Like Donny and Marie, [Romney is] counter-cultural. He doesn’t seem to have experienced the cultural shift of the last few decades. No Lenny Bruce, no Richard Pryor, no Letterman, Seinfeld, Jay-Z or “The View.”
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My question is: Is this good or bad? People turn back the clock all the time. Look at the Renaissance.
-- David Brooks, 05/30/12
If Mr. Brooks continues to lie about the past to make his daily bread, one of these fine days the University of Chicago campus police are going to come a'knockin' at his $4M front door with a court order stating that he must:
- Immediately return the degree in History that he somehow scammed them out of, and,
- Stay at least 50 yards away from History and cease and desist from all false, misleading and slanderous public comments about History until such time as he agrees to take and pass a court-approved course in "History Abuse Management."
Until then, don't you think this bit of Mr. Brooks' reflexively fraudulent, hit-and-run Conservatism:
People turn back the clock all the time. Look at the Renaissance.
Reads so much clearer dressed like this?
People turn back the clock all the time. Look at the Taliban.
Or this?
People turn back the clock all the time. Look at the trial of Galileo.
9 comments:
is he trying to claim the Renaissance was a NOSTALGIC movement?
Brooks is reminiscing about the past the same way Southerners reminisced about the past to justify hierarchy generally, and specifically, the owning of slaves.
Anyone who has taken a high-level history course covering the South knows that Southerners used Greek and Roman philosophy that celebrated patrician values and societal structures to compare their own culture. They had to, since they were enthralled by FREEDOM! and LIBERTY!, while denying those very rights to the human beings they owned. It was cognitive dissonance to be sure, double-think by Orwell's standards. But excusing the inexcusable is always a reach. So, look backward, suspend reason, and make the most favorable comparison you can.
You see the same today by Republicans and Southerners. Always looking to the past to justify the status quo, or regression to decades past.The constant look back by Republicans and Southerners is a tradition that they won't let go of until it's beaten out of them. And I don't mean through the ballot box or education system.
Make of that what you will.
OK, I'm looking at the Renaissance. Is Romney Michelangelo or Lorenzo de' Medici? I know, Cesare Borgia!
Karl Weintraub must be ready to drown himself in Botany Pond right about now.
...Na, Cesare was ten times more intelligent than Rmoney is, and even more ruthless.
Rmoney is more akin to the Pazzi family, I'd say.
"He doesn’t seem to have experienced the cultural shift of the last few decades."
That thought feels terrifyingly like Reagan redux to me. AIDS? Oh, I don't know about that, heh heh. Right mommy?
I believe Leto II had the appropriate response to historians who abused their power. They were burned on a pillar of their own books.
Frankly, his rational has gone so far off the rails, I'm not sure even he believes it any more.
I think.. he thinks..he is conditioning us,the great unwashed..or those in power that he believes he influences. Like some abstract Pavlovian experiment. The great tragedy being, if it actually worked..
Like Donny and Marie, [Romney is] counter-cultural.
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...the fuck?
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