Awful Things from a Distant World, Ctd.

There's no Nation like Imagination

Today, Our Mr. Brooks pretends to write about German and Europe.

Over the past few decades, several European nations, like Germany and the Netherlands, have played by the rules and practiced good governance.

But this is not what he is writing about at all. It's merely today's mushy apple into which he slips the same rusty razor he has slipped into virtually every David Fucking Brooks column since the beginning of time: the scurrilous lie that Dirty Fucking Hippies and their crazy ideas are destroying the world!

And since this notion is utter bullshit, Mr. Brooks must once again wildly contort history out of its true shape and into a radically dumbed-down scrap of fiction which he can then origami into another David Brooks Morality Play about Murrican Values the perils of listening to people like Paul Krugman:

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources — many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.

This is, of course, nonsense.

First of all, in his paean to the Germany of his Imagination, Mr. Brooks conspicuously omits any mention of the fact that modern German prosperity is built on a massive social welfare system, high taxes, solid labor protection, strong government industrial and trade policies and a program of life-long learning that begins tracking students into careers often before they hit puberty.

But those pesky, socialist details detract from Mr. Brooks' fable of values and capitalism, so away they are whisked down the same gigantic memory hole into which Mr. Brooks consigns all of life's inconvenient little truths.

Second -- and this should always be a clue for your Brooksian scholars out there -- whenever you see Bobo straining his back trying to haul the entire United States of America into the middle of any discussion:

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich?

you will start to notice that this is always done for the purpose of propping up some brutally oversimplified bit of mendacious claptrap that he needs as a load-bearing wall for the rest of his fairy tale about Important Moral Truths:

It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources — many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.

No, Mr. Brooks. You have it wrong, and, to a large extent, ass-backwards. American got rich because...

...we conquered an entire continent loaded with one of the greatest trove of natural resources on Earth, which we then ruthlessly exploited.

...we also ruthlessly exploited the labor of slaves and their children.

...once slavery was abolished, we switched over to an apartheid system so we could continue ruthlessly exploiting the labor of those same people and their children.

...we ruthlessly exploited the labor of the working-poor citizen and the immigrant. We still do.

...we are indeed an industrious and clever people.

...we do indeed reward ingenuity and innovation, albeit ever more unevenly.

...World War II wiped out our competition, leaving us as virtually the only country on Earth with an intact industrial base and labor force at exactly the same time that the pent up demand for the manufactured products of that industrial base was at an all-time high.

...we spent hugely on evil socialist schemes like educating our kids, sending the GI generation to college, building our infrastructure and creating a social safety net to try to prevent our aged and indigent from dying like stray dogs in the street.

...we had things called "labor unions" which, for all their flaws, made sure that a decent day's work earned you a decent day's pay, some benefits and, over he course of a loyal, hard-working lifetime, a decent retirement.

...we accepted the idea that paying taxes was the price of civilization.

...we did not allow gargantuan banks and Wall Street assholes to shoot craps with the global economy.

And so forth.

What Mr. Brooks' is really waxing subliminally nostalgic about is the broadly distributed prosperity of America between the 1940s-1970s: a prosperity which made the Middle Class possible and froze the values which that period of unprecedented prosperity created -- consumerism, conformity, car-culture, highly mobile nuclear family units tucked into suburbs far from ancestral homes, obedience to authority in every form, a clear social hierarchy with white Christian men on top, etc. -- into place as if they were laws of nature.

Values which people like Mr. Brooks sermonize endlessly about as if they were the sole cause of our mid-20th century prosperity, instead of many of them being the result of that prosperity (Richard Sennett has written volumes on the subject -- "The Culture of the New Capitalism", "The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences Of Work In the New Capitalism", "The Conscience of the Eye: The design and social life of cities", "Authority", "The Fall of Public Man", "The Hidden Injuries of Class", etc. -- any of which I commend to your attention, although "The Corrosion of Character...", "Authority" and "The Hidden Injuries of Class" are my favorites.)

Don't get me wrong -- I agree very much with Mr. Brooks' sentiment that:

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

I also agree that Motherhood is Awesome and apple pie is great, but apple pie with a scoop of hand-cranked vanilla ice cream is even better, but none of the values which Mr. Brooks and I both admire has anything whatsoever to do with the point Mr. Brooks is really making.

So what is the real point of all of Mr. Brooks' braying about ethos and morality?

I thought you'd never ask:

On the one hand, there are the technicians who are oblivious to values. For them anything that can’t be counted and modeled is a primitive irrelevancy. On the other hand, there are people who see the European crisis through the prism of some cosmic class war. What matters is not how people conduct themselves, but whether they are a have or a have-not. The burden of proof is against the haves. The benefit of the doubt is with the have-nots. Any resistance to redistribution is greeted with outrage.

Translation: Quit reading Paul Krugman for God's sake. Can't you see what those damn, Dirty Hippies have done to Europe! Don't you know they're coming for you next!

Considering that Our Mr. Brooks makes his fabulous living regurgitating the same 2-3 lazy columns over and over and over again, it is kind of hilarious that he he still writes stuff like this --

Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise.

-- with a straight face.

But then again, why shouldn't he? After all, it's not like any of his fellow Villagers is ever going to call him out for spouting this crap. They are Swift's "confederacy of dunces"; the Club to which little people who ask unpleasant questions will never, ever be admitted.

Still, as I noted above, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Brooks that...

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

Which is why I think it is a damn shame that Mr. Brooks' Republican Party has spent the last 40 years methodically destroying every cultural and economic pillar that makes such a society possible.