Hey, St. Petersburg, Before You Ring Your Bell

Just been down in Beltway town

Done my time in hell...

From the St. Petersburg College News:

Best-selling Author David Brooks speaks at SPC Foundation Distinguished Speaker Event

Best-selling author and op-ed columnist David Brooks will be speaking at the Second Annual St. Petersburg College Foundation Distinguished Speaker Event at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 21 at The Palladium Theater, 253 5th Ave. N. St. Petersburg.

As a widely acclaimed political and social analyst, David Brooks is a keen observer of the American way of life and a savvy commentator on present-day politics and foreign affairs. He has a gift for bringing audiences face-to-face with the spirit of our times with humor, insight and quiet passion.

...

Brooks holds several prestigious positions including op-ed columnist for The New York Times and analyst on the PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered. Additionally, he appears regularly on NBC’s Meet the Press. His latest best-seller, The Road to Character, tells the story of ten great lives that illustrate how character is developed. In a society that emphasizes success and external achievement, The Road to Character is a book about inner worth.

Event tickets are $65 for orchestra seating and $55 for balcony seating...

Event sponsors are: Raymond James; Bright House Networks; Cisco; Duke Energy; Merrill Lynch; LEMA Construction; Carroll Family Foundation; Ken and Sandee Cherven...

 It's the Duke Energy sponsorship that makes it art.

Meanwhile and unrelatedly, Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times has once again sublimated his many spectacular professional failures into another rambling, discursive contrail of words about how "American Leadership" has failed --

Why America’s Leadership Fails

-- through no fault of anyone.

When you spend time around government officials you are constantly struck by the fact that they are more impressive in private than in public. Somewhere at the base of their personal story you usually find an earnest desire to serve some vulnerable group.

The fact is, political lives are simply not that glamorous or powerful or fun. Most politicians wouldn’t put up with all the fund-raising, the stupid partisan games, unless they were driven at some level by the right reasons.

But over the years, many get swallowed by the system...

It's the system, man!  The system!

Then comes the obligatory Both Siderism:

For example, Hillary Clinton seems to have been first inspired by a desire to serve children...

Mitt Romney seems to be an exceptionally fine person...

Because in David Brook's Conservative Dream House and Opium Den, Hillary Clinton is running against Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell is a dedicated public servant, Paul Ryan is a reasonable Centrist, the Caucus Room Conspiracy never happened and Fox News/Hate Radio never existed.

See, it's not that Mr. Brooks' Republican Party is so chock full of out-and-proud bigots and imbeciles that it has finally gone as nutso in public as they have always been in private.  No, the real problem is a "careerist mentality" (and the aforementioned "system") to which politicians in both parties all apparently succumb in equal numbers to equally bad effect:

But a careerist mentality often replaces the vocation mentality. The careerist mentality frequently makes politicians timid, driven more by fear of failure than by any positive ideal.

Such people are besieged by the short-term calculations and often forget about their animating vision and long-term ideal. They rationalize that, since the opposition is so evil, anything that serves their career serves the country. This is not just bad for the people involved but for the system itself.

And then Mr. Brooks' already-barely sublimated denialism and self-loathing finally bobs close enough to the surface for anyone to see:

I do think there’s often an arc to vocation. People start with something outside themselves. Then, in the scramble to get established, the ambition of self takes over. But then at some point people realize the essential falseness of all that and they try to reconnect with their original animating ideals.

And so I think it possible to imagine a revival of vocation. If Clinton is elected, maybe even she can remind us that we’ve all developed these bad habits, that most of us secretly detest the game we’re in and the way we are playing it.

Hillary Clinton will never be my ideal Liberal candidate, but she is an intelligent and capable public servant and for-real policy wonk.  And if the Sanders/Warren wing of the Democratic Party can continue to shepherd her in the right direction, it is possible that a President Hillary Clinton will accomplish many good things.  

But however successful a Clinton Administration may prove to be, it will never be powerful enough to save David Brooks' soul.

Down the road a piece, Yastreblyansky. raises a welt:

What would [David Brooks] like to be thinking about? He has no idea, but he has a kind of emotion in the shape of an idea, which is a nostalgia for the time when it used to be fun...