David Brooks: Super Fanaticism Defeater Guy

Because honestly, in all the wide world, who better to talk to today's youth about the Fanaticism -- 

How to Engage a Fanatic

-- than a man who lives a cloistered wealthy suburban Washington D.C. life of extreme privilege, writes Beltway Both Siderism Comfort Food columns for a living and hires staff to read internet comments because reading them himself it too psychologically scarring? (From Wonkette)

David Brooks Too Delicate To Read Internet Comments

The prompting for Mr. Brooks column seems to be that, for the third time in his life, someone was unkind to Mr. Brooks in public:

First, I was at a Washington Nationals game when a Trump supporter in the row in front of me unleashed a 10-minute profanity-strewn tirade at me, my wife and son.

The world will not soon forget back in 2014 when Mr. Brooks bravely recounted the harrowing details of the first and second time in his entire life he met with rude public prose:

But on the street, Brooks rarely hears from haters. "I think in my whole life I've had two people come up and be nasty to me," Brooks said. "Once I was at the Museum of Modern Art and this astoundingly good-looking woman came up to me and said, 'I hate you.'"

Spoken like a man who has never been on a city bus a day in his life.

Anyhoo...

What does Mr. Brooks recommend as a curative for this national scourge of half-drunk Republicans yelling at David Brooks at baseball games? 

Love, of course.  Saccharine, limitless oceans of love which, according to Mr. Brooks, those of us on the receiving end of 30 years of lies, sadism and insanity from the Republican party should dole out to those madmen and sadists and bigots and imbecile who are terrorizing us and inflicting lasting damage on our country.

This, according to Mr. Brooks, we should do because otherwise we will all become terrible people:

You engage fanaticism with love, first, for your own sake. If you succumb to the natural temptation to greet this anger with your own anger, you’ll just spend your days consumed by bitterness and revenge. You’ll be a worse person in all ways.

In Mr. Brooks' telling of history, fascism was defeated with hugs, and the Confederacy was destroyed with trust falls.  Because Mr. Brooks -- whose only academic credential in the undergraduate degree in history he scammed from one of America's most prestigious universities -- is once again just full of happy horseshit about how he pretends the world works, and how he wishes history were unfolding.

For example, Mr. Brooks believes that if we (meaning us Libtards, because this shit is always on us) would just listen even more compassionately to the miscreants and bigots who make up the base of his Republican party then everything might take a sharp turn back to civility:

If you make these people feel heard, maybe in some small way you’ll address the emotional bile that is at the root of their political posture.

Yeah.  We tried that.  Repeatedly.  The most recent attempt was called the Obama Administration.  And their reaction to the election of a calm, decent, honorable, rational, scandal-free family-man who sincerely wanted to make their lives better and who actually listened to their grievances...

...was to run in circles with their hair on fire for eight years screaming about the Kenyan Commie Usurper who was trying to take their guns away and sell them out to the Muslim Brotherhood.

And then they elected a lying, racist, sexual predator who gets his "news" from the same toxic Fox News/Hate Radio dumpster from which they get theirs.

So fuck that.  We're past that.  We're way past that.

And by the way, is Mr. Brooks ever left Villa Straylight and actually walked among the hoi polloi he would very quickly notice that "feeling heard" is not a problem with these people.  In fact, quite the opposite is true: you can drive from sea to shining sea in this country and never hear anything but their ludicrous opinions pouring out of the radio and bombasting at you from Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting telescreens.  Hell, my local paper syndicates George Will, Michael Gerson, Hugh Hewitt and Ann Fucking Coulter because it is so terribly important that the racist opinions of brain-dead acolytes of Ann Fucking Coulter be pandered to.   There is a sprawling, multi-billion dollar, vertically-integrated political-media behemoth in this country that does nothing but listen to every little mumbling word these meatheads have to say on every subject...

...and then fawningly repeats it all back to them as gospel.

So, again, fuck that and let us return to Mr. Brooks' inappropriate groping of American history:

...the best abolitionists restrained their natural hatred of slaveholders because they thought the reform of manners and the abolition of slavery were part of the same cause — to restore the dignity of every human being.

But to actually end slavery, President Lincoln had to burn the Confederacy to the ground, didn't he? And yet even after their cause was lost and their cities and armies destroyed, the leaders of the Confederacy were still playing every angle to keep their obscene institution up and running.

And the minute the North took its boot off the South's throat, they were right back to their old depravities, which they kept intact for another century.  Their fanaticism was not "electron-thin".  It was and is bone-deep, and passed down from generation to generation like a family heirloom.

Which bring us into the realm of more recent history, which Mr. Brooks also shamelessly drop-kicks into fantasy land:

You don’t have to like someone to love him. All you have to do is try to imitate Martin Luther King, who thrust his love into his enemies’ hearts in a way that was aggressive, remorseless and destabilizing.

Yes, but consider the means by which Dr. King's "thrust his love into his enemies’ hearts".

Dr. King did it be fearlessly naming and shaming those enemies with clarity and specificity even as those enemies imprisoned him over and over again (Chapter 18: Letter from a Birmingham Jail) --

You would be living in a city where brutality directed against Negroes was an unquestioned and unchallenged reality. One of the city commissioners, a member of the body that ruled municipal affairs, would be Eugene "Bull" Connor, a racist who prided himself on knowing how to handle the Negro and keep him in his "place." As commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, entrenched for many years in a key position in the Birmingham power structure, displayed as much contempt for the rights of the Negro as he did defiance for the authority of the federal government.

-- something which Mr. Brooks would find inconceivable for fear of possibly being yelled at by some drunk rando at some point in the future.

Dr. King did it by using even his most public platform and most soaring rhetoric to lay the blame for the system which oppressed his people squarely where it belonged --

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification”...

-- something which Mr. Brooks has spent his entire career assiduously avoiding.

And most importantly, Dr. King did it by organizing and marching and boycotting and being thrown in prison over and over again in order to bring relentless political pressure to bear on the system until the system cracked:

Mr. Brooks, on the other hand, thinks that sort of thing is silly and self-indulgent --

-- from the Huffington Post, Jan 24, 2017:

In a column published Tuesday, The New York Times’ David Brooks tries to argue that the women and men who marched Saturday were wasting their time on what he dismisses as “mass therapy” and ineffective “identity politics.”

His rationale is basically: Oh, girls with their silly pink hats and trifling concerns, please stop; I know what’s best. Leave this stuff to the men in the political parties.

This is how he puts it: “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. The definition of America is up for grabs. Our fundamental institutions have been exposed as shockingly hollow. But the marches couldn’t escape the language and tropes of identity politics.”

This is because Mr. Brooks is a creature of the establishment -- a creature of extreme privilege and quivering cowardice.  And as such, he wouldn't mind if our politics got better as long as no one raises his taxes, raises their voice or raises a fist in protest.

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