Famous Beltway Fairy Tale Curator Would Like Better Fairy Tales Please

As one infamous Libtard freebooting blogger once noted:

...Mr. Brooks only really has four very dull tools in his op-ed toolbox:  lying about the past, burying the unhappy present under a pile of false equivalence, making up pleasing fairy tales about the bright future that is just around the corner, and pseudo-rabbinical argle bargle about Values and Community and Faith, about which Mr. Brooks may well be sincere, but which are wildly at odds with everything his Republican party has been saying and doing for the last 40 years.

And today, from within the stale ideological coffin where he assembles his columns, you can once again hear the clank and thud of each of the tools of Mr. Brooks' dishonest trade.

Pseudo-Rabbinical Argle-Bargle:

One of the things we’ve lost in this country is our story. It is the narrative that unites us around a common multigenerational project, that gives an overarching sense of meaning and purpose to our history.

For most of the past 400 years, Americans did have an overarching story. It was the Exodus story. The Puritans came to this continent and felt they were escaping the bondage of their Egypt and building a new Jerusalem.

The Exodus story has six acts...

False equivalence:

Today’s students get steeped in American tales of genocide, slavery, oppression and segregation. American history is taught less as a progressively realized grand narrative and more as a series of power conflicts between oppressor and oppressed.

The academic left pushed this reinterpretation, but as usual the extreme right ended up claiming the spoils. The people Gorski calls radical secularists expunged biblical categories and patriotic celebrations from schools. The voters revolted and elected the people Gorski calls the religious nationalists to the White House...

The market for Making Up Pleasing Fairy Tales About The Bright Future has taken a helluva hit since the election of President Stupid but Mr. Brooks still slips in a little rah-rah for his vision of tomorrow:

It should be possible to revive the Exodus template, to see Americans as a single people trekking through a landscape of broken institutions. 

But when it comes to the task of dismantling today's exercise in Brooksian' Lying About The Past, today I gratefully hand the microphone over to Mr. Peter Laarman, reprinted here in LA Progressive:

David Brooks Gets Lost in a Lily-White History

...Brooks’s overall congeniality makes it easy to forget that he is consistently wrong about the nature of the still-unfolding economic crisis, which he (in neoliberal fashion) thinks is mainly about economic losers needing to acquire some discipline and bootstrap themselves to success.

And Brooks can be spectacularly wrong about other things, as he has just demonstrated in an unbelievably fatuous column on the “Unifying American Story,” which he frames as a story of exodus and covenant. Brooks rings all the changes on this theme, from the Puritans’ righteous “errand into the wilderness,” to the Founders’ identification with the oppressed Israelites, to the stated wish of Frederick Douglass to be included in the American destiny, and, finally, to the waves of immigrants seeking to make their own exodus from oppressive cultures elsewhere.

...

Brooks cites this story’s “many virtues as a national organizing myth,” including the way it “welcomes in each group.” He concludes by blaming lefty academics for trashing the national story and portraying U.S. history as “a series of power conflicts between oppressor and oppressed.”

Wow, just wow...

With example after example, Mr. Laarman then efficiently dispatches the predicate on which Mr. Brooks' entire column is based before concluded that:

...

Brooks ends his column with a wistful plea for a new Moses to come along to revive the Exodus template and “tell us what our goal is.”

My plea is that someone will come along and tell Brooks what our actual history is – and how his kind of misty-eyed mythologizing gets in the way of seeing it clearly.

Lord knows I've tried, Mr, Laarman.  Year after years after year.  But "actual history" is the Beltway pundit's Kryptonite: they seal it in another layer of lead and bury it even deeper every time it threatens to leak out and sap them of their powers.

One more observation.  

Mr. Brooks concludes that:

What’s needed is an act of imagination, somebody who can tell us what our goal is, and offer an ideal vision of what the country and the world should be.

Yep.

And guess what?  We actually we had such a person. And he was actually president for eight years! 

So yay for us!

Unfortunately, instead of joining President Obama as a genuinely loyal opposition dedicated to rebuilding our broken institutions, Mr. Brooks'  party chose to spend every fucking minute of those eight years working tirelessly to slander him, cripple him, obstruct him and obliterate his legacy, and fuuuuuck the good of the country.    

Because as Brother Charlie Pierce notes, even now, raving, unhinged hatred of the first black president remains the most powerful animating principle of the Party of Lincoln.  

This Is About Destroying the Presidency of Barack Obama

Digesting the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Neil Gorsuch.

Which Mr. David Brooks might have noticed if his ongoing search for the "The Unifying American Story" ever took him anywhere but straight up his own ass.