David Brooks' Excellent Olympic Adventure

Regular readers know Mr. David Brooks of "The New York Times" as a Conservative hack who makes a princely living plying his trade in the pages of America's Newspaper of Record.  This is not opinion or speculation: this is a fact, as observable and replicable as any high school chem lab endothermic demonstration showing what happens when you mix lemon juice and sodium bicarbonate.

People who only brush up against his writing occasionally in the New York Times or catch him on NPR of "Meet the Press" often make the mistake of believing that Mr. Brooks is primarily America's most ubiquitous and revered Conservative commentator or pundit, but he is not.  Mr. Brooks is primarily fiction writer.  Specifically, a genre writer who cranks out small, bad works of Conservative flash fiction every week.

Like a lot of bad fiction writers, Mr. Brooks kills of whatever tiny flicker of originality his little parables might otherwise have had by stuffing them with Vital Messages of Moral Importance which are enacted on the page by the same, tired, two-dimensional cast of cutout-characters --  sinister hippies, virtuous, besieged capitalists and the lonely Reasonable Centrist -- over and over again. Mr. Brooks chooses paid hackery over honest writing and, in doing so, sells "his birthright for a pot of message", as the saying goes.

Again, none of this is contested critical territory and none of it will cause the slightest crease in the fortress wall of interlocking Beltway media interests which conspires to protect useful tools like Mr. Brooks from the brutal judgment of a genuinely free and fair marketplace of ideas.  Instead I thought it would be interesting in an academic sort of way to whip up a little essay on the subject of hackery itself by focusing on one of it's central characteristics:. the moral pliability of the hack writer.  I'm not talking about changing one's style or subject matter based on the genre one is working, which is something every writer does, but instead transmuting one's stated first principles based on the ideological framework of whoever is paying his bills this week.

Once upon a time, Mr. Brooks was employed as button man at Bloody Bill Kristol's wingnut chop-shop, "The Weekly Standard".  While there, Mr. Brooks was encouraged to bare his partisan fangs as much as he liked: to range as far and wide as he wished in the sungle-minded pursuit of slandering Liberals and telling Conservatives comforting fairy tales . This is where and how he made his bones and most of it still sits there, on public display, to this day.

But then two things happened.

First, Mr. Brooks left that job for a better one; being Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Junior's in-house Conservative sock puppet. However, as the Times' catastrophic one-year test-drive of Bloody Bill Kristol demonstrated, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Junior's tolerance for raw, wingnut projectile-bile-vomiting is not as high as, say, "The Weekly Standard" -- an editorial standard which obliged Mr. Brooks to dip his wingnut turds in Paco Rabanne if he wanted to stay on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Junior's payroll.

Second, and more importantly the Conservative movement for which Mr. Brooks had stooged so enthusiastically his entire adult life publicly and spectacularly shit the bed in every way conceivable.  As I wrote in 2005:

...the Moderates have lived to become everything they detest. Every word of clucking reproach they yelped in snickering glee during the Clinton Age has gotten caught up in the Bush Treason Cyclotron, sped up to light-speed, and is now coming screaming back at them like a sack of radioactive axe-heads.  

Their worst nightmare is in the process of coming true, big as a mountain in stilettos, carrying a sledgehammer in one hand and a 40-foot-long straight razor in the other, and there is not shit all they can do about it. Because everything they believed or touted or crowed about or tried to rub in our faces is in the process of coming down around their ears. 

Every. Single. Thing.

Every justification that they were fed about their Great Ay-rab Safari is now spilling out into the sunlight and can clearly be seen -- even from High Earth Orbit -- to have been a willful lie.  

The leaders who swore to them it was holy and justified to scream their lungs bloody in ecstasy at the thought of their two dearest fantasies -- piles of dead brown people and Low! Low! Gas prices -- coming to pass in One Glorious War are outed as a Confederacy of traitors and liars and fools. 

Their pet media, nothing but perambulating pustules, refilled with hate and mendacity every night by White House messengers.

That they have never been anything to the GOP but chumps: little sacs of cash and votes and “mandate” to be squeezed dry with impunity, because Moderates are basically beat-down whores who will always go wriggling back to their abusers.

But now it’s not one thing that’s melting down; it’s everything. The serial cons that have kept the grubby Mods goggle-eyed and heroin-loyal are all falling apart simultaneously and there’s nothing but decibels left in the Shiny Object Bag to keep them from noticing the awful truth.

That their Leaders are traitors.

Their heroes are liars.

Their dogma is a joke.

Their President is a feeble-minded creep who has fucked up everything he has ever touched.

It’s as if their mothers suddenly ripped of rubber masks and have shown themselves to be the spree killers they’ve always been.

How terrifying that must be. I mean, I’m wrong about a lot of stuff...but everything?  

Every God Damned Thing?  

And worse – so very much worse – not only were they utterly wrong about everyfuckingthing, but the Evil Liberals were right all along. 

The big picture. The fussy details. The arithmetic. The real, racist heart of the GOP. The various myriad, casual betrayals by the Bush White House.

All of it.

The Liberals were right, and the Moderates had been given no fewer than 30 years of warning that this is precisely where their idiocy would land us. 

I can’t even imagine how it must feel to know at some level that your whole world is a farce, and your whole belief system is a Ponsi Scheme run on you by thugs who never gave a shit about you, or your family or your dearest peon dreams. 

Very suddenly it stopped being a sellers' market for full-throated defenders Paul Wolfowitz, Halliburton, Republican family values and Reaganomics. Very suddenly "Bloody Bill Kristol's BFF" stopped being something you wanted in 20-point, boldface, RailRoad font at the top of your resume.  And very suddenly, Mr. Brooks burned his "Weekly Standard" style book sand printed at the speed of money for the sheltering bower of every Conservative scoundrel's last refuge: Centrism.  That ideological whorehouse which Mr. Brooks dismissed during his heady Bill Kristol days as unserious, fuzzy-headed, mostly-Leftist nonsense --

THE LAND BEYOND LEFT AND RIGHT

OCT 2, 1995

... But on the second day in this land, clouds appear. Questions nag. For example, why is it always Democrats who argue that labels don't matter anymore? When Oliver North called him a liberal, Mario Cuomo protested, " don't like your labels. I don't buy shoes that way." Barbara Mikulski wrote in the Washington Post that the words liberal and conservative "have become cliches . . . with little meaning." A cynic might conclude that what these liberals are really trying to move beyond is the number 43 -- the percentage of Americans who vote for liberal presidential candidates.

But even among the intellectuals, Beyondists are likely to have liberal pedigrees. Sometimes they seem loosely akin to the non-aligned bloc in the Cold War, loudly nonaligned, yet somehow usually siding with one side. ...

Conservatives, by contrast, seem to be quite happy with the conservative label. They embrace it. It seems coherent and meaningful to them. ... 

And it is not only that the Beyondists are unable to mobilize political power ; intellectually, their best ideas are perpetually just over the horizon. What's needed, they say, is that we begin a process of rethinking. They are great at beginnings. The problem is that unless they reach a compelling conclusion, they remain more defined by their desire to stay in The Land Beyond than by their ability to actually arrive at something else.

Things are often irreconcilable; that is a sad reality. Liberals promote one set of virtues, a lot of them having to do with compassion. Conservatives promote another set of virtues, a lot of them having to do with achievement. And the champions of these two "ideologies" spend their time struggling to give greater weight to their own constellation of virtues. The labels "liberal" and "conservative" have survived at least a half century of charges that they are obsolete. They have done so because they represent two worldviews that are not compatible.

Not every issue in America is polarized -- most Americans occupy a middle ground on abortion and racial matters, and foreign policy disputes are for the moment unformed -- but the struggle between left and right reflects something profound. It isn't over how to solve a plumbing problem. It's a long competition between virtues.

And it is a healthy competition. Some Soviets, and some Western neoconservatives such as Jean-Francois Revel, thought that the democracies would lose the Cold War because they were always tearing themselves apart with internal disputes between right and left. But as it transpired, these internal disputes allowed the West to remain dynamic and creative. Another species may think more acutely in an atmosphere of friendship and cooperation, but for most people, a good motivation to argue well is to humiliate the sons of bitches on the other side.

Debates are not dominated by the loosely tethered individuals who declare themselves above the partisan fray. They are dominated by people who are self-conscious about their premises and firm in their conclusions, who nail their theses to a door.

Such people don't think about the center but force the center to move toward them...

The Beyondists are above the compromise that membership in a movement entails, as they are beyond partisan politics. In short they are above the fray. At their worst, they seem like Kevin Phillips -- solitary complainers who inveigh against a world that will not live up to their standards. At their best they are acute observers, but observers only...

-- and over which he now glibly presides as both Madam and Chief Procurer.

And so, cut off  from his capacity to make a living advancing the Conservative cause by producing inferior Conservative fiction about Conservatism being Good and Liberalism being Bad, Mr. Brooks' now makes his living advancing the Conservative cause by producing relentlessly inferior Centrist fiction in which every single issue, real or imagined, from child abuse to mass murder, is A) always equally the fault of two imaginary opposing sides between which stands the Reasonable Mr. Brooks, or B) caused by imaginary hippies destroying American Virtue in the 1960s, or C) all of the above.

Fortunately for future historians who will look back on the life and times of David Brooks and wonder WTF kind of candy-ass madhouse of a culture would raise this trifling huckster up into its pantheon of public intellectuals, there exists a perfect, one-to-one case where Mr. Brooks' public opinions of exactly the same event can be clinically observed during both his Bill Kristol/Conservative fiction-writing period and his Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Junior/Centrist fiction-writing period.

The subject is the Olympics -- specifically the contrast between the games themselves and their opening ceremonies.

Now that Mr. Brooks' gets paid by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Junior to extrude Centrist glop, this is is how Mr. Brooks describes the Olympics.

First, he creates imaginary conflicts where none exist:

The Olympic Contradiction
Published: July 26, 2012

...

The opening ceremony represents one side of the Olympic movement. They are a lavish celebration of the cooperative virtues: unity, friendship, equality, compassion and care. In Friday’s ceremony, there’ll be musical tributes to the global community and the Olympic spirit. There will be Pepsi commercial-type images of the people from different backgrounds joyfully coming together. There will be pious speeches about our common humanity and universal ideals. 

And there will be a lot of dancing. Because we’re social, semi-herdlike creatures, we take a primordial pleasure in the sight of a large number of people moving in unison. Dance is physical, like sports, but, in many ways, it is the opposite of sports. In dance, the purpose is to blend with and mirror each other; in sport, the purpose is to come out ahead. Dancers perform for the audience and offer a gift of emotion; athletes respond to one another and the spectators are just there to witness and cheer. 

Dancers, especially at the opening ceremony, smile in warmth and friendship. No true sport is ever done smiling (this is the problem with figure skating and competitive cheerleading).

After the opening ceremony is over, the Olympics turn into a celebration of the competitive virtues: tenacity, courage, excellence, supremacy, discipline and conflict.

... 

If the opening ceremony is win-win, most of the rest of the games are win-lose. If the opening ceremony mimics peace, the competitions mimic warfare. It’s not about the brotherhood of humankind. It’s about making sure our country beats the Chinese in the medal chart.

...

Then -- for those who need their horses beaten to death with Vital Messages of Moral Importance -- Mr. Brooks explains why Centrism is always-fucking-always the right course of action...

In sum, the Olympic Games appeal both to our desire for fellowship and our desire for status, to the dreams of community and also supremacy. And, of course, these desires are in tension. But the world is, too. The world isn’t a jigsaw puzzle that fits neatly and logically together. It’s a system of clashing waves that can never be fully reconciled.

The enduring popularity of the Olympics teach the lesson that if you find yourself caught between two competing impulses, you don’t always need to choose between them. You can go for both simultaneously. A single institution can celebrate charitable compassion and military toughness. A three-week festival can be crassly commercial, but also strangely moving.

...and why you needn't bother to ask him about  the shit he wrote back when Bill Kristol was paying his mortgage, because talking out of both sides of one's ass is not hackery or hypocrisy at all, but a mark of special intellectual grace.  

Like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Lincoln even!

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the mark of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time. But it’s not really the mark of genius, just the mark of anybody who functions well in the world. It’s the mark of any institution that lasts. 

The world, unfortunately, has too many monomaniacs — people who pick one side of any creative tension and wish the other would just go away. Some parents and teachers like the cooperative virtues and distrust the competitive ones, so, laughably, they tell their kids that they are going to play sports but nobody is going to keep score.

Politics has become a contest of monomaniacs. One faction champions austerity while another champions growth. One party becomes the party of economic security and the other becomes the party of creative destruction.

The right course is usually to push hard in both directions, to be a house creatively divided against itself, to thrive amid the contradictions. The Olympics are great, but they are not coherent.

But of course no matter how assiduously his colleagues conspire to pretend that David Brooks 1.0 never existed, the internet's memory is long and deep, and Mr. Brooks' writing during his "Weekly Standard" days will continue remain on public display forever, for anyone who is interested.  (Which, I am more and more convinced, is only me :-)

Here, then, are Mr. Brooks' public reflections from the Year of Our Lord 2002 on how our precious National Greatness fluids have been polluted by the degenerate Commie hoax that is the Olympics' opening ceremonies.  

Or something.

And no, I am not kidding.

Olympic Farce

Once upon a time, the Olympics were about patriotism and the celebration of virtue. Now they're a multi-culti festival.

11:01 PM, FEB 7, 2002 • BY DAVID BROOKS

...

We are about to enter the Olympic season, and there are going to be a bunch of obnoxious stories about the overbearing patriotism of the host Americans. My point is first that all nations are overbearingly patriotic come Olympics time. And all nations should be. Patriotism, the love of something larger than oneself, is one of the noblest passions known to man.

But there has been an attempt over the past few years to hijack the Olympic spirit, to minimize national pride and turn the events into a UNICEF-style celebration of global harmony and cooperation. The organizers are trying to turn the Olympics from a series of sporting contests into a multinational festival.

Which is a total perversion. The Olympics are meant to celebrate honorable rivalry and maximum skill, perseverance and toughness. The Olympic events, after all, are won by people who are ferociously competitive....

Yet there is a certain sort of person who chokes on the stark inequality that is inherent in competition--the fact that some are better than others. That sort of person only knows how to celebrate cooperation.

So now we have a whole propaganda machine built up to spread the distortion that the Olympics exist to bring people from all over the world together to enjoy togetherness--when the reality is that the Olympics are there to bring people from all over the world together so we can see who is best.

The propaganda machine reaches its climax during the only two ludicrous moments of the Olympic games, the opening and closing ceremonies. These ceremonies were fine when their major feature was the parade of nations. You could see the teams, the diversity of nations and cultures, the spirit of friendly but determined competition that is supposed to dominate the games. But over the years this parade has taken a back seat to the great propaganda show, often featuring cute children, multicultural cliches, and Up With People-style dance routines. The whole thing is designed to spread the message that we are all just one great big loving human family.

This is true on an abstract level--we do all share a common humanity--but in practice it's just sentimental goo. And we know it is sentimental goo because it is the kind of effortless emotion that is completely detached from real life situations and difficulties. What is happening to the Olympics globally is a large scale version of what happened to the Olympics in the Communist world during the Cold War.

Communism is predicated on this phony ethos built around equality, worker solidarity, and cooperation. Communists were not allowed to acknowledge any ethos that celebrated and thus regulated individual striving and accomplishment. So when Communist officials found themselves competing with the rest of the world, they cheated on a massive scale, pumping their athletes full of steroids, lying to their own athletes. Their official religion had nothing to do with the actual character tests they were likely to face. They had no moral system that had anything to do with reality. So, untethered, they behaved disgracefully.

As the official ideology of the games has emphasized cooperation and goo, the standards of sportsmanship have actually declined.

David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Bwahahaha!

You know, as a Liberal I genuinely believe in the possibility of salvation and atonement. I believe that people who have screwed up in some big and important way can redeem themselves, but only after some period of serious reflection spent away in the wilderness far from the scene of the crime wandering. Only after that "searching and fearless moral inventory" at the heart of every 12-step program.

But because any acknowledgement that Liberals were right all along would be professionally fatal, Mr. Brooks has done none of these things.  Instead, like so many of his Conservative fellow travelers, Mr. Brooks has merely swapped one gravy train for another; merely upgraded his public profile by agreeing to wear a Centrist velvet glove over his partisan iron fist.  

And it worked great! (from Glenn Greenwald writing about how being wrong about everything actually gets people like Mr. Brooks promoted):

...
All of this would be a fascinating study for historians if the people responsible were figures of the past. But they're not. They're the opposite. The same people shaping our debates now are the same ones who did all of that, and they haven't changed at all.

They're doing the same things now that they did then.

When you go read what they said back then, that's what makes it so remarkable and noteworthy. David Brooks got promoted within our establishment commentariat to The New York Times after (one might say: because of) the ignorant bile and amoral idiocy he continuously spewed while at The Weekly Standard. According to National Journal's recently convened "panel of Congressional and Political Insiders," Brooks is now the commentator who "who most help[s] to shape their own opinion or worldview" -- second only to Tom "Suck On This" Friedman. Charles Krauthammer came in third.

Ponder that for a minute.

Of course, despite his very best efforts to avoid any venue where any questions about his skeevy past might get raised, on rare occasions Mr. Brooks finds himself accidentally caught in the gigantic vortex created between what he said then and what he is saying now.

And like so many of his Conservative fellow travelers, he solves the problem of his horribly inconvenient history by simply lying about it (from me in October of 2010):

All The Lies That Are His Life 

...

At Elmhurst College's storied Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel, New York Times columnist David Brooks gave a keynote address on the works of the late American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the meaning his teachings in modern life.

It was a fine night out, except for the bits where David Brooks utterly betrayed Niebuhr's most basic teachings by manifestly lying about his own horribly inconvenient past statements and beliefs (I never said what I said) and repeatedly drawing manifestly false equivalences between Left and Right positions and policies (asserting, for example, that while the invasion of Iraq may have been problematic, it was a largely a noble and well-intentioned effort that was poorly executed. Just like the Stimulus Package! Which, Bobo asserted, had also proven to be a failure because it was based on a similarly false model of human nature.)

Of course, if I had publicly shit myself as badly and repeatedly as David Brooks has over the years, I'd be kinda desperate not to have it publicly recalled and recounted either, which is why Beltway pundits and journalists are such fetishists about their Villager manners and rituals, and why they generally stick with their own species and rarely wander off into the weeds: out here in the Real World, people are liable to ask all kinds of rude, impertinent questions.

So why should anyone care?

Because standing at the pulpit of a church, invoking the name of Reinhold Niebuhr, America's leading Conservative public intellectual calmly lied about some things that are really important.

Because over the last 10 years, Cruel Reality has not merely demonstrated the fatuous dishonesty of the stereotypes which David Brooks has used to beat up Those Crazy America-hating Leftists, but it has let him lived long enough to see every single one of his dire observations and hysterical predictions about the insularity and irrationality of the Imaginary Hippie Left that lives under his bed instead take root in his own back yard and metastasize into the monstrous freak-show of the Actual Palin/ Beck/ Limbaugh/ Angle/ O'Donnell/ Rand/ Armey/ Koch Family/ FoxPAC Right.

...

Because that's what Conservative hacks do.