So David Brooks wrote a stupid column about pot.
A remarkably stupid column about pot.
Mr. Brooks then followed his column up with some remarkably stupid (but much-less-remarked-upon) thoughts during his weekly face-time on PBS:
But crimes such as Mr. Brooks' -- who already comes to the table with an extensive rap sheet filled with serial assaults on good writing, history, causality and common sense -- can only occur when motive, method and opportunity are all in alignment.DAVID BROOKS: Right. Well, I think we probably will see it decriminalized. I'm not sure we will see it legalized. I am not super in favor of all the arrests that go on for people using marijuana.But I -- we will see how Colorado -- Colorado works out. It is a good future of our system. It's an experiment. We will figure out how it works. I have to say, I'm skeptical of it and I am dubious and I wouldn't have supported it for a couple of reasons.
"Method" is easy to figure out. Mr. Brooks is a professional repressed, ingrown twat and teller of Conservative fairy tales who, for reasons the Sulzberger family has declined to share with us mortals, has been given a chuck of the most valuable journalistic real estate in America's newspaper of record.
"Opportunity" is also easy to figure out. As one of America's most famous and ubiquitous repressed, ingrown twats and teller of Conservative fairy tales, Mr. Brooks has a long history of being horribly wrong about almost everything. And yet despite his epic record of public bed-shitting, for reasons the Sulzberger family continues to decline to share with us peons, Mr. Brooks has been able to retain his chuck of the most valuable journalistic real estate in America's newspaper of record. Since the Sulzberger family and the rest of his Beltway colleagues have made it perfectly clear that Mr. Brooks will never, ever suffer any consequences for saying remarkably stupid things in public, why in the world would he refrain from saying remarkably stupid things about pot?
So finally we come to Mr. Brooks' "Motive" which, as it turns out is the easiest of all three criminal elements to understand.
In Mr. Brooks' Conservative lexicon, "pot" is just a proxy for "hippie" and according to his May, 18, 2010 New York Times editorial, this is Mr. Brooks' opinion of hippies:
The crime wave killed off the hippie movement. The hippies celebrated disorder, mayhem and the whole Dionysian personal agenda. By the 1970s, the menacing results of that agenda were all around.Conservatism in virtually incomprehensible to a normal person unless you understand it as is a study in narcotic dependence: an entire population that could not make it through the day without increasingly massive doses of a toxic dogma which holds that poor people are poor because they are lazy and morally defective, and Liberals are depraved, hedonistic Commies bent on wrecking Murrica.
And as I pointed out at the time ("The Plutocrat's Beat Poet"), Mr. Brooks is really nothing more or less than a high-end dealer working the up-scale end of that market.
* For those of you who have no idea what the title of this post refers to:
7 comments:
Damn....buds these days look like something out of "The Day of the Triffids".
...and I still say there is some former hippy chick out there who is responsible for inflicting Bobo on us all, when she laughed at his awkward advances...
"horribly wrong about almost everything"
Do we really need the "almost"? It's possible that he might get his own name correct if asked, but he's probably never been asked that question since it wouldn't be softball enough.
Brooks is not even old enough to have been scarred by the 60s, as George Will was. But the torch has been passed, to even younger conservatives like Jonah Goldberg.
I confess I am a little disappointed in your column. Brooks has crossed a line here, in my opinion; his blithely suggesting that people be imprisoned so we can "nurture a moral ecology", his complete failure to acknowledge what effect this "nurturing" would have had on him, his tacit assumption that his kind can overcome it but "other" people apparently need help (and we all know what he means by "other"), his sheer disregard for the actual facts on the ground, render this (IMHO) to be the worst column ever written in the history of the world.
I realize there is only so much outrage one person can feel in a lifetime, and Brooks has used virtually all of it, but I really feel this is the turning point. This column is the perfect example of white upper-class ignorance of white upper-class policy: this is "Let them eat cake" for the 21st century.
So: more flame, please. Much, much more.
MCPlanck skrev:
I really feel this is the turning point.
I'm sure a lot of people felt that about the revelation that, when George Fwill wrote columns praising Reagan's campaign speeches, he was in danger of dislocating his arm by patting himself on the back, and that even the possibility of his having worked from the stolen Carter campaign briefing books* should have been the icing on the shit twinkie. And yet, thirty years later give or take a fast month, he continues to squat on Even the Liberal Washington Post's editorial page and extrude columns into our eyes, because pointing out that he has been demonstrably, horribly wrong, his entire career, about everything that wasn't baseball and some things that were, would constitute aid and comfort to the International Communist Conspiracy and, more importantly, make the Baby Jesus cry. Because democracy, whiskey and sexy.
That, in my opinion, is why the Historicals and Fictionals alike consider the Literals laughable, and why I consider "In Search of Historic Bobo" overly optimistic. Because any society that can produce an actual David Brooks needs a better word for "hilariously doomed". Unless Historicals, Fictionals and Literals are all writing from much further in the future than DG let on, or from some country with enough of a Strategic Sanity Reserve to not be dragged down by our final national collapse**, trying desperately to figure out, not why American went crazy, but why we didn't go sane again once 1989 came and the danger that drove us crazy was over.
(* That he's never actually been proven to have done so, and probably never will, is an immutable fact I am stating for the record. It does not mean conceding his innocence is what's taking place here.
** "That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back door into the fields." -- the Old Tory, The Colour Out of Space)
History repeats itself; Brooks is merely our Leni Rifenstahl, producing feel-good propaganda for the police state.
Of course Leni had the excuse of an actual homicidal police state; Brooks doesn't have that yet, but he's willing bow and scrape to the one he dreams about.
I was just hoping for some cathartic release from DG over this greatest and final betrayal, but of course DG has nothing more to say, having long ago identified Brooks as the dead, rotting canary under whom some clever management type has placed a tape-recording of singing.
I knew when I read David Brooks column that it would inspire you to an awesome diatribe.
I am not disappointed.
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