David Brooks Tried The Yoda Thing Out For a Day

“Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.” -- Yoda, The Phantom Menace

It did not go well.

"Fear stokes anger, which then stokes more fear."  -- David Brooks, the Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph

Because he doesn't fear privation of any kind -- because in his rarefied world of extraordinary privilege the idea of starvation, or homelessness, or losing his job, or losing his health insurance, or losing his country are completely alien to him -- for Mr. Brooks, the idea of "fear" itself exists only as a free-floating abstraction.

For Mr. Brooks, fear is not a key survival-emotion honed by millions of years of human evolution, but an entity unto itself.  Like the glowing, red alien flashlight-special-effect thingy in Star Trek's Day of the Dove -- a malevolent spirit which hovers above all of us, making us fight for no good reason but its amusement.

Mr. Brooks makes this breathtakingly stupid claim for the same reason Mr. Brooks makes all of his breathtakingly stupid claims: because Mr. Brooks has spent the last 15 years relentlessly clawing his way up to the exalted position of the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It. And as the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, Mr. Brooks is driven with the implacable zeal of a fanatic to false-equivalence the shit out of every issue, under all circumstance, in every venue he has available.

In this case, that means using his New York Times column to indiscriminately bulldoze everyone's fears -- legitimate or real -- down to the same level of folly.

In other words, because Mr. Brooks lives rapturously inside an indestructible citadel of elite privilege with his very new, very young wife,  everyone else's fears on all sides of every issue are all equally frivolous:

But now grand ideologies clash by night: white nationalism, populism, oppression studies. All trade in binaries between oppressor and oppressed, the struggle between the good groups and the menacing evil ones.

Because Mr. Brooks lives rapturously inside an indestructible citadel of elite privilege with his very new, very young wife, there are no actual existential threats abroad in the land.  It's all just ego and narcissism:

“Fear, indeed, is intensely narcissistic,” she continues. “It drives out all thoughts of others.” The fearful person doesn’t see particular individuals, just hateful shades who arouse disgust and can be blamed. Muslims are disgusting. Immigrants are disgusting. Republicans are disgusting. 

Because Mr. Brooks lives rapturously inside an indestructible citadel of elite privilege with his very new, very young wife, there are no real monsters living in the White House. There are just superstitious peasants and their...

...overwrought bellowing about the monster in the closet.

And because Mr. Brooks insists there are no real threats or monsters, there is no need for anyone to fear anything, sound the alarms over anything, or fight for anything.  Instead, all that is required is some Great Leader to spray a little Hope and Optimism Febreze into out nation's Stinky Toilet of Irrational Fear and -- poof! -- everything will work out fine.

You know, just like FDR!

They say that perfect love casts out fear. And maybe there is at least one presidential candidate who will perform the role Franklin Roosevelt performed 86 years ago — identify fear as its own independent force and confront it with hope and optimism.

Of course, in the movies, eventually Yoda had to sack up and deal with the fact that there were bad guys who were very bad indeed.

And in real life, while FDR did indeed radiate hope and optimism, we can all thank the Great Maker that he never got so fall-down drunk on whatever Beltway Pollyanna popskull has rotted David Brooks' brain that he came to believe that Hope and Optimism would make fascism magically go away.

Instead, as a wise and responsible leader, Roosevelt did everything in his power to prepare the nation for the war that was coming, including repeatedly warning the nation in clear, grave and unambiguous language that the rising threat of fascism was an insatiable and unappeasable wolf at their door:

And yet University of Chicago history baccalaureate David Brooks would very much like his readers to believe that, somehow, none of that ever happened.

Just as Mr. Brooks would very much like his readers to believe that we had not already lived through an eight year experiment in what would happen if we did, in fact, elect a president who radiated hope and optimism.  A president who was calm and humane.  Formidably intelligent and fundamentally decent.  A president who reached across the political aisle to a fault, no matter how ruthlessly his opposition slandered him, how scurrilously they attacked his family and no matter how relentlessly they sabotaged anything he tries to accomplish, even if it meant filibustering their own bills.

For eight years Barack Obama was everything David Brooks could ever have hoped for in a president.  And for eight years, David Brook's Republican party told President Obama to pound sand and then party nominated and elected the King of the Birthers.

But the real kicker here?  The real punch line in all of this?  When the white nationalist mob on which the Republican party built its power actually kills someone, where do you suppose Donald Trump goes for absolution?

He goes to the same place all such cowards and Quislings go for absolution.

He picks up the official hymnal of David Brooks' High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, opens to page one, and begins to belt out the Beltway's most sacred words:

Trump again blames ‘both sides’ in Charlottesville, says some counterprotesters were ‘very, very violent’

Behold, a Tip Jar!