No, You Festering Peasant Drool Buckets

You may not see my stock portfolio.

Whether concocting another 100% fact-free fable about Dirty Fucking Hippies destroying America values;
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MR. BROOKS: I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK." And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.


MR. DIONNE: Right.


MR. BROOKS: And that's just not true.


MR. GREGORY: But I have to challenge you on that point.


MR. DIONNE: Yeah.


MR. GREGORY: Is it really that we don't know right from wrong? Is there anybody who doesn't know that sodomizing a 10-year-old boy in a shower by another man is wrong?


MR. BROOKS: But if you...


MR. DIONNE: Exactly.


MR. BROOKS: If you're alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense. You have a script to follow. And this is necessary because people do not intervene. ...

or using his New York Times column to shamelessly pimp for the oil and gas industry in an out-of-nowhere advertisement on the Joys of Fracking and how it suffers at the hands of Dirty Fucking Hippies:
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David: But the bigger problem is that Democrats may lose the spirit of enterprise. University town voters tend to be put off by the policies favored by the aspiring entrepreneurial classes. They side with the environmentalists over the people who like pipelines and shale gas, for example.
...

...the American Plutocracy has no more dog-loyal lick-spittle than Our Mr. Brooks.

Sure, when it comes to reporting the simple, unhappy facts about class or race or politics or culture in America, Mr. Brooks may be congenital liar, but the lies he tells are so diligently focused on pleasing the powerful -- so congenial to ears of the immensely wealthy -- that whether or not they intersect with reality at any point is entirely beside the point. Because Mr. Brooks is not a journalist in any sense of the word; he is a storyteller, employed by America's Newspaper of Record to tell America's power-elite the fairy tales that make them happy.

Over and over again.

Column after column, year after year, Mr. Brooks piles up his personal fortune and reinforces his thick network of clout-heavy patrons by singing them the same little tune.

He wrote one such yesterday, but to get yourself in the proper frame of mind to appreciate Mr. Brooks' words, consider the distance between the imaginary lives of imaginary, simple, working folk found in the lyrics of the lagniappe lullaby



with which Mr. Brooks sings for his supper...

..and the working world as really is for millions of real, working people in America.

Consider that...

...if you want to get a low-wage job a banging out dents and welding cracks on public transit buses, you will first have to pee in a cup.

...if you want to get a low-wage job dodging punches at a social service agency working with, say, ex cons you will first have to agree to let the HR department and three different levels of law enforcement go over your life with a microscope and a pair of rubber gloves.

...if you want to get a low-wage job moving pallettes of potato chips around in some freezing. pre-dawn warehouse, God help you if you ever did time in what Willard Romney refers to as "the Big House".

...if you dream of being, say, a postal inspector, understand that the FBI will visit you, everyone in your immediate family, all of your friends and all of your former employers.

...if you hope to keep a roof over your family's head by landing that sales gig, you'd better dye the gray our of your hair and pare down your formidable resume to make sure it looks like you're under 40.

...having landed that low-wage job moving numbers around spreadsheets and constantly retweaking your psychotic boss' PowerPoint presentations to include whateever the fuck he happened to read on "In Flight" magazine this week, if you want to keep your job you'd damn well better never turn off your iPhone or Crackberry, just in case your psychotic boss has a brainstorm at 2:00 that you absolutely need to get going on Right Now!

In the the workaday, working class world about which Mr. Brooks obviously knows nothing whatsoever, it is now absolutely commonplace to be expected to turn out the pockets of your life and hand your hair, urine, blood over to strangers to get a job.

Even a crappy job.

In the the workaday, working class world about which Mr. Brooks obviously knows nothing whatsoever, it is now absolutely commonplace to be expected to give up on having anything your parents would recognize as a "private life" as a condition of keeping your job.

Even a crappy job.

And if you don't like it? Fuck you! Quit and starve because now that the plutocracy which Mr. Brooks has spent his life celebrating and defending has annihilated the middle class and gelded our labor unions, there will be forever be six unemployed Americans ready and eager to take your place on whatever terms the company dictates.

And if, in turn, those Americans start getting uppity and asking for crazy shit like "raises" or "health insurance" or "time off"?

Well, behind each of them stand 100 Chinese slaves who will do the work for pennies a day.

Got that?

Now keep these incredibly invasive disclosure rules -- from psych exams to surrendering your flesh and fluids to internet background searches to find out if you or any of your 2,611 Facebook friends have ever said "fuck" online -- which have now become the banal norm for the American working class in mind as you read today's little gem by David Brooks, in which he explains why people running for the most powerful job on Earth -- a job where you can let and energy company poison the groundwater for thousands of Americans, influence the spending of trillions of tax dollars on weapons systems or give the Go/No-Go to allow the reimportation of cheaper, generic drugs -- should not have to disclose whether or not they are heavily invested in Exxon Mobile or Halliburton or Eli Lilly.

From Gawker (with a h/t to "Gene"):

In some little cutesy online back-and-forth piece today, Brooks and Gail Collins purport to debate the issue of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns. Here is where David Brooks comes down:

...
My own view is that the desire for full disclosure stems from a few things. First, pure prurience. Second, members of what used to be called the New Class perpetually labor under the delusion that other people dislike the rich as much as they do and if they can only disclose that someone is rich that will end their political chances. Third, there is a misbegotten ideology haunting the land, the ideology of sunshinism. This is the belief that everything should be made public...

Sunshinism is a destructive ideology. Forcing people to financially undress in public is just one of those incursions that repels decent people from running for office... It also destroys people's faith in government. Have you noticed that as democracy has become more open, cynicism has skyrocketed and the effectiveness of government has gone down the toilet?

So just to clarify, and I don't know why I'm shocked by this, really: New York Times employee and wealthy white male David Brooks strongly believes that the idea that our most powerful and barely-accountable leaders should have to tell we, the people, a bare minimum of facts about themselves and their lifestyle, is a "destructive ideology." 
David Brooks, a columnist whose work is based largely on news reported by journalists dedicated to exposing facts that powerful officials would prefer to keep private, favors allowing powerful officials to keep everything private. David Brooks, who purports to know something about politics, genuinely believes that the fear of too much honesty with the public is the reason that "decent people" don't run for elected office...

I would write a little more, but at the moment I am nursing that tiny, starburst headache behind my right eye I always get just after I make another round of job inquiries and just before I re-certify for unemployment, so I will conclude with this quote by James Russell Lowell:

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft.