless Chunky Bobo to become David Brooks, which (to complete the circle of media life) would make room for some other Conservative apologist with a comically selective memory to become Chunky Bobo (too bad CNN has already snapped up such winners as Dana Loesch and Erick Son of Erick.)

This is what those in the getting-people-jobs business call "backfill", and the groaning sound you hear in the background is the very, very bottom of the Conservative barrel being scraped to the paving stones beneath.

Of course, in the process of becoming David Broder, David Brooks has merely added one more thin coat of varnish to his own, time-honored method of meeting his 800-word, bi-weekly contractual obligation to the New York Times: namely, observing-America-with-alarm as if he were an alien.

Or a robot.

Or (a trope I have leaned on before) one of the time travelers from C.L. Moore's wonderful "Vintage Season" -- A jaded connoisseur on a "Disasters of the Past" tourist junket, taking up temporary residence at the edge of each of history's great catastrophes long enough to savor its distinct terrors and tragedies...and then moving on to the next plague.

The next genocide.

The next collapse.

The next spectacle.



Always buffered by their tricks and wealth from any genuine human contact with the poor, doomed fuckers they are there to watch go up in smoke.

Of course, they could change the shape of things: actually prevent the horrors they view as passive entertainments. They have that power, but they have no skin in the game, because they live in the ultimate gated community: the future. A gated community where they enjoy apparently limitless plenty and privilege, all of which might come undone if they actually used their power to take any meaningful action.

And so, very much like Our Mr. Brooks (and for very much the same reasons), they do nothing but press their noses to the glass, take in the view, jot some notes, and then move on to the next living diorama of catastrophe and pain.

Of course, if Our Mr. Brooks really was greatly concerned about the moral deficits our nation has accrued, he could write meaningfully about the avarice and amorality that drive those deficits...

He could write about the relentless and well-funded campaign to annihilate the middle-class that is currently being very successfully waged by his very own political Party.

He could write about the blowback from that Party's decades-long of army of soulless Randite killbots preaching an evangel of pure, knives-out capitalism.

He could write about the revulsion that young people feel -- any sane people would feel -- for "faith" when that faith mostly comes screaming at them in the form of hateful, shrieking yokels who tell them their gay friends are going to rot in Hell, but the looters who just laid off their Dad are good Christians.

He could write about why their answers to moral questions seemed very highly focused on money, or what effect being told by the vassals of richest people in the history of the world that...

1. Wealth is the ONLY virtue, and,
2) Rules are for suckers and little people

...might have had on their view of shape of the moral universe.

If Mr. Brooks were a robot or an alien or a time traveler, his ruminations on the effects of the dilution of "sturdy virtues" into "shallow values" shorn of any reflection whatsoever on WHY these things have come to pass might be excusable, but of course, he is none of those things.

Instead, our Mr. Brooks is a life-long champion of Conservatism and a stalwart of the Republican Party.

And as his Party and Movement wrapped themselves flag and scripture and went mad,
Our Mr. Brooks ' own morality rarely extended farther than using his 800-words in the "New York Times" to conjure up an endless series of silver linings, or to haul yet another imaginary hippie out of the closet to blame.

Or both.

For, y'know, "balance".

That Mr. Brooks made his daily bread this week tut-tutting over the ashes of a conflagration that he and his ilk helped ignite is an act of moral bankruptcy that dwarfs anything of the of those youngsters' "shallow values" about which Mr. Brooks expresses such concern, so as Mr. Brooks satisfies himself with merely cataloging the symptoms of America's moral decay -- sighing that its all very sad, and then moving onto his next on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand "journalist" diorama of suffering and ruin -- we are left to ask:

In the face of such civic calamity, how would a person with much, much sturdier virtues than Our Mr. Brooks have used the power and the privilege of a column the "New York Times"?