Alert Reader Gene in Stockholm

Dropped me a note to tell me that I was no longer a lone voice crying in the wilderness, and then pointed me to this lacerating piece of bareknuckle, collimated outrage by Taibbi that begins thusly:

Translating David Brooks

A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn’t just any writer.

Rather than go through the Brooks piece line by line, I figured I’d just excerpt a few bits here and there and provide the Cliff’s Notes translation at the end. It’s really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling — if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity...

The rest of it

was a lot like this.

Thing of beauty, and a œuvre to which I have made my own, modest contributions over the years. Such as this series from 2007:

A Rose for Bobo Part 1
A Rose for Bobo Part 2
A Rose for Bobo Part 3
A Rose for Bobo Part 4

And yet...

And yet when I pair it with this from Thomas Frank and Bill Moyers (emphasis added and video here) discussing what I would strongly argue is one of the most important cultural phenomenon of our lifetime --

...
THOMAS FRANK:...Bill. When I say this is done by design, I'm not exaggerating. And this is one of the more surprising things that I found when I was doing the research for "The Wrecking Crew," is that there's a whole conservative literature on why you want second-rate people in government, or third-rate.

I found an interview with the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1928, where he said-- this quote, it's mind-boggling to me. But he really said this. "The best public servant is the worst one." Okay? You want bad people in government. You want to deliberately staff government with second-rate people. Because if you have good people in government, government will work. And then the public will learn to trust government. And then they'll hand over more power to it.

And you don't want that, of course. Your Chamber of Commerce. And I thought, when I first read this, "That's a crazy idea. I can't believe that sentiment." And then I found it repeated again and again and again. Throughout the long history of the conservative movement. This is something they believe very deeply.

BILL MOYERS: It comes out of a definitive way of seeing things, right?

THOMAS FRANK: Yes. And we can summarize that very briefly. That the market is the, you know, is the universal principle of human civilization. And that government is a kind of interloper, if not a, you know, criminal gang. And getting in the way.

BILL MOYERS: But we saw with this collapse and this bailout, we saw the failure of that.

THOMAS FRANK: Of course.

BILL MOYERS: And yet there's no sense of contrition. What's amazing to me, and you wrote this, that the very people who brought us this decade of conservative failures, the party of Palin, Beck, Hannity, Abramoff, Rove, DeLay, Kristol, O'Reilly, just might stage a comeback.

THOMAS FRANK: I think they might. I think there's a very strong chance of that.

BILL MOYERS: After only 11 months out of power, because of the record. I mean--

THOMAS FRANK: Look, well, the stuff--

BILL MOYERS: --it's crazy.

THOMAS FRANK: --the stuff we've been talking about here today. The stuff in "The Wrecking Crew," that's all forgotten. The financial crisis had that effect of-- that stuff is now off the-- down the memory hole...

-- I find it ever harder to believe that it makes any difference.

We live fully inside the Meme-ento

black hole now.

At the event horizon, there is David Brooks. Immovable. He was there yesterday, last week, last year, and he will be there tomorrow, and next week, and next year. So will Tom Friedman. So will all of them, nesting in the high places, living large, making strange, irrelevant little chirping noises.

From deeper inside the gravity well, we good little Liberals weep and rail against the coming of a New Dark Age, but as long we are inside the hole, none of it can achieve escape velocity.

So we brandish our depressingly extensive bills of particulars against the Right, and the Right's enablers and apologists in the media.

And from the voracious singularity at the center of it all, the invincibly ignorant Right shrugs.

We show off our decades-long Bayeux Tapestry of their travesties.

They toss it on the same cultural pyre onto which they have already heaped the Constitution, the economy and the past.

And smile.

And keep coming.

We keep the safety off of our rebuttals, and our logic greased in its holster with the site filed down for a faster draw.

As if facts and logic mattered.

Digby has it right here when she says:

...
If progressives want to change politics in this country they are going to have to do it not just in institutional terms, but in rhetorical and ideological terms as well. It's not like we haven't talked about this before. Until the 2008 presidential campaign, it was one of the primary issues we talked about -- changing the terms of the debate, educating the people, giving voters something to believe in and care about. But for some reason, on the progressive side all we seem to care about these days is poll numbers and institutional reform.

I think those things are important, but they aren't the whole story. If the Republicans make a comeback -- a big "if," in the short term -- they will do it because they have spent the last thirty years indoctrinating the American people into a certain way of thinking.
...

Once Conservative strategy shifted entirely to supplying the Pig People with an ever more powerful pharmacopoeia of Wingnut Chewable Crazy to help them obliterate inconvenient truths and keep their berserk rage amped into the stratosphere, this stopped being a fight of policy vs. policy, and started being a struggle between the Children of the Enlightenment, and. a 30-million-strong army of doublethink zombies --

“ To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.[1] ”

“ The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. ”
...

-- hell bent on wrecking this country.

I will always appreciate skilled contributions to the "Why Is David Fucking Brooks Still Employed?" genre, and will probably continue to add my my own bits and pieces to it for some time to come.

But we are now fully in the hands of the tidal forces of history which are driving us towards a moment when we must confront the fact that this country (to misquote Lincoln) cannot endure, permanently half zombie brainwashed wingnut goon and half not. There is a good deal of ugliness coming our way, and I cannot help but think that once we have passed through it we will look back on David Fucking Brooks and his fellow travels as the quaint, overpriced and absurdly-ornate journalistic equivalent of a Victorian era sterling silver snuff box.