...eventually winds its way down to the wide, dead sea of Both Siderism.*
Every one.
You see, the story of what has happened to our country, what has brought us to this place, while frightening and tragic is actually pretty straightforward. It's the story of the Republican Party -- David Brooks' Republican Party -- and it's long war against democracy. It's the story of a lavishly funded political/ideological/media confederation which built a mob of reprogammable meatheads in order to carry out their political, economic and cultural agenda -- a mob which they assembled and perfected piece by piece, lie by lie, right out in the open over the course of many decades while all of the Very Serious political experts in the media -- experts like David Brooks -- swore over and over again that it wasn't happening.
But it did happen, and we are living in the rubble of decades of Republican treachery, sabotage, conspiracy mongering and racism all of which makes Brooks horribly uncomfortable because the simple, straightforward story of how we got to where we are negates the twenty years of Both Siderist fairy tales on which he has built his career.
And so, to stay in the Both Siderist business when overwhelming evidence that Both Sides Don't can be found around every corner, Mr. Brooks needs to con his reader into changing their vantage point to a place so far out in space that all meaningful moral, ideological, political and geographical differentiations on Earth are lost. And to sucker his readers into agreeing to that change of venue, Brooks needs to convince them that he is gonna tell them a story so awesomely sweeping that it will encompass All of Recorded Human History in 800 Words!
And to do that, he needs to kick things off with the column title equivalent of the Christopher Nolan bass note --
-- which has been engineered to suck in the casual reader.
How to Destroy Truth
Then follow up immediately with a big, flatulent promise that the author is about to let you in on a Very Big and Important Story:
Great nations thrive by...
Oooh! Brooks is gonna explain how Great Nations Thrive. Except, if Brooks' body of work has shown us anything, it's that he doesn't have the slightest fucking idea how anything works. How anything thrives.
Next up, he'll try to dazzle you with Brooks-brand civilization-spanning fortune cookie history --
Homer taught the ancient Greeks how to perceive...
Exodus teaches the Jews how to interpret their struggles and their journey...
-- and inundate you with a firehose of random namedropping to pad out his Very Big and Important Story --
Irving Berlin and Woody Guthrie, Aaron Burr and Cesar Chavez, Sojourner Truth and Robert Gould Shaw...
...invited Americans to share Walt Whitman’s passion to contain...
-- and Sweeping Doubletalk --
...emotional and moral knowledge...
...sense of identity...
...ideals
...values...
...equality...
...prosperity...
...freedom...
...shared stories; this shared knowledge...shared destiny...shared affection...
-- that, like a rusty, rattletrap Fourth of July carnival Tilt-a-Whirl, will spin you 'round and 'round but ultimately dump you off at the same place you started, but dizzy enough and slightly nauseous enough from the ride to nowhere that Brooks hopes you'll let him to lead you where he was going all along.
To the heart of his crumbling kingdom of Both Sides Do It.
To his decaying cathedral of empty platitudes and false equivalence where, somehow, the Donald Trump and the entire Republican base, and "Some students at elite schools" are both such equally dangerous threats to democracy that they need to be presented side-by-side in the same paragraph:
But Donald Trump doesn’t get away with lies because his followers flunked Epistemology 101. He gets away with his lies because he tells stories of dispossession that feel true to many of them. Some students at elite schools aren’t censorious and intolerant because they lack analytic skills. They feel entrapped by moral order that feels unsafe and unjust.
Where Conservatives and Progressives are just two equally poisonous sides of the same America-smashing cudgel:
Part of the blame goes to conservatives who try to whitewash history. Part goes to progressives who tell such a negative version of history that it destroys patriotism.
Where the real crisis is not that the Republican Party has been recruiting the dregs of society for decades -- has been going publicly insane and sharpening its fascist knives for decades, and now those knives are at our throat. No, the real problem is that an abstraction called the "country" has failed to tell the right "stories" so another abstraction called "people" have gone all tribal 'n shit.
If a country can’t tell narratives in which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.
As I have already mentioned once or twice over the past 16 years, David Brooks, the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, has only one story to tell his readers...
...One fairy tale he has spun over and over and over again, with grim, inhuman persistence.
The story of Both Sides Do It.
And being a lazy larcenist, Mr. Brooks will fiddle with every handle on every vital issue facing this country on the block -- from Abortion to Jay-Z -- until he can find one that he can open without effort. An issue from which he can thieve enough odds and ends to assemble into his umpteenth shitty column on the Extremes on Both Sides.
And there is no market force strong enough or critique devastating enough to make him stop.
Because just as Fox News and Hate Radio and all of their imitators are kept in the black by a mob of reprogammable meatheads of who demand the racist lies and conspiracies those outlets provide, so too are David Brooks and all of his imitators kept afloat by a flock of privileged myopic cowards and smug intellectual shut-ins who demand fairy tales about how the Extremes on Both Sides are to blame for everything.
*Yeah, I sorta borrowed this from Swinburne's The Garden of Proserpine
6 comments:
I LOVE your mission to destroy the fantasy of this republican party.
Concise as always. Carry on oh Teller of Truths.
Mr. Glass: Concerning DFB's " If a country can't tell narratives...", here's From today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
‘Forget the Alamo’ book on Texas and slavery gets boot from museum, boost in sales
BY BUD KENNEDY
JULY 03, 2021
FORT WORTH
The Great History War of 2021 has reached Texas, where state officials are so upset over the new book “Forget the Alamo” that they told the authors to forget speaking at the state history museum.
That’s what happened Thursday, when the Bullock State History Museum in Austin abruptly canceled a livestream panel about the new book that contends white Southerners moved to Texas to farm cotton, then fought the Texas Revolution and the Battle of the Alamo to establish a slave state and make more money.
But “Forget the Alamo” (Penguin Press, 416 pages, $32) challenges the state’s origin myths, from the 1836 defeat at the Alamo church in San Antonio to the very idea that Texans and Tejanos were fighting to secede from a heavy-handed, unfair Mexican federal government.
“The people at the Alamo were fighting for slavery as much as they were fighting for liberty,” said Chris Tomlinson, co-author of “Forget the Alamo” and a Houston Chronicle columnist.
That was what he was going to tell hundreds of viewers on a virtual panel, Tomlinson said. But four hours before the livestream was to begin, a co-host from the Writers’ League of Texas emailed to say the Bullock had withdrawn.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Montgomery County Republican, wrote on Twitter that he was among state leaders and conservative activists who wanted it stopped.
“This fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum,” Patrick wrote on Twitter.
As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as
soon as I found out about it. Like efforts to move the Cenotaph, which I also
stopped, this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place
Two of the 12 public school years — fourth and seventh grades — are devoted to Texas history. A new state law even uses a spooky term: “patriotic education..”
This new popular history book by Tomlinson, Vanity Fair author Bryan Burrough (“The Big Rich”) and former Democratic political consultant Jason Stanford would have been controversial anytime, particularly for its provocative title.
But it happens to hit the racks at the height of a national political debate over whether America was founded on Christianity or on slavery, and over how schools should teach about slavery and racism.
“Everything we’re saying has been said before, but we’ve touched a nerve right now, and the only recourse was to shut us down,” Tomlinson said.
Burrough, author of the sections on early history, said the book is “not some radical interpretation of the Alamo — the radical interpretation is the Anglo-Saxon narrative that’s been discredited for 50 years.”
Burrough, an award-winning business writer, has reported from around the world.
“I’ve worked around the world, and I had to come back to Texas to face this kind of government interference,” he said.
But only recently has slavery become part of the public debate. Until lately, the arguments were mostly over how to balance the Texas and Mexico sides of secession and how to fairly recognize those Tejanos who were heroes of the revolution or later ostracized or slaughtered.
University of Texas Professor Walter L. Buenger, chief historian for the Texas State Historical Association, wrote by email that “Forger the Alamo is “nothing new” to historians.
“[It] puts the spotlight on the importance of slavery in Texas, and focuses on how the myths and stories of the Alamo were added after the fact,” he wrote.
If so, Patrick and the Bullock Museum gave the book a giant boost.
In one day Friday, it went from No. 289 in sales at Amazon.com into the top 50.
“The more our book takes hold, the more copies we sell, the more upset they get,” Tomlinson said.
"Part goes to progressives who tell such a negative version of history that it destroys patriotism."
Hate to tell you this David, but patriotism for an imaginary country is, uh, imaginary patriotism. Read that: a lie.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
David Brooks is a fucking low-class ignoramus.
Today you have earned your Phd. in Booksiology and Republicanism. Fantastic writing and job.
Great job by Steve all those years ago kicking you out of his joint to open your own.
Also, Meremark, I tend to think this about Brooks: David Brooks is a fucking low-class intentionally ignorant ignoramus.
Brooks, like the 6 SCOTUS justices, Like the Georgia GOP majority state legislature making rules for everyone else to vote.
Like the Arizona State legislature GOP who make law to make it illegal's to take my wife sealed ballot along with my own to drop off at ta drop box because I am driving in the area and can save on postage. That the wife has to take it herself. U imagine I cannot give her a ride to drop box to drop her ballot off. She will have to do it herself.
While president Trump had his staffers / secretaries request his ballot, Probably filled it out for him and returned it for him.
Not one of these GOP state legislators are going to be standing in line for 7 hours at the polls in their district/ Precincts.
Odd how that works for the law makers making the rules for everyone else.
This is that conservative ideology that in Broo;s tormented mind both sides do. To ensure that shared destination.
Arriving at 5 GOP SCOTUS justices gutting established law of the Civil Rights Act for one small southern county. Roberts wrote that striking down sect. 5 will leave people with the avenue for wrongs done to be sought through the Civil Rights sect. 2.
Which a week ago. Roberts joined the other GOP SCOTUS justices to strike down Sect. 2.
So they all have the same sought out destination and their favored have a more pleasant direction. See, we are all happy now the Baby was in fact cut in half, says Justice Barrett.
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