By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
It was another week of terrible news in the ongoing coup against American democracy perpetrated by the Mad King and his goons. Americans murdered and terrorized; journalists indicted for committing journalism; millions of children threatened by insane science-free vaccine recommendations; the destruction of America's alliances; and the Department of Justice committing criminal obstruction and perversion of justice every day.
Did we miss anything? We did, but we'll get back to Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.
But there was one ray of light amidst the storm: David Brooks is signing off.
Or so he said:
He summed up his Times career in a column in which he, wait for it, continued to cover up the truth about the Republican attack on America and its free institutions. (He did not cover his earlier career at the Murdoch mouthpiece Weekly Standard shilling for George W. Bush and the insane Iraq War debacle.)
He looked back on his legacy, not entirely inaccurately:
We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country....Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.
Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. Trump is nihilism personified, with his assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force, bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations.
Notice how Brooks, as he has done throughout his entire miserable career, blames the public for its malaise, rather than considering whether real events in the world have contributed to the public's disaffection with its lot.
For example, the reason why large majorities believe that elites don't care about regular people might well be because elites don't care about regular people. Since 2009, according to Robert Reich, 95% of the growth in wealth has gone to the top 1%, a statistic never quoted by Brooks, who strenuously avoids any criticism of the revolting rich.
Perhaps that's because he gets a lot of free stuff for his service to the rich and powerful, including free meals (a point of some concern to Brooks, who once wrote an entire column complaining about his $78 bar tab at Newark Airport).
In 2011 he enjoyed a free trip to a Napa resort to mingle with his fellow edgemasters like:
Let's see – that's billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire former Microsoft CEO and STD victim Bill Gates, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, billionaire former Google CEO Sergey Brin, billionaire former Amazon CEO Jeff “Steroids” Bezos, and some rando named Epstein. Ring any bells?
Sounds like a fun weekend.
But Brooks couldn't get enough of these guys. He managed to get an invite to another Billionaires' Dinner with some of the same folks, including this Epstein guy again:
We’re abandoning our humanistic core. The elements of our civilization that lift the spirit, nurture empathy and orient the soul now play a diminished role in national life: religious devotion, theology, literature, art, history, philosophy. Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans.
Fun fact: nobody decided that. Can he name one university in America that stopped teaching great Western philosophers? Other than Texas A&M which banned Plato for his lack of “family values?”
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| The New York Times loses David Brooks! |
There are of course a few evils that never seem to penetrate Brooks' work or apparently skull. You'll search his litany of social ills in vain for trivia like white racism, sexism, the ravenous greed of his plutocrat dinner partners, environmental destruction, corruption, exploitation of workers, abandonment of civilized values like democracy and human rights, religious intolerance, and wallowing in violence and corruption. None of which have anything to do with expanding the college curriculum to include studying these phenomena.
Racism and bigotry would seem to be assaults on our “humanistic core,” but not in Dave World.
He wanders further away from reality in his farewell:
The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values.
What shared moral order? The one that said all rewards in society should go only to rich white men? The one that persecuted and stigmatized LGBTQ individuals, often driving them to suicide? I sure hope that individuals abandoned that evil and oppressive social order that has benefited Dave as an untalented white man.
And David remains committed to his non-solution:
Where do people and nations go to find new things to believe in, new values to orient their lives around? Where do they go to revive their humanistic core? They find these things in the realm of culture. In my reading of history, cultural change precedes political and social change. You need a shift in thinking before you can have a shift in direction. You need a different spiritual climate.
Here's a suggested change in spiritual climate: Stop supporting and apologizing for vicious violent bigots and racists and start supporting human rights for all, ranging from immigrants seeking to adjudicate their status to women trying get Ross Douthat's hands out of their uteruses. We don't need a shift in thinking. We need to oppose and overcome the violent Republican campaign against the values we already hold, but Dave can't bring himself to express.
There's so much more but we'd refer to Mr. Driftglass for his decades-long dissection of David's “thought” in the service of Republican tyranny and corruption.
But the biggest disappointment is the punch line of his farewell address: he's not really shutting his yap. He's just moved to The Atlantic, at the invitation of his fellow Iraq warmonger, Jeffrey “Bombs Away” Goldberg. Does this mean that we'll soon see Moral Mountain Dave on The Atlantic's TV gabfest, Washington Week? If so, we have some bad news for Bombs Away. We'll be shunning any episode that includes the ol' Perfessor in lieu of real journalists like Susan Glasser.
And he'll be pontificating at one of the leading universities in Southern Connecticut, where for the next five years he'll be a no-heavy-lifting “fellow” at some bullshit school not located within Yale's School of Arts and Sciences:
The Atlantic has even conned Yale into paying for a video podcast starring Brooks. It's all part of rebranding this long time lazy hack a “pop sociologist.” That's like calling me a “pop neurosurgeon.” Apparently at Yale “pop” means “not a.”
We've always tried to avoid New Haven so it's unlikely we'll bump into the Fellow down at Mory's.
But we can't avoid the lasting effects of the astonishing intellectual dishonesty and moral bankruptcy of generations of Republican apologists and bulls*** artists like David Brooks. At least though, unlike Renee God and Alex Pretti, we're alive to fight on.
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