...vapid and lazy, it doesn't warrant the expenditure of even the few words it
would take to kill, skin it and serve it up on the good china.
Well, maybe a few words. Just for posterity.
First, Brooks takes the jejune opinions of 13!Count!Em!13! "undecided" young
voters --
-- and extrapolates their tapdancing-'cause-I-didn't-do-my-homework reactions to
the vice presidential debate out and out and out until they encompass the world.
Second, Mr. Brooks pulls I-don't-know-which-or-how-many writing How-To
manuals off the shelf and snatches a few quotes from famous people talking
about "story".
Did he borrow from
"Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very
First Sentence"
by Lisa Cron? Chris Baty's "No plot? No problem!"? Annie
Dillard's "Talk"? The classic "The art of fiction" by
John Gardner? "Creative Writing For Dummies" by Maggie Hamand?
"Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer?
Can't say for sure.
I can say that my own copy of least one of these was in one of the four
boxes of books I just donated to my local library. I can say
that, as Mark Twain once noted,
"Stringing together a bunch of quotes by notable people to pad out your
column when you really have nothing to say is a great way to technically
fulfill your 800-word contractual obligation without breaking a sweat."*
Here are a few of the "As so-and-so said" chunks from Mr. Brooks' column.
The playwright David Mamet once wrote...
Hold it right there, because Mr. Brooks might've wanted to catch up with where Mamet is today
before copy/pasting him into his column. From
Forward:
Embracing Trump’s politics, David Mamet has become the Kanye West of
American letters
The author of ‘Recessional’ offers up a bevy of conspiracy theories
Yeah, he's nuts now. Orthogonal to reality. Which is sad.
And as much as I would love to hear Kamala Harris dress down Donald Trump
using pre-gone-bugfuck bone-shredding Mamet language similar to this --
-- should that ever even come close to happening, I am 100% sure that David
Brooks' employers at The New York Times would ask Aaron Sorkin to
come back and write another dumbass guest editorial demanding that she drop
out of the race.
And speaking of...Mr. Brooks continues:
The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin builds on that definition. He says that
strong drama...
Does Mr. Brooks even remember the last time Sorkin entered the 2024 presidential election chat? It was when he decided that Democrats were idiots who didn't understand how politics works, so he offered the following helpful advice to Democrats about how they should run their campaign:
Aaron Sorkin: How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats
It was 9/10ths him ruminating on a West Wing episode and what-iffing its plot. And then, this:
But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump
in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs
unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch
to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.
At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.
Subsequent events proved that advice to be so goddamn punishingly stupid and awful
that Sorkin asked the public to please, please, please forget he ever wrote it. Y'know, give it the ol' "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"
treatment and ease it down the memory hole as if it had never been.
Brooks went on:
Christopher Booker wrote a book called “The Seven Basic Plots,” arguing
that...
And on:
As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues
And on
...the novelist Mary Gaitskill once told The Atlantic.
And on:
As the novelist and New York University writing professor Darin Strauss
has put it...
And on:
Compelling characters have what the British author and writing
instructor Will Storr calls...
And on:
But, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt told Storr for his book...
And on:
The novelist E.M. Forster reminded us...
Having digested this no-calorie, no-protein, no-flavor poached cake of nothing on your behalf, two things come through loud and clear.
The first is that the Kamala Harris which you and I see out there on the hustings every
day bears no resemblance to the Harris which the "undecided" children in the
Times focus group --
-- are bitching about.
And second, Brooks and the rest of his ossified professional-opinion-having colleagues in the dying legacy media are desperate for Vice President Harris to pay them the kind of
tribute that Obama offered them during the Before Time of January
2009.
In a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration,
Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post
columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet
the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s
part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a
post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances
with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still
working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty
grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that
for far too long have strangled our politics.”
Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s
yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David
Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry,
and Peggy Noonan...
However, having learned from Obama's grave error in judgement, Vice President
Harris is having none of it.
*Also, Mark Twain never said that.
In fact, he said that "Scoundrels who make up false quotes and put them in the mouths of dead men to prove some point are lower than frog-cheating thimble riggers and should have their internet access revoked."**
Like climate change, the madness of the Republican party is man-made.
Like climate change, the conditions that created a Republican party base
stupid enough and racist enough to manifest a calamity like Trump were a long
time in the making.
Like climate change, all along the way there were ample signs warning where the Republican party was headed and how dangerous it would become.
Like climate change, the warning signs kept getting clearer and scarier.
Like climate change, the clearer and scarier the warning signs got, the deeper
into denial the professional Conservative denialists sank.
Like climate change, the clearer and scarier the warning signs got, the more
those trying to make the public pay attention to the impending disaster were
ignored or shouted down or blame-shifted or "whatabouted" to the margins.
Like climate change, there are huge, monied interests with vast resources
funding Conservative denialism.
Like climate change, the acceleration of the wild lethality of the Republican
party exactly fit with the warnings that professional Conservative denialists
had been loudly dismissing all along.
Like climate change, once the wild lethality of the monsters and quislings and
cowards which the Republican party has manifested became too catastrophic to
ignore, most professional Conservative denialists went right on making a
living pretending that none of this was happening. (A few professional
Conservative denialists began to recognize the catastrophe for what it was,
but still swear that it all began spontaneously and without warning in 2016.)
Like climate change, the destructive power of one or two or even three
violent, "once in a century" events, while, tragic, are no longer the
issue. Because...
Like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, the terrible damage done to our
democracy by Hurricane Trump will someday come to an end, but the environment
which manifested that particular monster has now changed irrevocably.
There will be more and worse monsters slouching out of the GOP's
political whelping box for the foreseeable future. In fact, they are
with us today, all over the country, itching for their chance to unleash their
particular brand of ruin upon us.
However, unlike climate change, the transformation of the Republican base into
an army of reprogrammable meatbags was not the poisonous
byproduct of some other process or industry. Something that could at
least be mitigated if, collectively, we mounted an urgent, spirited and
ongoing campaign to do so. This is not the case in the Republican
party.
In the Republican party, polluting our politics and zombifying the base
was the point. And having achieved all they set out to do,
the majority of the party is perfectly content with what they have become,
while the tiny minority who have been cast out of the party dream of lifeboats.
From The Bulwark:
Romney Winks
Mitt Romney is getting a little tired of you asking him whether he’s
going to endorse Kamala Harris. He wonders: Can’t you people read between
the lines?
“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next
president of the United States,” Romney said at an event in Utah
yesterday. “And you’re going to have to do the very difficult calculation
of what that would mean.”
The Utah senator has never before implied so strongly that he’s actively
rooting for Kamala Harris. What remains fascinating is that he still won’t
say it out loud.
He says his reticence is deliberate. “There’s a good shot that the
Republican Party is going to need to be rebuilt and reoriented, either
after this election, or if Donald Trump is reelected, after he’s the
president,” Romney went on, as is his habit. “I believe I will have more
influence in the party by virtue of saying it as I’ve said it. I’m not
planning on changing the way I’ve described it.”...
This is madness, and to their credit, the author says as much.
Why he thinks the GOP will be headed for reorientation if Trump wins
again, rather than for four more years of lockstep devotion to the least
of Dear Leader’s whims, we couldn’t begin to tell you. ..
The pose Romney is striking here is a common one for many anti-Trump
Republicans, ex-Republicans, and conservatives—even ones whose primary
political goal is somehow finding a way to move the Republican Party past
Trump. These people are open, ideologically, to the premise that Harris
would be a far better, safer president than a re-elected Trump. But
they’re also still trying to maintain their credibility and moral
authority in a coalition whose current sole bedrock principle is the
Democrats are always worse.
Ultimately, the little Fig Leaf Gavotte that Romney is doing here -- and that
so many other Never Trumpers have done and are still doing-- is, at once,
boring, sad and darkly hilarious.
They brought this on themselves, and now they want someone or something to
save them from the disaster which their ambition, their hubris and their
patrician I-don't-want-to-know-what-goes-on-down-in-the-bowels-of-the-party
cowardice created.
But nothing can save them, because by their own hand the ambient
political environment of their party has accelerated beyond their ability
harness and use it. They cling to flotsam on a storm-tossed sea they
manufactured, and dream of lifeboats.
Sometimes those lifeboats are flimsy, made from simperingly parsed words about
not supporting a tyrant but not endorsing the not-tyrant.
Other lifeboats are to be found on teevee and in the op-ed pages of American
newspapers, where whitewashing and rehabbing the reputations of
recently-former Republicans has become an integral part of every legacy medis
corporation's business plan. Or in dreams of using their now-outsized
media presence to reshape the ambient environment of the Democratic party to
suit their tastes.
Other times those dreams take the shape of an entire armada of lifeboats,
waiting like so many cruise ships docked nose-to-tail at Cozumel, for the
immediate crisis to pass. Then, once the skies have cleared, presumably
under the leadership of newly-minted Hero of the Resistance, Admiral Liz
Cheney, the luxury fleet will sail back to power, and back to calling
Democrats baby-murderers and "the face of pure evil".
But there is no sailing back to 1980 or 1984 or 2000 in glory. First, because all of that is gone for good. And second, and because all of those nostalgia-swaddled Republican landmarks were actually the warning signs along the road to the malignant political ecosystem which not only spawned Hurricane Trump, but is already busy gestating the next monster...
the number of pundits/analysts/news anchors who have been consistently wrong for 20 years and yet are constantly given airtime is absolutely astounding. in no business would these folks last longer than 15 minutes, except maybe sports analysis and wall street.