Today, Our Mr. Brooks takes a perfectly serviceable essay on the construction project at Ground Zero...
Ward set prosaic priorities — what would be built first, which parts of the project could wait. He cut costs by doing things like putting columns in the design of the transportation hall. He changed the name of Freedom Tower to One World Trade Center. He divided the construction deals into manageable chunks.
...then -- and you can see it coming from the fucking ionosphere -- straps it to the hood of his car (emphasis scattered here and there)...
Ward (who is inexplicably being replaced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo) rescued the ground zero project by disenchanting it, by seeing it as it is, not through shrouds of symbols — by attending closely to all the practical complexity. American politics in general could use that sort of disenchantment.
...stomps the accelerator...
Many issues that were once concrete and practical are distorted because they have become symbolic and spiritual.
...and rams it smack into the only subject the Sulzberger family pays Our Mr. Brooks to write about anymore: his long, obsessive war against the terrible and perfectly reciprocal sins of Both Sides:
Tax policy isn’t just about how to raise revenue anymore. Liberals see it as a way to punish the greedy and redress the iniquities of capitalism. Conservatives see tax increases as an assault on the enterprising class perpetrated by arrogant central planners.
...
President Obama’s Green Tech initiative has become a policy disaster ... because its champions ignored basic practical considerations. They were befogged by their own visions of purity and virtue.
...
And if you don't agree with Our Mr. Brooks' fraudulent bullshit well, well...you're a bad man who just doesn't caaaaaare!
You get politicians and commentators whose views are entirely predictable because they don’t care about the specifics of any particular issue. They just care about the status war against their social enemies and the way each issue functions as a symbol in that great fight.
Clinging to the Big Lie that there is no difference whatsoever between Left and Right is literally all that keeps Our Mr. Brooks' professionally afloat: it is the hinge on which his every false-faced public utterance creaks and the razor he slips into the mushy apple of every mediocre column he throws together.
Mr. Brooks' addiction to his Big Lie has long since morphed from a political opinion into a form of mental illness that has only gotten more petulantly maudlin since his tearful public breakup with President Poopyhead.
When viewed as a whole, the single characteristic Mr. Brooks' body of work that jumps most starkly into focus is that he is in precisely the same line as Fox News and Hate Radio. Yes, their audiences differ -- Fox News and Hate Radio cater to the straight-up bigot and imbecile crowd, while Our Mr. Brooks' clientele are upscale plutocrats and cringing, gutless Centrists desperate to believe that they are little islands of moderation in a world where Both Sides Do It -- but the basic, prostitutional nature of the transactions are identical: telling comforting lies to the desperate and delusional for cash.
And in the absence of any rational explanation why he (or Ross Douthat or Tom Friedman) exists once can only assume that:
A) The Sulzberger family has its own reasons for keeping an entire petting zoo of talentless Conservative/Neocon hacks on their payroll, and;
B) There is an e-n-o-r-m-o-u-s amount of money and/or clout is involved.
Some days, being a member of the Professional Left feels like being the Josephus of Wally World :-)
The Fundraiser Continues.
The dough goes here!
3 comments:
Aah, Driftglass, you're just not having enough fun. Here's my comment on Brooks, which the Times just posted at #111. (I think that's something like Cain's 999 or Bachmann's 666):
"Liberals see it [tax policy] as a way to punish the greedy and redress the iniquities of capitalism." -- David Brooks
I'm beginning to love your almost-subliminal throwaway straw men lines. You have at least one in every column, no matter what the subject. Finding these lines is like playing "Where's Waldo?"
Of course, if you actually believe your liberal straw man is somebody who has a job in Washington, maybe some day you could expose him, Mr. Brooks. I'd like to know who that nasty guy is and throw the bum out. However, I don't think he exists outside your long-running fantastical nightmare of "The Attack of the Scary Liberal."
And speaking of unusual obsessions and compulsions, I find it curious that you've chosen to concentrate today's column on the World Trade Center when what the world is watching is going on right next door to it. Maybe your limo took you downtown to the World Trade Center via the West Side Highway or the FDR so you wouldn't have to think about those hippies yelling, "Wall Street got bailed out; we got sold out." So disconcerting. And so uncaring about the problems real Wall Street bankers face. I read in Bloomberg News (of the Baron von Bloomberg Bloombergs) that the denizens of the Street itself were pretty upset that their incomes might be cut a little because of "government interference and persecution." (Article by Max Abelson.) I'm sure you feel their pain.
Keep up the good work, Mr. Brooks. Those of us who face real problems every day appreciate these occasional diversions.
"President Obama’s Green Tech initiative has become a policy disaster ...."
The Dept. of Energy has given loan guarantees totaling $20 billion toward green technology, and the only default has been the $500 million to Solyndra. Any venture capitalist would say that that is a very good track record.
It's puzzling that Brooks chooses tax policy as the playground to try out his little rickety scooter of a premise on here. I have a hard time imagining a more complete victory of Symbolism over Pragmatism than in the area of tax policy, and the victory has clearly been the Right's. If one were to eliminate all ideological crosswinds from the debate (as if that was possible, or even desirable), it is clear that we would be trying to generate more revenue from that portion of the population which has weathered the financial downturn admirably. A pragmatist would say "Well, we're running low on $$$ to pay for shit that we have decided is a good idea to do. And the upper echeloners have missed not a beat. And their tax rates are at a historical low. Let's raise taxes on them." Instead, high marginal rates on the rich is painted as being inspired by liberal self-loathing, poor parenting, a victory for redistributionism, coattail-riding, etc., etc.
I just wonder if Brooks is not a Bizarro-type, who literally exists for the purpose of painting reality's negative in really bad prose.
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