Tuesday, January 24, 2017

David Brooks Finally Gives Up On Getting Laid Forever



As you know, many of the columns extruded by Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times over the past few years have been barely-sublimated shudders of dread and rage at being dumped by his wife, which the deeply repressed Mr. Brooks tarts up to try to look like broad (and ridiculous) social and political commentary on Our Parlous Modern Times.

Examples include:
Of course these columns are the weird, lurid refractions of the effects of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times being dumped by his wife, but what about the causes of those effects?

Well, thanks to evidence presented today by none other than Mr. David Brooks himself, it seems we have isolated at least one of those causes, which is best explained by this 41 second clip from The Simpsons:


Because, believe it or not, from his Acela corridor bachelor pad Mr. Brooks beheld the raw, tectonic power of the largest protest march in American history and came away with this --
In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues...
-- and suddenly all becomes clear.  Have your little march and throw your little tantrum, hippies, because, yeah, sure, your little, lady-parts issues are real important:
Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they were marching under the conventional structure in which the central issues were clear. As The Washington Post reported, they were “reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, action on climate change.”
But after your hysterics have died down I, David Fucking Brooks of The New York Times, will explain to you what really matters:
That is exactly what you see in the writings of the peace camp generally--not only in Chomsky's work but also in the writings of people who are actually tethered to reality. Their supposed demons--Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and company--occupy their entire field of vision, so that there is no room for analysis of anything beyond, such as what is happening in the world. For the peace camp, all foreign affairs is local; contempt for and opposition to Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, et al. is the driving passion. When they write about these figures it is with a burning zeal. But on the rare occasions when they write about Saddam, suddenly all passion drains away. Saddam is boring, but Wolfowitz tears at their soul. You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves.
Oh, Jeez, just look what I've done!  I've gone and ruined a perfectly good post by accidentally pasting in an excerpt from Mr. David Brooks' reaction the last time the Left held widespread protests against a feckless and dangerous Republican president.  Back when Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times was Mr. David Brooks of The Weekly Standard ("The Fog of Peace").

Lord, the junk that lurks in my computer's clipboard, lemme tell you.

Let's give it another shot:
My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 
Holy crap, it happened again! ("The Collapse of the Dream Palaces").

Look, kids, I am really sorry about this.  All I can tell you is that it was my administration's sincere intention to tamp down my flu long enough to write another short and perfectly forgettable column about how Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times' failed marriage has become a leitmotif for waaaay too much of the tripe he is paid insane amounts of money to churns out.  And completely unbidden, my cranky, half-dead laptop keeps urping up stuff about how Mr. David Brooks of The Weekly Standard dismissed the entire Bush-era anti-war protest movement as whiny, indulgent, re-heated 1960s culture war politics.

And now my poor, flu-befogged hippie-brain --  which knows is should be focusing on my Topic Sentence and not going on a feverish ramble though the Forgotten Past -- just cannot help hauling me back to a moment on a crisp October evening in 2010, at the Hammerschmidt Auditorium in Elmhurst Illinois.  Back to the time when Bush's Excellent Iraqi Adventure had finally been litigated by history as an unmitigated clusterfuck and it turned out the whiny, indulgent anti-war Lefties had been right all along.  Back when, rather than sack up and face the music when presented with his own fucking words, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times chose instead to flatly deny observable reality and just plain lied about what he had written back when he was Mr. David Brooks of The Weekly Standard.

Hey, you know who else does that?

Anyway, it's time to suck it up and march back from the Bad Old Days of 2003 when Mr. David Brooks of The Weekly Standard used to write incredibly condescending claptrap scolding Liberal protesters for being frivolous, self-involved narcissists who were completely missing history's moment...

...to the present day, where we find Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times writing incredibly condescending claptrap scolding Liberal protesters for being frivolous, self-involved narcissists who are completely missing history's moment (with emphasis added):

After the Women’s March

...
All the big things that were once taken for granted are now under assault: globalization, capitalism, adherence to the Constitution, the American-led global order. If you’re not engaging these issues first, you’re not going to be in the main arena of national life...

Without the discipline of party politics, social movements devolve into mere feeling, especially in our age of expressive individualism. People march and feel good and think they have accomplished something. They have a social experience with a lot of people and fool themselves into thinking they are members of a coherent and demanding community. Such movements descend to the language of mass therapy....

...identity politics is too small for this moment. On Friday, Trump offered a version of unabashed populist nationalism. On Saturday, the anti-Trump forces could have offered a red, white and blue alternative patriotism, a modern, forward-looking patriotism based on pluralism, dynamism, growth, racial and gender equality and global engagement.

Instead, the marches offered the pink hats, an anti-Trump movement built, oddly, around Planned Parenthood, and lots of signs with the word “pussy” in them...

...now progressives seem intent on doubling down on exactly what has doomed them so often. Lilla pointed out that identity politics isolates progressives from the wider country: “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.”...

The central threat is not the patriarchy. The central challenge is to rebind a functioning polity and to modernize a binding American idea...

If the anti-Trump forces are to have a chance, they have to offer a better nationalism, with diversity cohering around a central mission, building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality...

Shorter David Brooks:  Don't you dare screw with my tax cuts hippies.

Other Shorter David Brooks:  I shall fuck no more forever.  

14 comments:

dinthebeast said...

Yeah, we should all do it exactly the way you say we should so we can all be exactly like you, right? Faced with a choice of being DFB or being buggered to death by a sheep, I'd at least take a good long look at the sheep...

-Doug in Oakland

Lit3Bolt said...

If you’re not engaging these issues first, you’re not going to be in the main arena of national life...

Kind of like how if you're not engaged with women, they're not going to be in the main arena of your personal life? HEY-O!

They have a social experience with a lot of people and fool themselves into thinking they are members of a coherent and demanding community. Such movements descend to the language of mass therapy....

Like country club members, Aspen Ideas Festival-goers, and conservative columnists? HEY-OOOO!

...identity politics is too small for this moment.

You're right, David Brooks. The identity politics of divorced, hypocritical, Republican PR hack-journalists are indeed too small for this moment. We'll carry on without you, since you're too incapable or cowardly of opposing Trump, and too caught up in bashing women along with him.

Instead, the marches offered the pink hats, an anti-Trump movement built, oddly, around Planned Parenthood, and lots of signs with the word “pussy” in them...

David, remember what the anti-Obama movement was built around? The Tea Party? Do you? And let's see, what were on conservative signs? Something about calling President Obama names? Do you really want to go there and make a comparison?

a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life....

And this is in comparison to...Trump? REALLY, David Brooks? Millions of people are narcissistic to march against Donald Trump, and indifferent to reaching out? What about your own party? WHAT ABOUT YOUR PRESIDENT?

The central threat is not the patriarchy.

Then why do you need to leap to its defense, David? At least we've gotten you to simply acknowledge it exists. Baby steps, I guess.

dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality...

Just ignore everything this Jesus guy says though. He's a bit of a hippie and we don't focus on him too much except when he's born and when he dies. Ignore everything he did in between. Also, he's white and blue eyed because that's important to me for some reason.

Shorter David Brooks: "Projection now, projection tomorrow, and projection forever!"

Robt said...

Isn't it amazing how DFB measures up to his goal in life to be what his conservative ideology demand. That he has never attained admitting failure.
Miraculously, he so understands the "libs".
Well, he understand the the liberal strawman.....Which might make him a job creator.
(his job writing of the elusive liberal Sasquatch only he has seen).

This republican poliwog refuses to evolve. Finds himself caught in the polluted republican river currents were he continues to flounder downstream from reality and continues evermore to ignore the effects of the contamination..

Neo Tuxedo said...

Anyway, it's time to suck it up and march back from the Bad Old Days of 2003 when Mr. David Brooks of The Weekly Standard used to write incredibly condescending claptrap scolding Liberal protesters for being frivolous, self-involved narcissists who were completely missing history's moment...

...to the present day, where we find Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times [writing incredibly condescending claptrap] scolding Liberals protesters for being frivolous, self-involved narcissists who are completely missing history's moment


Fixed that for you, chief.

Lawrence said...

Biblical morality. Oh, David. You're going to be in a Home Depot one day and bump into Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher. And they are going to look at your shopping cart and tell you you bought the wrong matches because the sulfur is in the striking paper, and explain a few more mistakes in your cart. And they will tell you not to buy it all in one place (dummy). And you will leave, confused, only to have them chase you in the parking lot and angrily snarl at you to stay out of their territory.

Kevin Holsinger said...

Good evening, Mr. Glass.

"Brooksplain." Feel free to use it.

Be seeing you.

ad astra said...

"Fixation on DIVERSITY" = ignorance of conditions beyond on one's own "self-defined group."
I dunno, seems like a paradox to me.

Gator90 said...

I hate David Brooks and wish he was never born. On the other hand, were there no David Brooks, I would not be able to read Driftglass on David Brooks. So there's that.

Bruce.desertrat said...

This goes way, WAY beyond 'mansplaining' and is well into 'dickpicsplaining'....

Unknown said...

"On Saturday, the anti-Trump forces could have offered a red, white and blue alternative patriotism, a modern, forward-looking patriotism based on pluralism, dynamism, growth, racial and gender equality and global engagement."

I was at the march in Chicago and saw dispatches from around the country, and indeed the world.

I can posit quite emphatically that's EXACTLY what was happening.

Brooks haz a sad because no woman would EVER march with him.

Wife/partner (?) says to Brooks, "David, I'm going to the store." Goes to the march. Never returns.

- lifeat45rpm

Marion in Savannah said...

Every time Bobo extrudes one of his fetid little turds like this my first thought is always "I can't WAIT to see what Driftglass is going to do with this." And you never let me down.

I know that you don't usually consider his output, but Frank Bruni left another such pile in the Times today. Us ladeez ain't supposed to do no cursin'...

Thanks for what you do — I always read, but almost never comment. Keep on keeping on!

Unknown said...

"On Saturday, the anti-Trump forces could have offered a red, white and blue alternative patriotism, a modern, forward-looking patriotism based on pluralism, dynamism, growth, racial and gender equality and global engagement."

I was at the march in Chicago and saw dispatches from around the country, and indeed the world.

I can posit quite emphatically that's EXACTLY what was happening.

Brooks haz a sad because no woman would EVER march with him.

Wife/partner (?) says to Brooks, "David, I'm going to the store." Goes to the march. Never returns.

- lifeat45rpm

Fritz Strand said...

Perhaps he's getting worst because not getting any (non professional action) already. It can get mighty lonely at the Chevy Chase Country Club.

Johnny Fever said...

"On Saturday, the anti-Trump forces could have offered ... a modern, forward-looking patriotism based on pluralism, dynamism, growth, racial and gender equality and global engagement."

here I was thinking that a massive group of women (and men) from every corner of the country, and socio-economic background, religion and race pressing for (in part) for gender equality, and forward thinking policies that would benefit (at worst "just") 50% of the population was exactly that.... but Brooks doesn't think so... cause... you know... bitches. amirite?