Hey, Brooksie, Leave Them Kids Alone!

Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the driftglass blog I ask that you please pay attention as we review the emergency procedures. Today we will be deconstructing a typically awful David Brooks column.  There are three emergency exits on this blog. Please take a minute to locate the exit closest to you. Note that the easiest way to exit the blog may be to quickly move to a calming YouTube video of green noise or cats playing with mouse toys.

Should you experience dizziness, nausea or a sudden realization that the Times has paid David Brooks a small fortune to write the same fucking dreck over and over again for 20 years, stay calm and listen for instructions from the cabin crew. Oxygen masks will drop down from above your seat. Place the mask over your mouth and nose.  Pull the strap to tighten it. If you are reading this with children nearby, shame on you. 

Now let's get on with our regularly scheduled hippie-punching, as Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times once again returns to his happy place. (emphasis added)

The enemies of liberal democracy seem to be full of passionate intensity — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, campus radicals.

Almost all of the balance of this thing appears to be a tedious recitation of the chapter titles of -- 

Fareed Zakaria’s important new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present.”

-- which reads as dull and cliched as a 6th grader's book report on The Call of the Wild based on notes hurriedly cribbed from Wikipedia the night before.

No kidding.

For example:

His story starts in the Dutch Republic in the 16th century. The Dutch invented the modern profit-seeking corporation. 

And:

Dutch success wasn’t just economic. There was a cultural flowering (Rembrandt, Vermeer).

And:

There was also moral restraint. Dutch Calvinism was on high alert for the corruption that prosperity might bring....

And:

The next liberal leap forward occurred in Britain. In the Glorious Revolution of the late 1680s, a Dutchman, William of Orange, became King of England ...

And:

British inventors and tinkerers like James Watt perfected the steam engine...

And:

The great reform acts in the 1800s gave more people the right to vote and reduced political corruption...

And:

America was next, and the pattern replicated itself: new inventions like the telephone and the electric lightbulb... 

Brooks managed to skip over all the violent uprisings and revolutions that are the other strand of the DNA of western civilization.  Instead it was just tulips to steam engines to light bulbs. 

The great liberal societies that Zakaria describes expanded and celebrated individual choice and individual freedom. But when liberalism thrived, that personal freedom lay upon a foundation of commitments and moral obligations...

...and Madame La Guillotine and a "whiff of grapeshot" and the brutal suppression of  counterrevolutionary forces and the bloody fall of mighty empires.  

But do please continue, because I sense we are nearing the actual point of this tedious exercise.  

Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations...

And here we go.  

So tell us, Mr. Brooks, when exactly did the great liberal democratic experiment that is America lose it moral footing and fall into the pit of hedonism and debauchery?  (emphasis added)

Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom.

Ladies and Gentlemen, as you can see we have arrived at our destination and the captain has turned off the “Fasten Seat Belt” sign.  Please move quickly to the nearest available exit and begin deblogging.  Please use caution when deblogging as the world is still full of idiots who believe Mr. Brooks is the ne plus ultra of political and cultural wisdom.   

May God have mercy on their souls, and don't forget to tip your flight attendant on the way out.  

And now, music!

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