Give Him That Old Time Religion

Today, rather than slinking quietly away from the loathsome bit of Conservative bullshit he floated on Sunday's "Meet the Press" (Dirty Hippie Culture is responsible for the Penn State Child Rape Cult) Our Mr. Brooks instead chose to double-down on the mendacity and, in a desperate bid to prop up his callow, ludicrous thesis, went on a wild, reeling rampage through world history and pop psychology reminiscent of Jack Lemmon looking for the bottle in "Days of Wine and Roses".

He needn't have bothered: as recent history has shown, as long as Mr. Brooks amuses his employer and tells the oligarchs pleasing fairy tales, it really doesn't matter how many times he shits himself in public.

And speaking of history...Holy Jesus.

In making his argument, Mr. Brooks -- the U of C history major -- botches his invasion of the past so thoroughly you'd think Paul Wolfowitz had planned it, and tortures history so brutally to make his point that I assume he had to get a permission slip from John Yoo before the Times would publish it.

It what is otherwise just another one of his standard-issue "Quick! Throw lots of random crap in the air!" columns, Our Mr. Brooks (who, I really need to reiterate, actually majored in history [with a minor in obsequiousness] at the University of Chicago) bulldozes Every Bad Thing in modern history -- from the Holocaust (193os-1945) to the murder of Kitty Geneovese (1964) to somebody who got killed in their yoga clothes -- together into one big pile --

...during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged

-- and then divides all of human history into three parts.

Part One: Everything from the Garden of Eden to the Puritans into one category which he describes as follows:

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

But we’re not Puritans anymore.
...

Part Two: Some sort of interregnum of indeterminate length during which apparently nothing much happened.

Part Three: Libertine Modernity!

We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness.

which Our Mr. Brooks would have you believe led more-or-less directly to the Child Rape Cult at the heart of Penn State.

In his column, Mr. Brooks is carefully murky about the start-date of this Libertine Modernity, but in his comments on "Meet the Press" this last Sunday he was not nearly so shy about stating when he believes the horror all began:

MR. BROOKS: I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is;

or the banner under which it marched:

...they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK."

In other words, those damned Dirty Hippies ruined everything!

You might think that the biggest hole in Mr. Brooks' one-size-fits-all Dirty Hippie Licentiousness Theory is that so many of the examples of cites -- from the Holocaust to the murder of Kitty Genovese -- took place before Dirty Hippie Licentiousness was invented by Jerry Rubin and Angela Davis at the George Soros-funded Center Advanced Liberal Studies at Berkley in 1968.

But you would be wrong.

First, you would have to ignore the fact that the Soros-funded Center Advanced Liberal Studies was known to have been experimenting with both LSD and tachyons in 1968, and that Dirty Hippie Licentiousness might very well have traveled back in time to create Adolph Hitler (see also Goldberg, Jonah: "Liberal Fascism").

Second, noting that the time-line of Mr. Brooks' Dirty Hippie Licentiousness Theory is ass-backwards -- while true -- amounts to a minor fucking quibble when compared to the fact that, to cast the blame for the Child Rape Cult at Penn State away where it belongs -- away from obedience to corrupt authority -- Mr. Brooks glibly abolishes virtually the entire history of the human race.

Abolishes the sanctified horrors of that Old Time Religion:


Abolishes the sanctified murders committed by the Puritans in the name of Old Time Religion:


Abolishes the Inquisition.

Abolishes the Crusades.

Abolished the sanctified lie that was the Desecration of the Host which was once a staple of that Old Time Religion (described here):

...According to the Christian doctrine of Transubstantiation, the wafer consecrated in the ceremony of Eucharist becomes thereby the actual body of Jesus (Protestants dropped the doctrine and consider the wafer only a symbol of the body, not Jesus himself; Catholics still hold it). The myth was the belief that Jews secretly stabbed, tormented and burned the consecrated wafer (this belief brought Judeophobia to a new peak of irrationality, since Jews obviously did not believe in Transubstantiation). This charge brought more persecution and massacre. Most of the forty infamous cases took place in Germany and Austria.

Abolishes the sanctified lie of Poisoning of the Wells, which came conveniently bundled inside that Old Time Religion (described here):

The third myth was referred to at the end of our last class, namely the Black Death. In this case the relation between the myth and its consequential massacres was direct and obvious. Between 1348 and 1350, one hundred million people, a third of Europe’s population, died of an epidemic caused by the bacillus “pasteurella pestis.” In centers with denser populations, such as monasteries, the proportion of dead people was higher.

People had extreme reactions, either seeking recourse to religion through repentance and supplication to God, or reverting to licentiousness, lawbreaking and savagery. These two types of reaction often combined to accuse the Jews of having poisoned the wells and therefore being the cause of the death (after so much persecution, Christians could imagine that the Jews might seek revenge).

Pope Clement VI came out to defend the Jews, as did the emperors, but massacres broke out throughout Europe. All appeals to reason were ineffective, and in many places Jews were killed even before the plague had visited the locality.
...

Abolishes the reality of the internal landscape of the terrified mind of the Middle Ages Catholic as it was driven irresistibly towards mass murder by that Old Time Religion (from James Carroll's "Constantine's Sword") --

“It was a small step in the Christian imagination from that newly sharpened sense of permanent Jewish culpability to a conviction that Jews were preparing to not only destroy a surrogate of Jesus, but “us”. Jews were believed ready to poison wells, if they could, aiming just to kill Christ, but Christians as well.
..

The anti-Jewish mobs may have waved the banner of an insane rhetoric making it seem they were irrationally avenging the crimes of some long-dead Jesus, or defending kidnapped children, but their very ferocity and the longevity of the Libel that they were defending themselves.

From what?

Not from villains conjured by some chimerical fantasy based on nothing real, but on the threat logically deduced from a solemn doctrine of the Church, one dramatically reiterated -– indeed this liturgy was key to the development of Western drama -–in every Holy Week of every year.

Namely that Jews are murderers.

In a dozen ways as we have seen, the Cross itself had been conscripted into that campaign, which was as much self-defense as revenge. And now every cross in Western Christendom pulpit would become an infallible promulgation of that same doctrine.”

Abolishes the obscene and inconvenient fact that the Germany of the 1930s had become an ideal breeding ground for genocide precisely because of its centuries-long culture of bone-deep, church-sanctioned antisemitism and obedience to authority under that Old Time Religion.

Abolishes the Milgram Experiment:

The experiments began in July 1961. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?" Milgram's testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs. The experiments have been repeated many times, with consistent results within societies, but different percentages across the globe.

Abolishes America's long and unspeakably evil system of state-sanctioned and pulpit-endorsed White Supremacy: a system which was ruthlessly enforced with fire and rope and Bible by church-going patriots practicing that Old Time Religion. A system which is looked back on with nostalgia and fondness by many of the God-fearing moral imbeciles who now run Mr. Brooks' Republican Party.

In his frantic attempt to distract his readers from the painfully obvious lesson of history that the worst of our species' crimes, slaughters and catastrophes stem from systems that demand a blind obedience to corrupt authority, Mr. Brooks blithely scatters his entire grab-bag of "people are bad" indictments like so much radar chaff; burying most of humanity's real and inconvenient history wholesale, and then redacted and re-jiggered whats left to fit into his bill of particulars against the permissive culture of the Dirty Fucking Hippies:

First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

Why does he do this?

Because as a tool of oligarchic compliance, obedience to corrupt authority is Mr. Brooks' stock-in-trade; the lone hymn in the hymnal from which he sings every fucking day.

Because, as I wrote Sunday "...powerful people lying about matters of life and death is not material about which Our Mr. Brooks "reports", but instead is the contaminated water in which he swims.

From his full-throated support of the Operation Iraqi Clusterfuck and contempt for the filthy hippies who opposed it...to his full-throated support of the Scooter Libby and contempt for the filthy Lefties who opposed him...to his full-throated support of the Oligarchs and his contempt for the filthy Occupiers who opposed them..to his full-throated support of Paul Wolfowitz and his contempt for the filthy anti-Semites who questioned him...Mr. Brooks' career has had one, utterly consistent and very profitable theme: Afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable."

How does he continue to get away with it?

I guess you could call it the Villager Bystander Effect: the more Mainstream Media drones who have a stake in Mr. Brooks' lies, the less likely anyone is to intervene.

Because that's how obedience to corrupt authority works:



Or, as Charlie Pierce wrote this story is simply and solely about one things (h/t Matt):

There is solace in Scripture, but there are also too many places where the guilty and the morally obtuse can hide.

The crimes at Penn State are about the raping of children. That is all they are about. The crimes at Penn State are about the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky, and the possibility that people lied to a grand jury about the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky, and the likelihood that most of the people who had the authority at Penn State to stop the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky proved themselves to have the moral backbone of ribbon worms.

It no longer matters if there continues to be a football program at Penn State. It no longer even matters if there continues to be a university there at all. All of these considerations are trivial by comparison to what went on in and around the Penn State football program.

(Those people who will pass this off as an overreaction would do well to remember that the Roman Catholic Church is reckoned to be a far more durable institution than even Penn State University is, and the Church has spent the past decade or so selling off its various franchise properties all over the world to pay off the tsunami of civil judgments resulting from the raping of children, a cascade that shows no signs of abating anytime soon.)

Any anyone who tries to drag the conversation away from that central fact in order to pimp their god damned ridiculous Hippie Theory of Everything one more god damned time needs to have their keyboard confiscated and their pencil box burned.


Update:

Apparently the sound of someone, somewhere doubting the moral superiority of another authoritarian, hierarchical, money-generating man-cult caught rotting from the head down was too much for the New York Times' smaller, auxiliary-Conservative to bear:

Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses. The earlier lies or thefts or adulteries make the next one that much easier to contemplate.
...

But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It’s precisely in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away.

I believe that Joe Paterno is a good man. I believe Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated, the brilliant sportswriter who is working on a Paterno biography, when he writes that Paterno has “lived a profoundly decent life” and “improved the lives of countless people” with his efforts and example.

I also believe that most of the clerics who covered up abuse in my own Catholic Church were in many ways good men.
...

Postscript:

For anyone who is interested, back in 2007 I wrote a series of posts noting how closely the demented, fear-based thinking of the Middle Ages Catholic parallels the demented, fear-based thinking of Modern Conservatives when one substitutes the word “Liberal” for “Jew”, “Conservative” for “Christian”, etc, and substitutes the various lies leveled against the Jews of that age with the various lies Conservatives level against Liberals every single fucking day.

Here is a link to one of them.