David Brooks and the Triumphant Reprise of the Return of the Crepes of Wrath

From David Brooks' address to Brigham-Young University, October 22, 2019:

My life started out in unpredictable form. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s to somewhat left-wing parents. When I was five, they took me to a Be-In, where hippies would just go to be. One of the things they did at the Be-In was set a garbage can on fire and throw their wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can, so I broke from the crowd, reached into the fire, grabbed the money, and ran away. That was my first step over to the right.

From David Brooks on "Morning Joe", August 15, 2023:

Brooks:  But I think the big [reason why everything sucks and everyone is sad and mean] is, there are certain skills is being a decent person, decent neighbor, decent parent.

Then he ticks off a few of these "everyday skills" as if they were a series of How To books that Playboy might have published in the 1970s. "How to Throw a Killer Party", “How to Do Conversation”, 

“Forgiving the Abusive Asshole in Your Life", "How to Dump the Mother of Your Children So You Can Take Up With Your Much Younger Research Assistant and Still Get Paid to Sermonize About Morality", and so forth.  

Brooks: Skills that used to be taught in a wide variety of ways.

Then Brooks lists of virtually every civic and religious institution extant.  And maybe I missed it, but I don't remember "How to Throw a Killer Party" being taught at any union hall I ever heard of.  Or“How to Do Conversation”at my Sunday school.  But maybe I slept through it.  I was a pretty "meh" Sunday schooler.  Maybe that's why my "moral formation" tend towards the low and perverse?

Then comes the Brooks-brand "razor in the apple".

Brooks:  And about 50 or 60 years ago we just stopped doing that.  Stopped teaching those basic social and moral skills.  And as a result we treat each other often unkindly.

Then came a lot of yadda yadda character formation and "permission structures" that, according to Joe Scarborough, "comes through our phones."  But let's stop for a moment and do a little cipherin'.  

David Brooks is 62.  

Which means, when he was the five-year-old Davey Brooks he mentions in his little my-dirty-hippie-parents story, it was either 1965 or 1966.  

Which means that when Brooks says that everything went to shit  "50 or 60 years ago"...

Pardon me while I do the math...  

Carry the one...

Holy shit!  According to Brooks' timetable, America went to hell in a Grateful Dead VW microbus at the exact moment when some dirty hippie friend of his parents toss a fiver into the fire, and young Davey Brooks plunged his hand into the flames to retrieve it.

Do I smell the ordure of Mommy and Daddy issues?  

And ever since he found out he could make a buck putting pen to paper to punch a hippie, Brooks has been plunging his hand into the fiery crucible of culture to save capitalism and Conservatism from us dirty, amoral hippie.  

Meanwhile, back on Morning Joe, it was yet another recently-former Republican Never Trumper's turn to ask "Whatabout the Bible?!?"  Elise Jordan had a whole long thing that technically ended in a question mark about how ain't it a shame that we have tossed out the Bible and put politics in its place.

It will surprise none of my gentle readers that Brooks answers that "question" with a farrago of "we"s and implied "both sides".

Brooks: In a normal, healthy society we have a politics of distribution.  We argue about how high taxes should be, what the budget should be on.  But we don't have that kind of politics any more.  We have a politics of recognition.  People don't want policy victories.  They just want to humiliates the other side and affirm my own people.

Mika Brzezinski: Contributing writer at The Atlantic, David  Brooks, thank you very much for being on this morning.

Brzezinski then finishes this segment pimping Brooks' piece in The Atlantic, which isn't a surprise considering the entire puppet show was basically Brooks reading aloud from it and every panelist asking him questions that were slightly reworded sentences from the article.

And oh my, what about that Atlantic article?   It is Brooks returning completely to his pre-Trump form.  A detached, bitchy, alien observer floating dirigibly so far above the grubby concerns of humanity that distinct beliefs and movements are no longer visible.   From Brooks' orbital platform, there is nothing uniquely monstrous about Mr. Brooks' former party, or distinctly competent and honorable about Democrats.  Instead, way down below, it's just "we".  Nothing but Brooks sourly, disinterestedly cataloguing the comings and goings and failing of "people" doing "things" -- 

People don't want policy victories.  They just want to humiliates the other side and affirm my own people.

-- because 50 years ago the dirty hippies fucked it all up.

If you track Mr. Brooks writing career -- his public resume -- over time, you will quickly notice several, recurring characteristics.  

First, Mr. Brooks has no sense of humor.  At all.  Humor, to David Brooks, is making snide remarks about people who wear sandals and drive Volvos, which might have once slayed 'em around the Cato Institute water cooler, but just comes across as bitter and bitchy to anyone not in the club.  

Second, Mr. Brooks develops an icky, public crush on a new Great Man about every few months, which makes perfect sense in light of Mr. Brooks' third compulsive topic: National Greatness.

So no surprise that when he was the Senior Editor at Bill Kristol's now-defunct Weekly Standard wingnut treehouse, Mr. Brooks carefully built his public resume on three, foundational subjects:

National Greatness.

The implacable anarcho-communism of the hilariously feckless Liberals.

The awesomeness of Great Men and the Elite Institutions they command.

In Mr. Brooks' gooey, pubescent imaginary History of America, all of these subjects all deeply interrelated:  National Greatness was destroyed in the Great Hippie Fire of 1969

'I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK." And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened'

While at The Weekly Standard,  Brooks invented lots of wild, gratuitous theories about how "the Woodstock generation" ruined everything, including  killing Jimi Hendrix:

From Jimmy to Jimi

An unearthed letter from the great guitarist gives some insight into the Woodstock generation.

...

Maybe what was phony about Woodstock was not the pretense that somehow it was above money and material things. Perhaps what was phony was the pretense it was being led by rebellious young people against a corrupt establishment. Perhaps most people at Woodstock, like Jimmy Hendrix, really were quite happy with their upbringing and loved their families. But when they got amongst each other and the rebellious pose became de rigeur, they began to convince themselves they felt more alienated than they actually had any cause to be. Then their behavior become unmoored from normal family-influenced constraints; Jimmy Hendrix lost control and became Jimi, and that ambitious boy who only set out to become rich and make his father proud, ended up dead.

Brooks' endless screeds against the stupid, Godless, America-hating Leftist dupes who refused to recognize the military and economic genius of George W. Bush were a staple of The Weekly Standard right up until the Bush administration went tits up and the Sulzberger family (who own The New York Times) gave Brooks a job-for-life at their newspaper.  

And (he said in a getting-back-to-the-point kind of way) the fact that Brooks is now double-dipping with gigs at  The New York Times (where he cranks out 800 word bafflegab at his leisure) and The Atlantic (where he cranks out much longer versions of the bafflegab he cranked out at the NYT) shouldn't come as a surprise.  Whatever its virtues may be, The Atlantic has become a soft landing place for Bush regime dead-enders.

In 2016 the NYT hired James Bennet away from The Atlantic to run its editorial page.  The Times was familiar with Bennet's work because before his stint at The Atlantic he had been the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, where he had hired leading neocon writers like Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan.  While at The Atlantic, Bennet also retrieved David "Axis of Evil" Frum from the edge of obscurity and made him a senior editor. 

Upon his arrival at the NYT, Bennet's first new hire in 2016 was the odious Bret "Bug" Stephens.  Bennet continued to be an embarrassment to his profession until he was forced to resign in 2020 after inviting Tom Cotton to pen his infamous, post-George Floyd murder op-ed titled "Send in the Troops" in which Cotton called for the deployment of federal troops into major American cities if there was violent rioting. Times staffers revolted and, in a rare move, publicly criticized the editorial board for publishing the op-ed Bennet initially defended the publication of the op-ed, then lied and said he hadn't read it, and then, when that lie fell apart, he headed for the exit.

Meanwhile, back at The Atlantic, Bennet was replaced, hey, whadya know!  It's...Jeffrey Goldberg!  That guy from two paragraphs ago!  

And in Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic this week we find:

HOW AMERICA GOT MEAN 

 

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. 

 

By David Brooks 

Oy.

This is what one Liberal wag on Twitter (ok, me) refers to as one of those "Unflushable Turd Bobbing Back to The Surface" days.  A day when something which normal people had been successfully ignoring bobs back to the surface of social media and everyone is all, "Really?  David Brooks is still being paid for his wretched opinions?"

Wonkette was quick off the blocks with this:

Is America Meaner Now Than When It Lynched People? David Brooks Unsure.

This man gets paid so much money.

You see, here in the (please, God) twilight of his career, Mr. David Brooks wants desperately to write about two things:  the secret hopes, dreams and disappointments of The Working Class, and morality.  

Just his own bad luck that he doesn't know shit all about either of those things.  But just his own good lick that not knowing shit all about a subject has never stopped Prestigious American Publications from paying him a small fortune to write about that subject.  Because with David Brooks, what those Prestigious American Publications are paying for is not shoe-leather reportage on the actual state of whatever the topic of the day might be.  Like, say, the aforementioned military genius of George W. Bush.  Or the need for massive tax cuts.  Or "stupid" Democrat's hysteria over the crazy idea that under George W. Bush we might start running huge deficits again.   Or the Mysteries of the Working Class.  Or whatever.  

What Prestigious American Publications are paying for are the Brooks-brand fairy tales about morality and The Working Class that their wealthy shut-in readership safe in their Upper West Side cultural terrariums wish to believe are true.   And of course, these days those fairy tales that must be slathered in the "Both Sides Do It" goo that make them go down easier.  

And in case you were wondering about what passes for "research" at The Atlantic these days, note that Brooks' grand, sweeping jeremiad about how mean and sad we all are  is buttressed mostly by sniffing word-clouds -- 

Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent).

-- and noting the bad electoral habits of..."people":

After decades without much in the way of moral formation, America became a place where more than 74 million people looked at Donald Trump’s morality and saw presidential timber.

See what those dirty hippies have gone and done!  They made Murrica so stupid and immoral that "74 million people looked at Donald Trump’s morality and saw presidential timber."  Damn those hippies!   Damn them to Hell!

Come on.  While Brooks may be many things, there is no chance that he is brain damaged enough not to know that it wasn't some free-floating, politically unidentifiable group of amoral "people" who voted for Donald Trump.  It was Republicans who did this.   It was all of those same racist asshole Republicans who Brooks spent the Clinton years and the Bush years and the Obama years cheering on as salt-of-the-earth patriots from his lofty perch high atop American journalism.  

Brooks knows this as surely as he knows that in 2016, 66 million people -- whose moral formation seemed to be in pretty good shape -- turned out to vote for a competent, capable, intelligent public servant named Hillary Clinton.  Three million more than voted for Donald Trump.

Brooks also surely knows that in 2020, when the race was explicitly between depravity and democracy, 13 million more people turned out to vote for a competent, capable, intelligent public servant named Joe Biden, than turned out to re-elect Donald Trump. 

But that is a story which scares the shit out of Brooks' wealthy shut-in fan boys because it does not allow them to continue to hold themselves smugly aloof from the grubby, real world where all politics is merely "people" on Both Sides who are equally bad:

People don't want policy victories.  They just want to humiliates the other side and affirm my own people.

Instead, such a story would demand that they pick a side.  Freedom or Fascism.  Patriotism or White Supremacy.  Joe Biden and the Democrats or Donald Trump and the Republicans.

And that perspective would blow Brooks' whole scam.  The work of his professional lifetime.  

And that has made Brooks desperate.  

How desperate?  

So desperate that the word "Republican" only appears once in the entire article, and only as one of a bunch of co-equal "Manichaean" tribes.  Because words no longer mean anything.  From The Atlantic:

The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative.

So mawkish and desperate and ham-handedly dishonest that this incredibly condescending bile directed a "You" flowed effortlessly from his fingertips onto the pages of The Atlantic:

You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.

So just plain bad that it provoked Joyce Carol Oates to come for him with a sword in both hands:

"why we have become sad"
David Brooks (again) lamenting that lost great moral upstanding feel-good Norman Rockwell America when women & minorities were not uppity, family-fun lynchings were not frowned upon by élites, & enslaved persons didn't get to sass their owners. https://t.co/lOiMvSnv0r

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) August 14, 2023

If you don't know who Joyce Carol Oates is...

Winner

• 1955–1956: Scholastic Art & Writing Award
• 1967: O. Henry Award – "In the Region of Ice"^[24]
• 1968: M. L. Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters – A Garden of Earthly Delights
• 1970: National Book Award for Fiction – them^[1]
• 1973: O. Henry Award – "The Dead"^[24]
• 1988: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates^[60][61]
• 1990: Rea Award for the Short Story
• 1996: Bram Stoker Award for Novel – Zombie
• 1996: PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story
• 1997: Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement^[62]
• 2002: Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award^[63]
• 2003: Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement (The Kenyon Review)^[64]
• 2005: Prix Femina Etranger – The Falls
• 2006: Chicago Tribune Literary Prize^[65] (Chicago Tribune)
• 2006: Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Mount Holyoke College^[66]
• 2007: Humanist of the Year, American Humanist Association^[67]
• 2009: Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, NBCC^[68][69]
• 2010: National Humanities Medal^[70]
• 2010: Fernanda Pivano Award
• 2011: Honorary Doctor of Arts, University of Pennsylvania^[71]
• 2011: World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction – Fossil-Figures^[72]
• 2011: Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection – The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares^[73]
• 2012: Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Oregon State University
• 2012: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement^[74]
• 2012: Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection – Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories^[75]
• 2019: Jerusalem Prize, Lifetime Achievement
• 2020: Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, work as a message of modern humanism

2023: Taobuk Award, for high-profile personalities in the literary, artistic and civic worlds^[76]

Finalist[edit]

• 1970: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – The Wheel of Love and Other Stories^[77]
• 1993: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Black Water^[78][79]
• 1995: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – What I Lived For^[78]
• 2001: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Blonde^[78]
• 2015: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories^[78]

Nominated[edit]

• 1963: O. Henry Award – Special Award for Continuing Achievement (1970), five Second Prize (1964 to 1989), two First Prize (above) among 29 nominations^[24]
• 1968: National Book Award for Fiction – A Garden of Earthly Delights^[80]
• 1969: National Book Award for Fiction – Expensive People^[81]
• 1972: National Book Award for Fiction – Wonderland^[82][83]
• 1990: National Book Award for Fiction – Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart^[84]
• 1992: National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction – Black Water^[68]
• 1995: PEN/Faulkner Award – What I Lived For^[85]
• 2000: National Book Award – Blonde^[86]
• 2007: National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction – The Gravedigger's Daughter^[68]
• 2007: National Book Critics Circle Award, Memoir/Autobiography – The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973–1982^[68]
• 2013: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories^[87]

So not great, Dave!

Brooks also makes a big, hairy deal of a drop off in "faith" in America, but never rises above the fog of his own Farts of Profundity to notice that, just maybe, that drop off in faith has something to do with the Catholic Church finally being exposed as one of the world's largest pedophile ring.

Or the Southern Baptist Convention also being exposed as another of the world's largest pedophile ring.

Or how, since the days before St. Reagan ascended bodily to Republican Heaven, the Republican party -- David Brooks' Republican party -- has been aligning itself greedily and publicly with some of the worst filth ever to con the rubes out of their coin by waving a Bible around and calling on the name of the Lord.  

Maybe, just maybe, "faith" in America got what was coming to it for letting child molesters and con men be the public faces of the Prince of Peace for the last 50 years.  

But the most sadly hilarious bit in the whole article has to be this little caveat that Brooks slips in near the end 

You know I love a caveat that is like, "so the premise of my article is false but anyway..."

— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) August 15, 2023

Finally, I find myself carried back to the first "Crepes of Wrath" installment I wrote back in 2018 when Brooks was trying to quickly recast himself as an authority on the beating heart and secret dreams of America's working class:

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 followed a turgid, 800-word book report on someone else's work.  It read 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.

So as I did then, so I shall do now and conclude by 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.  The Atlantic. 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...

Why Does David Brooks Still Have A Fucking Job?