David Brooks, Shouting At Clouds Column #1,773

Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times is god damn sick and tired of the stupid frets and concerns of millions and millions of grubby, narrow-minded, god-bothering pie wagons with whom he is forced to share this here Land of the Free.

Let’s Have a Better Culture War

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The laws commanding where transgender people go to the bathroom, on the other hand, show how the culture war has devolved into an overpoliticized set of gestures designed to push people’s emotional hot buttons.

These laws are in response to a problem that doesn’t seem to exist. They are in response to a threat of sexual predators that has no relation to the existence of transgender people. They are about legislating a group, not about what constitutes good behavior. They are an attempt to erect crude barriers when a little local consideration and accommodation could get the job done.

For some reason, some defenders of traditional values are addicted to sideshows that end with the whiff of intolerance...

For me, that "For some reason" bit is the absolute core of this column -- three little words being cruelly forced to bear the entire weight of the 40 years of toxic Republican awfulness that finally birthed Donald Trump and which Mr. David Brooks absolutely does not want to discuss, ever, under any circumstance.

"For some reason" is Mr. David Brooks' "Little did he know."

I have written over 5,000 posts on "For some reason."

I have been podcasting for over six years based on the theme of "For some reason."

I once gave an entire seminar on "For some reason."

None of which has ever had the slightest effect on Mr. David Brooks, whose professional energies are spent these days actively pretending not to know what horrors are encrypted in those three little words.

But, to be completely fair, Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times is also god damn sick and tired of the rest of us too -- those other hundreds of millions and millions of amoral, porn-crazy pie wagons with who have let his Land of the Free go to pot.

Because Both Sides, baby! Both Sides uber alles!

At the same time, the larger culture itself has become morally empty, and therefore marked by fragmentation, distrust and powermongering.

Yes, Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times longs for something better.  Purer.  Preferably something he can attain without having to ever actually talk to any of those hundreds of millions of us grubby little pie-wagons who have screwed up his country so badly.  Something with hot and cold running interns to fluff his pillow, turn the pages of whatever work by Edmund Burke he is re-reading but still not comprehending and open his blinds in the morning so  he can pick out just the right clouds at which to yell today.

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The larger culture itself needs to be revived in four distinct ways: We need to be more communal in an age that’s overly individualistic; we need to be more morally minded in an age that’s overly utilitarian; we need to be more spiritually literate in an age that’s overly materialistic; and we need to be more emotionally intelligent in an age that is overly cognitive.

Rather than fighting endless losing battles over sexual identity, we need a better culture war. We need a new traditionalism.

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There’s a warmth to our traditions and rituals that is fueled by love and contact with the transcendent...

We have souls or consciousness or whatever you want to call it. The first step of a new traditionalism would be to put the spiritual and moral implications of everyday life front and center...

You know, there are many people in this world who, like Mr. David Brooks, come to believe at a certain point that it is their True Calling to spend the rest of their lives endless and gassily lecturing us Lesser Mortals about how fucking awesome everything would be if everyone would just shut up, stop acting like grubby little pie-wagons and spontaneously change everything about everything from politics to human nature to our leisure activities,  

Ordinarily, the maudlin droning of such people can be circumvented pretty easily by, say, moving down a couple of bar stools, or changing seats on the bus, or executing a strategic retreat from the Mensa monthly meeting where they have cornered you.  

And for some reason, the New York Times has chosen to give just such a clueless moral scold a job-for-life at America's newspaper of record, and pay him a princely sum to impotently admonish hundreds of millions of people about whom he clearly knows nothing about the seriousness of our collective moral failings.