David Brooks and the Impossible Moon Rocket

The Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph has some bad news for you kiddo!

That rocket ain't gonna fly!

David Brooks, 1922:

Should a rocket ever escape our air, its journey could be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.   That such an enterprise could take a man to the moon is a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne, and I am bold enough to say that such a voyage shall never occur regardless of all future advances.

And that iron horse ain't gonna do more than crawl!

David Brooks, 1825:

What can be more palpably ludicrous than this notion held out by fools of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?

Same deal with your stupid horseless carriage.

David Brooks, 1910:

For all practical purposes, the automobile has reached the limit of its development.

And fuck teevee.

David Brooks, 1927:

The Philo Farnsworth's so-called tele-vision box is a parlor trick suitable to wow the hoi polloi at the carnival, but no serious person thinks anything will come of it.

 Also forget talking to your cousin in Philly by wire.

David Brooks, 1865:

The well-educated man knows that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires.  Samuel Morse's coded dots and dashes, yes, but no human voice will ever be sent over a wire.  And even if it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.

The good news is, the Marconi wireless will end war forever!

David Brooks, 1913:

The coming of the wireless era will make war obsolete! 

So you're a little let down that the wireless fell a little short in the war-ending department.  Well fella, turn that smile upside down because I have some great news from Munich!

David Brooks, 1938:

My friends, history was made today when the British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor.  Peace for our time, for which we give thanks from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and sleep with the calm assurance that war in Europe is now an impossibility!

And even if war should break out here or there in the future, the idea of some madman developing a "super" weapon is sheer scientifiction:

David Brooks, 1933:

Rest assured, no man will ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy.

And just for fun, David Brooks, 1970:

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.

Seriously, if you read David Brooks at all (and you really, really shouldn't because it will hurt your eyes and shrink your brain, but there are people with degrees and impressive titles who do and who proclaim it to be the best shit they have ever read, which is how I know we're fucked) one of the things you pick up on real fast is just how often he is hugely wrong.  Cartoonishly wrong.  Like a belt-fed machine gun of being wrong, firing endlessly at targets the size of planets and missing them completely, every time.

And since I've already written about Mr. Brooks to the point where sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet like it is now, I wonder if I'm in hell ... I won't bother heading down to the archives and hauling samples of his omnipresent, world-smother wrongness.

Instead I will just leave this here.  Mr. Brooks' column from today.  A great big ol' pinata of wrongness which everyone on the internet will pummel with their pummeling sticks until their arms are weary and they've sweated through their shirts and blouses and used up a week's ration of "fucks"-- 

‘Medicare for All’: The Impossible Dream

There’s no plausible route from here to there.

...
If America were a blank slate, Medicare for all would be a plausible policy, but we are not a blank slate. At this point, the easiest way to get to a single-payer system would probably be to go back to 1776 and undo that whole American Revolution thing.

-- after which Mr. Brooks will continue being employed by The New York Times and nothing whatsoever will change.

Funny old world.

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