David Brooks Meets Mr. Brown Shoes

Hey there Mr., uh, Brown Shoes! How bout that local sports team eh?

Now that he has lived among the natives for a minute, Mr. Brooks can once again bring his tone of Sweeping Authority to the problems of the grubby working class:

Anybody who spends time in the working-class parts of America (and, one presumes, Britain) notices the contagions of drug addiction and suicide, and the feelings of anomie, cynicism, pessimism and resentment.

Sure.  Anybody.  Literally anybody could do that by spending time among the wee folk of the shire. Or by, say, picking up a newspaper anywhere in America and skimming it lightly.  But let us get back to Mr. Brooks' tone of Sweeping Authority.  And,of course, by "Sweeping Authority" we mean "Hacking together a fast and dirty book report of someone else's work":

We all have a sense of what that working-class honor code was, but if you want a refresher, I recommend J.D. Vance’s new book “Hillbilly Elegy.” Vance’s family is from Kentucky and Ohio, and his description of the culture he grew up in is essential reading for this moment in history...

Mr. Brooks goes on to rhapsodize second-hand about the Noble Poor who lived Far Away in the Days of Yore.

He describes a culture of intense group loyalty...

It’s also a culture that values physical toughness...

Mr. Brooks then injects his opinion about those silly, out-of-touch Progressives who don't understand 'bout guns an' life down t' the mines like David Brooks does:

It’s a culture that celebrates people who are willing to fight to defend their honor. This is something that progressives never get about gun control. They see a debate about mass murder, but for many people guns are about a family’s ability to stand up for itself in a dangerous world.

Hahahaha!  Stupid Progressives!  Oh, by the way, here is Mr. David Brooks on the teevee less than a year ago:

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I’m for doing all the gun control you can think of, the gun show loophole, the background checks, assault weapons ban. And so I’m for it. I think, if you increase the number of filters between the buyer or shooter and the weapon, you might do some good...

So there's that.

But the one thing Mr. David Brooks can state with Sweeping Authority and from Personal Experience is that the wee shire folks love, love, love them some sport!  Why, it's practically all they talk about, presumably as they sit around the Applebee's salad bar (from Crooks & Liars in 2008) --

Memo To David Brooks: Applebee's Doesn't Have A Salad Bar

By John Amato

In an earlier post, C&L and many other sites caught David Brooks say this:

DAVID BROOKS, “NEW YORK TIMES: Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there. He has to change to be more like that Applebee‘s guy and as he‘s done that he‘s become much more transactional. Much more, I‘m going to deliver this and this and this to you on policy.

C&Ler Mitzi left this in the comment section:

I called my Applebee’s today to make sure I was correct and they do not have a salad bar. Just goes to show how much these people who make these comments have no idea how “regular people” live their lives.

I called an Applebee's also and they told me that none of their restaurants have a salad bar. David, sometimes the jokes write themselves. What an idiot.

-- sharing wondrous tales about that time the Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings came to town.

See, Mr. Brooks has always been America's leading expert on the likes and dislikes of the Imaginary Ordinary Folks and, as long as there are a sufficient number of rich, feeble-minded shut-ins who want to hear fairy tales about America as the wish it to be, he always will be.

And if Mr. Brooks knows one thing about the wee shire folk, it is that their love of sport is unique and transcendent in a way the rest of us dazzling urbanites just would not understand.

It’s also a culture with a lot of collective pride. In my travels, you can’t go five minutes without having a conversation about a local sports team. Sports has become the binding religion, offering identity, value, and solidarity.

So please, no one mention to Mr. Brooks (who is an a very delicate state right now) that members of this fierce and closed-off tribe of proud, sport-loving hill people that he just now discovered include the 40 million Americans who filled out NCAA brackets last year, Spike Lee, the New Batman, the Old Joker, Bill Murray -- 

Bill Murray would rather see the Cubs win a championship than Xavier

Bill Murray's devotion to the Cubs runs so deep that he's willing to put the team before his family.

When Esquire magazine asked Murray to choose between Xavier University -- where his son Luke is an assistant men's basketball coach -- winning the national championship or the Cubs winning the World Series again, Murray offered a simple answer.

"Well, I have several sons, but I only have one ball club," said Murray, who grew up in Wilmette.
...

-- and the President of the United States:

Then comes the inevitable blaming of Both Sides:

From 1945 to 1995, conservative and liberal elites shared variations of the same vision of the future. Liberals emphasized multilateral institutions and conservatives emphasized free trade. Either way, the future would be global, integrated and multiethnic.

But the elites pushed too hard, and now history is moving in the opposite direction...

David Fucking Brooks skipping right over the Southern Strategy, the Rise of Reagan, Hate Radio, Fox News and Newt Gingrich so that he can get on with the important business of clucking his tongue at the arrogance those god damn elites is the funniest thing I have read in a week.

Maybe two weeks.

You want to figure out what has gone wrong with this country, Mr. Brooks?  Start with the fact that one of our two major political parties -- your party, Mr. Brooks -- is completely fucked in the head. And it is completely fucked in the head because the elites of your party, Mr. Brooks, built their political fortunes and media empires by feeding a mob of angry, paranoid, intractably ignorant bigots a steady diet of praise, validation, false promises and wild conspiracies for the last 30 years.

So do let me know when you stop asking Mr. Brown Shoes about his local sports team and start asking him about the trail of bodies he is 100% sure the murderous Clinton's have left in their wake, and that that the rest of American would know about if it weren't for the god damn Liberal media covering the whole thing up.

I'll be over here, in the American heartland, not holding my breath.

UPDATE:

Meanwhile and predictably, Ron "Severe Dementia" Fournier cannot find enough glowing things to say about Mr. Brooks, who is apparently strummin' our pain with this fingers, and singin' our live with his words...

It's like he fit a book into a column: @nytdavidbrooks captures our times and our politics w/ a nod to TR https://t.co/A21G3FuDeH

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) June 28, 2016