Punish The Monkey

And let the organ grinder go.

In his Friday column about “What happened to the global economy?”, David Fucking Brooks spends 800 words trying to parse out whether the collapse of the world financial markets was caused by greedy fuckers who got stupid or stupid fuckers who got greedy.

Apparently, according to the gospel of David Fucking Brooks, the truth of the thing is a phenomenon so incredibly opaque and elusive that -- like the top quark or why Madonna remains even mildly popular -- it may ultimately be unknowable.

The behavioral super-villain of David Fucking Brooks’ "CSI: Wall Street" is a veritable Professor Moriarty: skulking around in the alleys behind the world's banking systems, hiding behind bibbly phrases like “[the] false lure of the Gaussian copula function”, kicking over whole economies, and then vanishing, leaving only the merest wisps of clues behind.

For his part, David Fucking Brooks stands foursquare in favor the stupidity theory over the greed theory. A daring move, certainly, but one which risks causing certain irresponsible imputers of unattractive motives to wonder aloud if his decision to blame Teh Stoopid instead of Teh Greedy might have anything to do with the fact that if it turned out the Great Republican Recession was caused by evil oligarchs fucking us all over because, well, they don’t give a shit whether any of the rest of us live or die, then that might sorta put a serious crimp in David Fucking Brooks’ sweet-sweet gig as the Chief Apologist for the Party Of Greedy Oligarchs.

Adoption of the greed theory would also inexorably point in the direction of Evil Regulation, which, according to David Fucking Brooks, would “just be trading the hubris of Wall Street for the hubris of Washington.” And we all remember how hubristic regulatory fiends held the economy’s head underwater until it drowned between those tragic, peak years of federal oversight between, say, 1936 and 1981.

Of course the most remarkable thing of all about this column is not the typical, clumsy, Brooksian faux intellectual argumentum ad verecundiam namedropping (“Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Taleb”), or the typical, clumsy, Brooksian juxtaposition of two completely false choices in order the manufacture the illusion of a complex dilemma where none exists.

No, the most remarkable thing about it what that big ol’ dog didn't do in the night:

Inspector Gregory: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Sherlock Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Inspector Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Sherlock Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

The most remarkable thing about it is that undisputed King Of Babbitt Crack-lapping Conservatism burns 800 words pretending to muse Very Seriously over the question of what in the hell went wrong with the American financial system starting in the 1980s and cannot bring his mouth to form these four little syllables:

Rea-gan-om-ics.

Instead, the whole monologue is presented as if this problem is happening on a distant, cloud-swaddled planet a thousand light years away; a place whose properties can only be vaguely inferred, whose deity isn't Conservatism's Greatest Hero and whose inhabitants don’t live two houses down from David Fucking Brooks.

Which is why he is not David Brooks, but will always be David Fucking Brooks.