David Brooks: The Crepes of Wrath

In all this wide, bountiful, fatally-conflicted nation -- from the mountains to the prairies and the whole rest of that song -- there is obviously no one who can speak with more hard-won authority about the beating heart and secret dreams of America's working class than...

...David Fucking Brooks.

What the Working Class Is Still Trying to Tell Us
And how we can make a difference in their lives.

By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist

Oh my sweet and fluffy Lord.

Therein follows a turgid, 800-word book report on someone else's work.  It reads like the script for Sullivan's Travels if Sullivan's Travels had been written by a callow, privileged, out-of-touch goof instead of being a brutal satire of a callow, privileged, out-of-touch goof who wants to make Oh Brother Where Art Thou without know the first damn thing about suffering or hard work or human nature.

If you'd like to read Mr. Brooks' book report on The Working Man, here's the link and have at it.

As for me, I will content myself be re-imagining Tom Joad's speech from The Grapes of Wrath  rewritten by David Fucking Brooks for our parlous modern age:

I'll be all around on teevee. I'll be everywhere. PBS. NPR.  NY Times.  TED Talks.  Meet the Press.  Aspen Institute.  Davos.  Everywhere.

Wherever you can look -- wherever there's a fight over how to pronounce charcuterie or soppressata -- I'll be there.

Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there, penning maudlin columns about the lack of civility on Both Sides.

I'll be in the way op-ed columnists scold Liberals about their tone when they're mad.

I'll be there in the way pundits laugh when an orange racist rage monster and his army of fascist zombies stomp democracy to bits because it does not materially affect them one bit, and when those pundits are yucking it up about how great their investments are doing and how they can finally pay off their vacation home in Montauk, I'll be there, too...

Behold, a Tip Jar!