Hey, I'm an Adjective!

From Balloon Juice:

Charles Pierce Forces Me to Take a Cold Shower

by John Cole

This driftglassian takedown of David Brooks got me all hot and bothered. A sample:

He does, however, interview some very well-spoken poll results, and proceeds to interpret them in ways that make you wonder if he’s dropped in from Alpha Centauri. He notices that poor people are having fewer babies, which makes him sad. But, things are looking up! People have stopped using their “bank-issued” credit cards as much. (These would be the cards they used so as to support the overstuffed suburban lifestyle that David Brooks so celebrated in his earlier, funnier work.) This means, to Brooks, “Quietly but decisively, Americans are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system.”
...

So I've got that going for me.

Commenter "srv" writes, "Wait, driftglass is at Esquire?"

No. srv.

No I am very definitely not.

Currently I am unemployed.

For the fourth time.

In three years.

Which is kinda scary.

Or, in Brooks-speak, I am "quietly but decisively...trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system."

On the slightly different subject of our nearest solar neighbors, I must confess that, like Mr. Pierce, I, too, have abused poor Alpha Centauri in the past:

In case you are just skimming past en route to Alpha Centauri and have no idea about who or what a "Newt Gingrich" is, he is a multiply-humiliated Republican personality who gloms onto whatever wingnut conspiracy theory or demagogic lunacy Fox News is peddling this week and lends it a portion of his ever-diminishing credibility.

And I, too, have wonder aloud if perhaps Our Mr. Brooks' complete absence of humanity might lie in his extra-terrestrial origins:

Of course, in the process of becoming David Broder, David Brooks has merely added one more thin coat of varnish to his own, time-honored method of meeting his 800-word, bi-weekly contractual obligation to the New York Times: namely, observing-America-with-alarm as if he were an alien.

Or a robot.

Or (a trope I have leaned on before) one of the time travelers from C.L. Moore's wonderful "Vintage Season" -- A jaded connoisseur on a "Disasters of the Past" tourist junket, taking up temporary residence at the edge of each of history's great catastrophes long enough to savor its distinct terrors and tragedies...and then moving on to the next plague.
...

But had I ever been pressed to name the planet of Bobo's origin, I'd have chose Tau Ceti Prime, not Alpha Centauri, for dark and terrible reasons known all-too-well to the xenojournalism community, but which remain hidden from the average Earth-born civilian for their own safety and sanity.

This is really nothing more than a minor quibble between Mr. Pierce and myself, which I raise here only because -- in one of those linguistic ironies which is surprisingly common in our jerkwater exurb of the Milky Way galaxy -- a "minor quibble" on Tau Ceti Prime is a nine-inch long, slow moving, sexless, eyeless parasitic invertebrate with a tiny brain and metabolism consisting of 90% mouth and asshole which nonetheless manages -- in defiance of all terrestrial rules of natural selection -- to continue landing highly sought-after positions at prestigious Tau Ceti newspapers.

Where it writes about how "Quietly but decisively, Tau Cetians are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system."

Twice a week.

Every week.

Over an over again.

Why yes, I do take contributions!