David Brooks: Sociopaths of Glory

It turns out that Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times finally got around to watching Stanley Kubrick's classic Paths of Glory over the weekend.  And thank God too, because it gave him one more cultural icon that he could claim is "weirdly relevant today" and wring another shitty op-ed column therefrom:

The Struggle to Stay Human Amid the Fight 

World War I and the adversarial mentality.

Actually, there are two points on which Mr, Brooks and I agree.

First, that the central conflict of the movie is located in the struggle between a front line colonel names Dax and his superior officers:

Kirk Douglas plays a French colonel named Dax who lives in the trenches and leads his men in battle. Far away in the palaces, pampered French generals order his exhausted men to take a nearly impregnable German position. One general hopes the assault will help him score political points. Another is promised a promotion. Something like 4,000 men are expected to die or be wounded for these objectives.

When the assault catastrophically fails, the generals look for scapegoats and decide to execute three enlisted men, more or less chosen at random, for alleged cowardice.

Second, that it is "weirdly relevant today" but not for the reasons Mr. Brooks thinks it is -- as an aid to his personal meditations:

I have to spend a lot of time thinking about Trump. I sometimes wonder what all that attention on a guy like that is doing to me. This is a meditation on that problem. https://t.co/alJrXX2xNb

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) November 13, 2018

As luck would have it, your lazy blog proprietor wrote an entire, three-part essay about politics, the Republican Party and Paths of Glory 12 years ago.  It was during the run up to the 2006 midterms, as the Bush administration was beginning to collapse from the weight of its own incompetence, corruption and hubris.  So allow me to plunder my own work from that dim and distant past in aid of explaining why this movie is indeed relevant today, starting with the climatic exchange near the end of the movie. 

Spoiler Alert!

The corrupt, glory-seeking General Mireau had ordered an artillery attack on his own men to drive them out of the trenches and into the face of certain death trying to take an impregnable German fortress.   Colonel Dax, who had been charged with defending three random soldiers who had been single out for execution for the failure of the hopeless attack, has come to a cocktail party at the estate of the (we shall soon learn) even more corrupt and cynical General Broulard to report General Mireau's actions.

General Mireau -- who had been perfectly willing to slaughter his men to advance his career, and to threaten to Colonel Dax with court marshal in order to cover up the crime -- is shocked to discover that his good friend General Broulard is every bit as willing to sacrifice him to save his career as Mireau had been willing to sacrifice Dax.

General Mireau: So that's it. You're making me the goat. The only completely innocent man in this whole affair. I have only one last thing to say to you, George. The man you stabbed in the back is a soldier.

And then, with his immediate problem solved, Mireau turns to Dax and -- wait for it -- offers him a job.

General Broulard: Well...it had to be done. France cannot afford to have fools guiding her military destiny. I'm grateful to you for having brought this matter to my attention. Colonel, how would you like General Mireau's job?

Colonel Dax: His what?

General Broulard: His job.

Colonel Dax: Let me get this straight, sir. You're offering me General Mireau's command?

Dax refuses, which completely flummoxes Broulard.  Although they wear the same uniform and serve in the same army, ethically and ideologically they might as well be from two completely different species.  Mr. Brooks drains this whole exchange of its true meaning and impact by boiling it down to two sentences that he can jam into his contractually obligated New York Times column, but to understand the real stakes in this scene -- which is the last main-character dialogue in the movie -- you need to let it breath.

General Broulard: Come, come, Colonel Dax. Don't overdo the surprise. You've been after the job from the start. We all know that, my boy.

Colonel Dax: I may be many things, sir, but I am not your boy.

General Broulard: Well, I certainly didn't mean to imply any biological relationship.

Colonel Dax: I'm not your boy in any sense.

General Broulard: Are you trying to provoke me, Colonel?

Colonel Dax: Why should I want to do that?

General Broulard: Exactly. It would be a pity...to lose your promotion before you get it. A promotion you have so very carefully planned for.

Colonel Dax: Sir, would you like me to suggest what you can do with that promotion?

General Broulard: Colonel, you will apologize at once or shall be placed under arrest!

Colonel Dax: I apologize for not being entirely honest with you. I apologize for not revealing my true feelings. I apologize for not telling you sooner...that you're a degenerate, sadistic old man. And you can go to hell before I apologize to you now or ever again!

General Broulard: Colonel Dax, you're a disappointment to me. You've spoiled the keenness of your mind by wallowing in sentimentality. You really did want to save those men...and you were not angling for Mireau's command. You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot. We're fighting a war, a war that we've got to win. Those men didn't fight, so they were shot. You bring charges against General Mireau, so I insist he answer them. Wherein have I done wrong?

Colonel Dax: Because you don't know the answer to that question...I pity you.

And here is what I wrote back in 2006:

These men – the fictional ones, and those that currently run our country – simply do not comprehend the notion of right and wrong.

They are creatures of craft and tactics, feign and betrayal, boot-licking and back-stabbing…all to advance their position, station and power.

Bushworld is a world of presumed monarchical privilege. People who rule based on no principle other than their inbred belief that it is their Divine Right to do so, and in that domain the reason for everything is power for power’s sake. Sometimes they choose – for brief interludes – to act as benevolent tyrants. At other times they lapse back into their natural, Bushie state: Peevish, feeble-minded autocrats.

In either state, their worldview remains absolutely anathema to Democracy. And in either state they do not know what to make of anyone who acts out of a sense of compassion or justice or sense of concern for the common good, except to mock and slander them.

We will never be rid of such morally stillborn monsters, but the least we can do is never, ever let them anywhere near positions of unchecked authority.

But did not do "the least we can do" because do not have accountability in either Republican politics or in the media.

Instead we have an incestuous, co-dependent media/political mutual protection society.

Instead we have a Club.  A Club that operates under a secret but clearly understood compact in which Club member are never held accountable for anything they say or do.

This is why virtually all of the "creatures of craft and tactics, feign and betrayal, boot-licking and back-stabbing" that conspired to lie us into the Iraq debacle -- creatures like Bloody Bill Kristol, David Frum, Michael Gerson, Max Boot, Marc Theissen, and of course David Brooks -- we're all given a fucking promotion.  It's why the Bush Administration has now almost entirely vanished from history.  It's why the media allowed the Republican Party itself -- the party that openly reveled in our Liberal tears as it went all-in on every Bush Administration catastrophe -- to collectively disappear into the Bush-Off Machine like a fart in a firestorm. 

One day they were there, braying about how they had won and we had lost so "Shaddap!" and yapping loudly and patriotically about how deficits don't matter anymore and besides, anyone who doesn't pay reverent deference to President Cuckoobananas during war-time was a traitor because Freedom and also 9/11 Changed Everything...

...and then they were gone.  Just gone.  Leaving nothing behind but the disasters they had championed, the failures they had authored, the institutions they had torched and moldering mountains of "Bush/Cheney 2000", "Bush/Cheney 2004" and "McCain/Palin 2008" buttons and tee-shirts and bumper stickers and yard signs stretching from one end of the country to the other.

This is the same Republican Party which Mr. David Brooks said was doing just fine (and Harry Reid was  a tantrum throwing baby) back in 2005.

This is the same Republican Party which Mr. David Brooks declared had completely "detoxified their brand" back in 2014.

This is the same Republican Party which Mr. David Brooks declared in 2016 was in no danger of nominating Donald Trump because "It's going to be Rubio. I'm telling you, it's going to be Rubio."

So why does this this myopic fraud and unreconstructed Iraq War pimp still have a job?

Because once it became clear that the Bush Administration was doomed, the Beltway media made the collective decision that holding Republicans specifically and personally accountable for anything -- including war, economic catastrophe, criminal incompetence and sedition -- was not in their financial interest. That however diligently Colonel Dax might document the atrocities on his shitty little blog, the Beltway Media was fucking well going to reward the lying, blood-soaked Mireaus and Broulards of the Republican Party with privileged positions on every influential op-ed page and at every elite political panel in America.

And once that decision was made -- once the Beltway media chose to abdicate their responsibility to protect our democracy from a raving, racist, out-of-control Republican political juggernaut in favor of protecting their own perks and privileges -- the rise of a monster like Trump that spoke the same language as that raving, racist political juggernaut and promised to lead them exactly where they always wanted to go became inevitable.

 Behold a Tip Jar!

Fun Fact:  This 2006 series was where I first predicted that "In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade." 

In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.

So that’s where we are now.

Turns out I overshot it by three years.