David Brooks Has Time Enough At Last

I admit that I showed off a little last week when I got up in front of an audience of literally dozens of readers to demonstrate the third most useless superpower in the world: accurately predicting how Mr. David Brooks of the New York times is going to react during any given week as the depraved political party and ideological movement to which he has devoted his entire career collapsed around him.

Looking forward to David Brooks' deep insights into his shitpile of a party.
Predict he'll whittle and talk about Edmund Burke's dog Pixie.

— driftghost (@Mr_Electrico) October 11, 2016

This week, I am forced against my better judgement to give myself extra-credit for today's column by Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times wherein he changed to a slightly different rocking chair on the same fucking porch to whittle and treat America to some of his patented pseudo-rabbinical argle bargle as he exhorts his readers to look away, look away, oh please look away from the scary sight of the complete collapse of Mr. Brooks' depraved political party and ideological movement and instead read more Martin Buber and be nicer to each other, damn it!:

Read Buber, Not the Polls!

David Brooks NOV. 1, 2016

So this first line has to be a joke, right?   Something a disgruntled intern slipped in?

If America were a marriage we’d need therapy.

Because who in their right mind would be taking marriage counseling advice from a guy who spent most of his career hectoring The Poors on the Perils Of Broken Families And Disordered Communities ... while coping with his own marriage going Boom! by simple refusing to speak about it at all and relying on his cronies in the media to never mention it until that one time when Brian Lamb did?

But then again, I am one of the Poors and I do come from a broken home and my community (or at least my living room) is somewhat disordered, so what do I know?

Anyway, moving on from the appetizer to the fish course, how about a big, reeking portion of Both Siderism, pan-fried in hubris and rotten from the head down?

There has been so much bad communication over the past year: people talking in warring monologues past each other, ignoring the facts and using lazy stereotypes like “elites” and “Trumpeans” to reduce complex individuals into simplistic categories. Meanwhile, our main candidates are poor connectors. We’ve got the self-enclosed narcissism of Donald Trump and, to a lesser degree, the mistrustful defensiveness of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

And then the main course, in which Mr. Brooks -- safe in his bubble of wealth and privilege and far from any personal or financial consequences of the collapse of his depraved political party and ideological movement -- gathers together that handful of New York plutocrat shut-ins who underwrite his career and reads aloud to them the happy-happy stories they want to hear:

As an antidote for all this, I’ve been reading the work of Martin Buber, the early 20th century Jewish theologian who dedicated his career to understanding deep intimacy. Buber is famous for the distinction between I-It relationships and I-Thou relationships.

And now we're off to the fucking races:

I-It relationships come in two varieties...

I-Thou relationships, on the other hand, are personal, direct, dialogical — nothing is held back... 

Some people go through life with a detached posture, trying to self-differentiate themselves and be more sophisticated than others... 

Others adopt a guard-down posture that is openhearted and open-minded...

Like Mr. Henry Bemis, Mr. Brooks now looks out upon the rubble of the world and sees a chance to finally catch up on his reading.

But unlike Henry Bemis, Mr. Brooks was not an inconsequential little man working in an inconsequential little job, taking his breaks in the vault so he could read undisturbed.

Instead, Mr. Brooks has been one of the foremost architects of the disaster from which he is now in full retreat. It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Brooks has worked his whole professional life for the Republican Party and Conservative Movement and profited hugely thereby.  He helped them built the mighty engines of ideological destruction that are tearing up to bits.  He helped bolt them together and polish them up.  He gave Conservatism's shitty ideas and maniacs in Brooks Brother's suits all the  respectability they needed to get in and good and close so they could wreck the country from the inside.

And now, sitting high above the ruins. Mr, Brooks wants to burble on about Exodus and Martin Buber and what "Americans" need to do to fix the mess he made.

You know, as a man of peace, Poor and Disordered, though I may be, I do not wish for Mr. Brooks to come to any physical harm.

But I do wish that, once and for all. his glasses should fall and shatter into one million pieces.

Behold, a Tip Jar!