White Man's Burden

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887

Mr. Brooks would like you to believe that the maintenance of empire is just same as the writing habits of Maya Angelou.

No.

Really.

When she was writing, Maya Angelou would get up every morning at 5:30 and have coffee at 6. At 6:30, she would go off to a hotel room she kept — a small modest room with nothing but a bed, desk, Bible, dictionary, deck of cards and bottle of sherry. She would arrive at the room at 7 a.m. and write until 12:30 p.m. or 2 o’clock

Cool.  Because who didn't love Maya Angelou!  Saw her once in-person St. Sabina's church.  She was great.  So where exactly are you going with this, Mr. Brooks?

People who lead routine, anal-retentive lives have a bad reputation in our culture. But life is paradoxical. In situation after situation, this pattern recurs: order and discipline are the prerequisites for creativity and daring.

Uh, OK.  I'm sorry the other kids at The New York Times make fun of you, but perhaps you can comfort yourself by rolling around in the piles and piles of money they shove at you.

The world needs order, too...

And here we go...

 But the larger point is that the order of global civilization, like the order in a poet’s mind, is something that has to be fought and imposed every day.

No, the larger point is that David Brooks does not understand that nations are not children.

The larger point is that David Brooks is clearly incapable of comprehending the difference between the self-discipline of poets and writers are and the externally imposed discipline of parents and jailers and empires.

The larger point is that for his entire career David Brooks has been an unabashed cheerleader for any policy of imposed order and American Empire which permits David Brooks to sit safely and comfortably behind the trigger, no matter how horrible the actual outcome of of those policies might turn out to be,

Finally and most importantly. David Brooks is wildly in favor of any form of social order which promises never to hold the loungers and idlers of Empire like David Brooks accountable for anything,

And any form of social order which actively rewards scoundrels and grifters like David Brooks is a social order which cannot be trusted.