David Brooks: The Return of the Crepes of Wrath

Studs Terkel knew from hardship.

His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants -- a tailor and a seamstress -- who moved from New York City to Chicago when Studs was a child and ran a rooming house during the Great Depression where Studs learned about the dreams and struggles of the working class from the people who would meet in the lobby there, and who gathered in Bughouse Square nearby to hear the soapbox orators inveighing against the predators of capitalism.  Although he earned a J.D. from the University of Chicago, Studs went to work as a hotel concierge instead, and later joined the WPA's Federal Writers' Project.  Studs would go on to become Chicago's great chronicler of the working class.

Chicago's most famous journalist, Mike Royko also knew about tough times.

He grew up over a bar, did a bit in the United States Air Force where he began writing for the base newspaper, got in with the legendary City News Bureau and never looked back.  Royko wrote with commanding authority about the mobsters, con men and bent politicians who ran the city, and with equal eloquence about the little guys who baked the bread, drove the trucks, tended the bars, taught the kids and made the book that made the city work.  He knew them all intimately because he worked the streets covering them all by day, and drinking with legends by night.

Like Terkel, David Brooks attended the University of Chicago and, like Royko, Brooks did a stint at the City News Bureau.

This is where all similarities end.

Mr. Brooks was raised in academic privilege, loitered at the University of Chicago long enough to score a BA in history (which, based on how routinely he molests and whitewashes the past in order to advance his political agenda, should have been revoked decades ago) after which he latched onto the wingnut welfare teat like a lamprey and has been nursing at its ample bosom ever since.  Brooks is America's most ubiquitous cheerleader for the myopically wealthy, the cluelessly privileged and politically inbred and has made his a career out of telling the rich and powerful the silky lies they desperately wish to be true.

Yes truly it can be said (and has been said, once or twice) that in all this wide, bountiful, fatally-conflicted nation -- from the mountains to the prairies and the whole rest of that song -- there is no one who can speak with less forged-in-the-crucible-of-hardship authority about what hard times have to teach us than David Fucking Brooks.

So imagine my complete lack of surprise when I opened the House of Sulzberger's little family newspaper this morning to find this staring back at me.

First, I'm sorry Brooks' kids no longer speak to him because he dumped their mother for an intern, and passive-aggressively lashing out at them via the op-ed page of The New York Times is the only way Brooks' knows how send them a message, but honestly, that sounds like a "David Brooks" problem, and not a "the rest of us" problem.

Second, this is every bit the Brooks-brand wretchedly oblivious moral hectoring that you imagine it to be.

And third, in the interest of self-care during these dark times, you shouldn't read it.  After all, that's my job.

Why Does David Brooks Still Have A Fucking Job?