For the past +17 years, the staff here at the driftglass blog has tracked the many phases of David Brooks' career of bad opinion-having. And having crunched the numbers, we can state with a high degree to confidence that each of Mr. Brooks' metamorphoses from one mode of bad opinion-having and mawkish writing to the next has been occasioned by some unpleasant reality to which he had dedicated himself to denying punching him in the yam sack so hard and so often that he finally had to reinvent himself to escape his previous self.
For example, David Brooks the tireless Liberal basher, George Bush cheerleader and Iraq War pimp could not survive the complete collapse of the Bush Administration. But rather than conducting a searching moral inventory to figure out how he could have been so consistently and catastrophically wrong about everything, Mr. Brooks instead morphed almost overnight into...
...the undisputed King of Both Siderism.
And for more than a decade, Mr. Brooks literally cranked out the same fucking column for The New York Times over and over again. Bland, self-righteous, view-from-nowhere denunciations of The Extremes on Both Sides: columns about the human condition apparently written by a depressed, malfunctioning robot floating in the near vacuum of interplanetary space.
Brooks' "style" was so mind-numbingly predictable that 12 years ago I published "How To Write a David Brooks Column" just to make sure the blueprints for Mr. Brooks' scam were not lost to history:
...In just 10 Easy Steps you'll be punditting like a pro!
1) Pick a subject. Any subject. From Tasseled Loafers to Torture, it literally does not matter.
2) Quote extensively from one person or group on the subject. It's OK to just more-or-less copy and paste in big hunks of what whatever-you-happen-to-be-reading-at-the-moment to flesh out your 800-word column. Here at the Times we call that "research"!
3) Quote from some other person or group on the same subject who appears to hold a different opinion. If no actual opposition exists, just put on your Magic Green Jacket and invent an opposing opinion.
4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!
5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!
Oh boy!
6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.
7) Every week.
8) Year.
9) After year.
10) After year.
Long ago this stopped being a "style", and started being a fetish, Mr. Brooks.
The scope or details of any given issue were immaterial to Mr. Brooks. His goal was, by dint of sheer repetition, drive home the Big Lie that every problem in American life was the result of the dogmatic insanity of the Extremes on Both Sides and that he, David Brooks, was speaking ex officio on behalf of a vast, voiceless, unrepresented (and almost entirely fictional) Sensible Center.
Then came Trump, who Mr. Brooks confidently predicted would not win the Republican nomination because the sane and sensible "establishment wing" of the Republican party would never such a thing happen.
And then it happened.
But not to worry, because Mr. Brooks confidently predicted he couldn't win the general election.
And then Trump won the general election.
And that was the One Punch Man shot to the yam sack that was finally hard enough for Mr. Brooks to begin to lose the thread.
After that, sometimes Mr. Brooks would get knee-walking drunk enough on his own self-regard to confidently predict that the horrors of the GOP under Trump only meant that there was definitely a Glorious Conservative Renaissance just around the corner!
And sometimes Mr. Brooks would get angry-drunk enough to swearing furiously that this was not, not, not the GOP he married.
And sometimes Mr. Brooks would get weirdo-dad-drunk enough to rap to America's Kids About Sexytime (Spoiler: The Extremes on Both Sides ruined everything.)
And sometimes even to this day Mr. Brooks gets weepy-drunk enough on his own self-loathing to grab the mic and start singing the Oldies again: "David Brooks: Both Siderism Is a Farce that Gives Us Meaning" or "David Brooks Returns to Form".
But mostly Mr. Brooks sorta shambled and defaulted his way into being the Faith and Humility Reporter For The Acela Corridor Pantograph. Here, for example, is a thing The New York Times paid him a large pile of money to write in 2017:
Atlantis: A Land of Contrasts.
Noah.
Noah.
Noah.
Noah.
Noah.
Noah.
Noah.
Both Sides!
Why won't Obama lead?
What? You think I'm kidding?
From Mr. David Brooks in The New York Times today
Harvey, Irma, Jose … and Noah.
So,, what is Mr. Brooks moulting into now?
It's hard to say, but were I a betting man, I'd bet he is reformatting himself into a New York Times version of Bob Greene.
"And who the hell is Bob Greene?" everyone of of a certain age and from Chicago may well ask?
This is (or was) Bob Greene. From The Chicago Reader:
The thing that made me fall in love with the Reader way back in my bright college years of the mid-90s—1995 and 1996, to be precise—was the monthly “Bobwatch” column. Its tagline was “We read him so you don’t have to,” which pretty much said it all, but at the same time conveyed so little of the column’s brilliance: how expertly the pseudonymous Ed Gold tore apart Bob Greene’s daily columns on the front page of the Tribune‘s Tempo section, the detail and incisiveness with which he analyzed what made Greene so awful.
Gold delivered a mission statement of sorts in his inaugural column on January 26, 1995:
We pick up [Greene’s] column with a tingle of anticipation—how awful will it be? Will he content himself with another effortless sputtering of baby talk, lavished over one of his pitiful handful of themes and interests? Or will he reach some new benchmark of idiocy?
Over the next two years, he would pick out every bit of sentimentality and sanctimony and skewer it mercilessly and brilliantly in a way that most of us (especially if we were still college students slogging away at the campus daily) could only aspire to...
Bob Greene was a cloying nostalgia peddler whose tedious amblings though his own misty-colored memories made him a wealthy and powerful columnist. Until the Bad Thing happened.
And based on Mr. Brook' most recent column where, in the middle of various homespun "life hacks" he overheard or --
If you meet a jerk once a month, you’ve met a jerk. If you meet jerks every day, you’re a jerk.
-- saw on the teevee --
-- or noticed on Pocket, or picked up from inspirational posters at the Dollar Store, wherever came this hilarious bit of folk wisdom from the guy who dumped his wife to take up with his much younger research assistant --
Marriage is a 50-year conversation. Marry someone you want to talk with for the rest of your life.
-- it appears that Brooks will be going Greene (with a side order of Both Siderism) most of the time for the foreseeable future.
1 comment:
It is not my conspiracy theory.
This only adds to promote the conspiracy that Brooks was conceived through anal sex. That all republicans are conceived in this way.
Hope it wasn't too harsh and mean.
Post a Comment