Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.
Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?
Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.Cool speech, bro, but I liked it better when Jules Feiffer first wrote it in Little Murders:
What’s left? What’s there left? I’m a reasonable man. Just explain to me… what have I left to believe in? I swear to God, the tide is rising. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Gimme, gimme. We need honest cops! People just aren’t being protected anymore. We need a revival of honor and trust. We need the army! We need a giant fence around every block in the city. An electronically-charged fence! And anyone who wants to leave the block has to get a pass. And a haircut. And can’t talk with a filthy mouth. We need respect for a man’s reputation. TV cameras. That’s what we need, in every building lobby, in every elevator, in every apartment, in every room. Public servants who are public servants. And if they catch you doing anything funny -- to yourself -- or anybody -- they break the door down and beat the living -- A return to common sense. We have to have lobotomies for anyone who earns less than $10,000 a year. I don’t like it, but it’s an emergency. Our side needs weapons too. Is it fair that they should have all the weapons? We've got to train ourselves. And steel ourselves. It’s freedom I’m talking about! There’s a fox loose in the chicken coop. Kill him! I want my freedom!Carol Newquist's prescription differs in some particulars from Brooks', but then Newquist didn't have an editor. Also Newquist was operating in late-60s New York, a situation of genuine danger, not Cleveland Park in an era of steadily-falling crime rates. Finally, Newquist is a character in a play, and the author had the opportunity to show us what had driven him crazy. With Brooks we can only guess.
UPDATE. I should have foreseen that Brooks' rightful owner, Charles P. Pierce, would have more and better to say on the subject. Sample: "Brooks reaches these completely unsurprising conclusions by quoting a few horror stories from whatever book is on his nightstand these days." His close is killer.
Next it will require holding people responsible.
ReplyDeleteGood point. Let's start with every shithead who supported our bloodthirsty and disastrous debacle in Iraq.
~
Try re-reading Brooks, but substituting "Wall Street" or "the 1%" for Brooks' implied "the poors" and I think I could agree with him. He shouldn't break his arm patting himself on the back for offering the same prescription the right has had on offer for the past 35 years. As it is, his column is just a longer version of "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
ReplyDeleteIf Brooks wants to improve the moral character of the poor, what's stopping him from taking the metro to Southeast? I know for a fact there's plenty of homeless shelters and food banks in DC that could use a helping hand, some of them might even let Brooks give lectures on the importance of thrift and moral values.
ReplyDeleteRight. If "America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence" and if "Social norms need repair up and down the scale," how come the only anecdotes he provides are about how shitty poor people are - I mean, how "broken" their lives are? Where are those other examples from the rich and their outsized influence on creating a Gilded Age of economic desperation for the masses?
ReplyDeleteMotherfucking David Brooks.
ReplyDeleteNearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do. There are a bunch of charts that look like open scissors. In the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same. But since then, behavior patterns have ever more sharply diverged. High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.
Okay, so during the post-war period, poor people had healthy families and lives and were generally doing okay. But then, in the late 70's/early 80's, something changed. Something made it so that poor people couldn't spend as much time with their kids, thereby causing a number of negative social outcomes.
Now let's brainstorm this. What changed in the 80's that might have interfered with the lives of the poor? Hmmm...I've got it! It's because we stopped judging people! I mean, there's nothing else that could have possibly done it - it's not like the economy or the legal system changed in any significant way. It's not like there was anything new introduced in lower-class neighborhoods that would have caused social disharmony. No, it's just that affluent white people stopped wagging their fingers at poor people.
That's what we need. We need to have more comfortable, privileged people from comfortable, privileged backgrounds wagging their fingers. On television. In editorial pages. On blogs. on the radio. In Congress. We need a lot more of those people, because right now, you can sometimes go a whole hour without hearing a politician spreading some urban legend about people buying narcotics with EBT. It needs to be constant. That's how we fix this.
Bully for you, David. You need to spread the word well beyond the NYT. Maybe you can give a speech as Aspen, or one of those other insipid "ideas" shindigs where rich fucks give speeches on topics they don't understand, explaining how they would do things if they ran the world (yeah, "if").
Obligatory:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C5pjMqKqrg
We all mourn Sam Simon in our own ways. Some watch FXX, David Brooks puts an onion on his belt and yells at clouds.
ReplyDelete"Just say no."
ReplyDeleteBrooks has enlisted the Hilton offspring to help him develop his new moral vocabulary, with some input from the HSBC boardroom.
ReplyDelete"We have to have lobotomies for anyone who earns less than $10,000 a year."
ReplyDeleteSounds drastic, but if that's what paves the way to single payer, let's discuss.
Christ, what an asshole.
ReplyDeleteWhat I said five minutes ago, verbatim, out loud.
ReplyDelete"These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They
were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert
that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the
habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set."
Interestingly, this is entirely false. Brooks is so exercised, punching the hippie in his mind, that he cannot see reality for what it is.
Interestingly, the above analysis is false. Brooks will punch whatever hippie he gets paid to punch. He can see reality just fine, if he wants to. But where's the career in that?
shorter david brooks: "sweep the leg."
ReplyDeletei don't understand this comment but i like it anyway
ReplyDeleteDamn! I do not have enough “ups” to give this comment the respect it deserves.
ReplyDeleteHey, I tried to email you but didn't have a good addy - just wanted to make sure your package arrived & see how our foot powder worked for you. (Apologies again to rest of crew for injecting my commercial enterprise into comments.)
ReplyDeleteI'll field this one David, if I may. May I? Thenk yew.
ReplyDeleteWe all know about the peccadilloes of the affluent, Mr. Trex. We are bombarded, non-stop, night and day, with harangues against their supposed selfishness and greed. They're threatened daily with tax hikes and regulations, and mocked incessantly by mainstream media figures such as yourself. And in fact there are signs that these complaints, unfair as they may be, are having an effect. The upper class has shown more willingness recently to pitch in and do its fair share -- Mr Brooks is a god example, with his tireless devotion to telling other people how to live. Poor Americans would do well to emulate him. They should keep him in mind as they type up their own New York Times OpEd columns.
It's typical Bobo crap — shame the poors (and blahs, but aren't they all supposed to be poors too?).
ReplyDeleteJuvenile, but amusing:
ReplyDeletethe unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.
ReplyDeletePeople born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same
ReplyDeletequestions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good?
Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the
freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?
I'm sorry, when have the poor, sorry "people born into chaotic situations," ever NOT been asked those questions? A change would be to ask rich and powerful people the same things, and to hold them to the same standards. Bah.
Fucking Saint Reagan!
ReplyDeleteSounds like Brooksie is auditioning for the job of designing the new Conservative reeducation camps...
ReplyDeleteOr in the case of Brooks, the illegible in pursuit of the indefensible.
ReplyDeleteWhat's sick is that this stupid bitch pretends that those "born into chaotic situations" have time for either pleasure or long-term planning in between their 3 minimum wage jobs.
ReplyDeleteI have nothing to add, except praise.
ReplyDeleteGagggh! He has a cameltoe on his face!
ReplyDeleteSince Brooks wife walked out on him, all his columns have been desperate cries for help. This latest is no exception.
ReplyDeleteYou won't make me feel sorry for him. I will, however, feel happy for his ex...
ReplyDeletePeople got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.
ReplyDeleteTo the contrary, people exactly DID catch on to how standards are set, by watching them being set in action. They understand the standards perfectly and they know who set them. The standards are that people with money are better than people without it; they get their own form of justice which usually boils down to escape from any punishment for anything - ever, while the poors become more and more just a pool for harvesting more $$$ when you feel the urge, whether you're a banker or short-term lender or a police department. They understand that how you got the $$$ is less important than having the $$$; thus the straightest path to $$$ is to lie, cheat and steal as needed because it's not like you're going to be punished once you have the $$$ in hand. "People" didn't get "out of the habit" of setting standards; they weren't allowed to set them and have been shown, repeatedly, that to set and live by higher ones will earn them the reward of being crushed under the heels of those who set the very lowest ones. You know, the guys you work for, Bobo.
You fucking cobag.
Also too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZnXnRq81rA
ReplyDeleteAs good a starting place as any, better than most.
ReplyDeleteI'll give you five bees for this comment.
ReplyDeleteUntil they start being hanged from lampposts with their mouths stuffed with grass, they are just going to keep blaming poor kids for picking the wrong uterus in which to gestate. It's really all they've got left at this point.
ReplyDeleteWho appointed this guy as the national scold?
ReplyDeleteTonight's homework: Eat a stick of butter.
ReplyDeleteShorter Brooks: "Sure, we came into your house 35 years ago and set the mattresses on fire. And we killed your dog, gave your kids brain damage, and took all your money away. But in the end, it's all your fault for letting us in to set the mattresses on fire. Now, if you'll just let us scold you for not having a house, everything will be better!"
ReplyDelete"Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires? "
ReplyDeleteYou can tell he's into that 50 Shades of Grey crap, too.
The package did arrive, thank you, and I ingested most of the contents as I guessed was reasonable. I haven't noticed a change in my feet but my breath has a pleasant chalky odor. ;)
ReplyDeleteActually, I have been away and haven't had the opportunity to use it yet. I'll let you know! Thanks!
The party of personal responsibility takes no responsibility for the actions of the party.
ReplyDeleteI was going to write a comment saying Brooks is a brilliant satirist and the column is actually about the 1%. Seems you beat me to it.
ReplyDeleteWhich was the style at the time.
ReplyDeletePeople got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.
ReplyDeleteYes, we used to have standards by which everyone was judged. For example, if you suffer from epilepsy, you would have been judged a witch or accursed 250 years ago. If you happened to be born a Native American with epilepsy, you would have been judged to have a special conduit to the gods. Of course, now, in our horrible non-judgmental society, we merely treat epileptics as though they have a medical condition. In fact, we should be burning them at the stake or having them counsel our tribes, depending.
Gimme that ol' time religion!
David Brooks understands that rich kids follow the rules. Because they are rewarded for doing so. Because if a rich kid follows the rules, that rich kid will be showered in praise and gifts, their path to the future will be smoothed and they will progress in every way that our society measures. People tell them that if they study hard and play nice, that good things will happen, and they do. Poor kids don't have that. Poor kids work hard and play nice, and still can't catch a break. There are no shiny toys, smart phones or college educations for poor kids. Poor kids learn that if they want a thing they are going to have to work harder and even if they can scrounge enough money for an iPhone or a Nintendo Wii U, that their parents or other authority figures may take that money for food or rent or anything else. Poor kids are suspicious of the rules because it becomes obvious very early that the rules aren't fair, and they were made that way for a reason, and that reason is to take everything of value from them and most everyone they know and deliver it to people who have more than they can spend in a dozen lifetimes. The system is designed to let some poor people who are workaholic paragons of virtue escape the cycle of poverty. The same drive that it takes to get to the lower middle class starting from poverty, could propel a middle class person into the 1%.
ReplyDeleteAmerica is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry.
ReplyDeleteIOW, rich people don't get to boss everyone else around enough.
It's your fault for not harshly condemning the person with the most flammable mattress.
ReplyDeleteReintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms
ReplyDeleteweren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were
destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that
one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit
of setting standards or understanding how they were set.
...said the man who's okay with torture.
Why would anyone listen to this goat-felcher anyway?
You don't expect Brooks to waste time with that do you? He's already wagging his finger. If that doesn't fix things, nothing will.
ReplyDeleteBrahv-fucking-oh!
ReplyDeleteNext it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.
ReplyDeleteIf only the rich would let the poor move into their neighborhoods so they could learn how to behave!
Oh, and I don't suppose that Brooks has heard about that kid from Texas who used "affluenza" as an excuse for a drunk driving accident in which he killed four people.
"...a plague of nonjudgmentalism." WTH?
ReplyDeleteI've known more than a few people born to privilege, and it never seemed to me that they tend to behave all THAT well.
ReplyDeleteIf David Brooks was right about all this, there never would have been a need for the invention of the word "affluenza."
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/05/us/texas-affluenza-teen/
And so, just what happens when twenty years of austerity and moral scolding and want produces a generation of ascetic zealots? What happens when there's a whole generation of hungry people that aren't bothered by working 12 shifts or missing a day's worth of food or sleeping in the cold every night? What do you supposed a generation of people who look down on every modern convenience as a decadent extravagance will do when there's still no jobs, no security and not a single reason to be loyal to a system set up to impoverish them? Just what is that kind of person going to think of David Brooks?
ReplyDeleteI can't say for sure, but I suppose that the answer would be pretty consistent no matter which of the rich and powerful people you ask.
ReplyDeleteThat answer would probably be "How DARE you ask me that!"
Perfect.
ReplyDeleteYeah!
ReplyDeleteIf creating a Gilded Age of economic desperation for the masses isn't bad behavior, I don't know what is.
The New York Times?
ReplyDeleteIn their never-ending quest to prove to the world they ain't no damn Liberals. Y'all can stop now, we get the idea...
ReplyDeleteA meme from the television show The Simpsons. Homer's aged father Abe tells rambling stories from his youth, one of which involves attaching an onion to his belt (which was the style at the time) before travelling to a neighboring town
ReplyDeleteSelf-appointed. They always are.
ReplyDeleteI don't know who they hope to impress anyway. The Right? No, they'll always consider the NYT to be "liberal media" no matter what. The Left? Not likely.
ReplyDeleteThe great muddle in the middle, I guess.
Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering about that myself.
ReplyDeleteSeems apropos, somehow -
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LZxelSc62Y
ReplyDeleteDo you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?
ReplyDeleteI like David Brooks' new Apple watch.
David Brooks is disgusted by the effects of 35 years of Conservative policies, demands that Conservative polices need to enforced to correct current social ills.
ReplyDelete+10 for cobag.
ReplyDeleteCCFICOBF
ReplyDeleteYes, probably so. I suppose I'd settle for folks like Brooks admitting that there is such a thing as privilege, and that the well-off can often commit the same sins as the poor without the same opprobrium, and more importantly, without suffering the same permanent, life-altering consequences. Jesus, sometimes the poor can't even make GOOD choices without suffering and being blamed for it, and yet the rich get second, third, countless chances and a shrug of the shoulders. I'd love if the Brookses of the world would see this and work to change it with all the energy they currently use to scold. I'd also like a pony. *sigh*
ReplyDeleteWell, if it doesn't, he can always pull mine...
ReplyDeleteIf you just teach parents old fashioned "morals", then having to work three jobs won't get in the way of raising children anymore. Got it.
ReplyDeleteWe have lost many things over the past number of decades that have greatly damaged if not destroyed our society for all but the rich, but they're generally not the things that David Brooks thinks they are. Then again, David Brooks has been an active cheerleader for those making sure that we lost these things (minimum wages, unions, more wage equality in general) so I guess it all makes sense, in Brooks land.
David Brooks ladies and gentlemen, the Professor Harold Hill for our time.
now it all comes back.
ReplyDeleteShort-term pleasures like food, or heat.
ReplyDeletethe well-off can often commit the same sins as the poor without the same opprobrium, and more importantly, without suffering the same permanent, life-altering consequences.
ReplyDeleteWell just look at the damage David suffered after smoking pot. Just like poor people!
Oh great, the clueless, pseudo-centrist nitwit pundit has decided he needs to become a clueless, pseudo-religious nitwit moral scold too. And here I thought he couldn't get anymore irritating.
ReplyDeletewhat's a drug deal or two among friends ;)
ReplyDeleteThe whole thing is disgusting and before I read everybody else's comments I just want to observe, no joking, that Brooks deserves to be curb stomped.
ReplyDeleteGet up off your knees
ReplyDeleteYou can wag your finger till your finger's sore
Shake your head till it shakes no more
I'd like to add something I just said over at First Draft. The recent case of the fine, upstanding, middle class valued, preacher and politician who "rehomed" his newly adopted daughters right into the hands of a rapist should give David Brooks pause in lecturing people at the bottom of the heap about how they can turn their lives around if they just "answer" the right questions the right way. Here are three kids, born into poverty and sexual abuse, who get picked up like pet chihuahua's by an upstanding, god fearing, hectoring, right thinking asshole who then drops them right back into the hands of a sexual predator and fucks off with the state money afforded him for the adoption.
ReplyDeleteEither "asking" and "answering" big questions like "are we living for others" isn't enough or upper class asholes with intact families turn out to be just as bad as lower class families with sexual abuse issues and a predatory attitude towards children.
Well they're also the party of fiscal responsibility. See, the way it works is, they squeeze the government down to helplessness, turning the world into a melee for cash -- now every individual is equally free! You can die hungry, or you can consolidate and expand your inherited good fortune! Your choice, bro! And really, when you have the same exact freedom as the Kochs, isn't it kind of on you when you don't measure up?
ReplyDeletePoor kids realize that they can be ticketed for things like "manner of walking on street" or "high grass and weeds" to help bolster the coffers of their community. Or shot for playing in a park.
ReplyDeleteReintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set. Next it will require holding people responsible. ... Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?
ReplyDeleteLove it! Looking forward to his explanation of how we apply his prescription to Wall Street. Round up the assholes and hold them responsible, Mr. Brooks? Or just continue the, you know, nonjudgmental thing?
Well, his redemption at the end of Act III would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath...
ReplyDeleteIf someone is handing out corrective curb stompings to the people who are actively making the USA worse, he doesn't even rank in the top 1000. Which is not to say a part of me wouldn't greet the news of some painful accident happening to David Brooks with a measure of satisfaction.
ReplyDeleteSome people believe that we're heading toward a feudal society of peasants and overlords where there is absolutely no hope for social mobility, and no opportunity for advancement for the very poor.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we are, and maybe we aren't. If that does happen, our new peasants will have an extra torment that the old peasants did not: the generally accepted myth that their poverty is THEIR OWN FAULT. That's what David Brooks offers: the idea that the peasants deserve their fate because they brought it upon themselves. It's just punishment for bad behavior.
For those at the bottom, that's adding insult to injury.
Its personal. I know its wrong. But I just don't think that the country should have to endure these scoldings on behalf of the wealthiest any longer.
ReplyDeleteWhat we mere Ausläder in flyover land forget is that the New York Times is still a New York City newspaper and Brooks is writing for Kings of Industry that have invaded the city. This is the chatter of Bank Pirates just leaving the hushed halls of the multi-million dollar apartment parties. We Proles should be grateful for the glipse afforded us...
ReplyDeleteLike you didn't know the exact episode where Abe first said "I don't understand this but I..."
ReplyDeleteTranslated Brooks: The poor must sacrifice for a future that my friends and I have taken away.
ReplyDelete"At the time all we had was yellow onions . . . ."
ReplyDeletedon't forget the boys from OUs former Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter
ReplyDeletemaybe they need to learn how to felch goats. Of course that shouldn't be taken literally, he really means any mammal kept for giving milk and eventually meat.
ReplyDeleteMore music, more often!
ReplyDeleteWhy that was over dickety-six years ago!
ReplyDeleteLet's face it: America The Beautiful has been looking for a source of moral rectitude and someone to instruct us, the heathen unwashed, in said rectitude ever since Cotton Mather died. David Brooks would clearly like to apply for the position.
ReplyDelete"Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely with David Brooks. We must condemn torture by our government and fraud by our elite banking industry and punish them to set an example to others who may choose to live by their example. Wait. What? That's not what the column is about?
"Our Kids." They're aren't goats, you fuck, they are human children!! That's half the problem right there, you need a new vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteNever is, izzit?
ReplyDeleteOnly a right-winger could think finger-wagging, complaining about how morally corrupt the poor are, and wishing for the good old days when everybody pretended to follow the same standard means he's "taken [my] column in a spiritual and moral direction of late"
ReplyDeleteI was trying to think in the manner of a satirical novelist and come up with a suitably ironic fate for Mr. Brooks. In 2017, Mr. Brooks has three things to celebrate: the election of President Cruz with supermajorities in both houses of Congress, the complete and total repeal of the ACA, and his marriage to his twenty-six year old second wife. While on his honeymoon/victory lap, he is struck by a drunk Sig Ep brother driving his dad's Mercedes AMG G63 ($161,595) and rendered a quadrapalegic. Mr. Brooks' own insurance had just been transferred to Anthim Health Care, headquartered in American Samoa, which mysteriously goes out of business forty minutes after his trauma bills are faxed in. For the next five years, he gets to watch as his wife spends his money on yoga retreats, movie-producer boyfriends, and fur-bearing trout farms while he moves further and further downward on the nursing-home food chain, until he ends up in the Etowah County Home, where he perishes after an orderly sells his artificial respirator on eBay for $250. His grave is unmarked.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a lovely, long winded, yiddish curse described in the book "Born to Kvetch" (which is a surprisingly brilliant philosophical inquisition (sic) into the world of yiddish as a language and as a mental state. At any rate the curse goes something like this:
ReplyDeleteMay you be blessed with a son
and such a son! a genius, and good with money, he brings honor to his family and fame to his village. Wherever he goes he is celebrated! And may he find the perfect bride and throw the biggest wedding ceremony the village has ever seen, and spend the most money on it, and honor his parents by inviting them to sit right down front in the church where the priest can bless them during the marriage ceremony.
privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of
ReplyDeleteself-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive
failures of leadership in government and industry.
Brooks has been banging this drum since 'BoBos in Paradise', in which the opening chapters are a lament for the Good Old Days when Republican WASPS reluctantly accepted the responsibility of running the country (out of self-sacrifice and noblesse oblige).
Apparently what the US is suffering from, worse than anything else, is an absence of condemnation.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see him (or anyone) define this "spirituality" crap.
ReplyDeleteOw. I think my heart just grew three sizes after reading that.
ReplyDeleteHis grave is unmarked.Oh, now you're letting him off easy.
ReplyDeleteI should have foreseen that Brooks' rightful owner, Charles P. Pierce, would have more and better to say on the subject.Well, that's a relief. I was afraid this was finally the David Brooks column that would force him to OD on Prestone.
ReplyDeleteApparently Brooks' "spiritual and moral direction" is simply going deeper up his own ass.
ReplyDeleteI bet he wishes he took a flashlight.
Funnily enough, some of the most socially conservative people I know are also the most nonjudgemental. But they're also deeply religious Orthodox Jews who take that part in halakha about how you can't possibly know everything about everyone and their motivations, so you shouldn't judge, seriously. Of course, that would never do for Brooks; it looks too much like the strawliberalism in his head.
ReplyDeleteAccording to right-wingers, finger-wagging IS spirituality.
ReplyDelete"Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations".....will be required to change the circumstances of their birth retroactively.
ReplyDeleteThere, fixed all those problems....
“I just love beating up somebody,” he told a member of Putnam’s team, “and making they nose bleed and just hurting them and just beating them on the ground.”
ReplyDeleteThe first response to these stats and to these profiles should be intense sympathy.
The actual first response will be more akin to the reaction Arlo Guthrie got when he went into his "Doc, I wanna kill" rant at the draft board.
At the end of his column Brooks praises moral revivals that have happened in the past, singling out "England in the 1830s and in the U.S. amid economic stress in the 1930s". In other words he puts the New Deal in the same class as the Malthusian Poor Law of 1834. It's enough to make one wonder about his vaunted moral intelligence.
ReplyDeleteNo, it's just that affluent white people stopped wagging their fingers at poor people.
ReplyDeleteExcept for those heroic few like Bobo.
What changed in the 80's that might have interfered with the lives of the poor?
ReplyDeleteMagnum P.I. came on the air in 1980. The poor were so mesmerized by Tom Selleck's mustache they have yet to recover
I would like to kick back and open a few cans of Duff with this comment.
ReplyDelete"Wait, why is the fire getting bigger? I just poured gasoline on it. The can says inflammable!"
ReplyDeleteThat thing about a fish rotting from the head down has completely escaped Brooks. Of course he's paid handsomely to ignore it.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about the middle, but they're definitely looking to further befuddle the muddled.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible this ultraviolent gentleman was, perhaps, lying to Putnam's team?
ReplyDeleteNo, of course not.
Oh, that smell from my storage shed? I just keep it as a convenience.
ReplyDelete#TheStorageShedWillRemainPrivate
Srsly. After 30+ yrs.* of inanely droning their always-wrong horsecrap it's time they shut up & went away.
ReplyDelete*Approx. 70 yrs. of John Birch Society-style drivel, if you want to go on beyond Reagan to his inspirations.
You punch the hippies in your mind you're paid to punch, not the hippies in your mind you'd like to be paid to punch.
ReplyDeleteRevealing. The moral revival of England in the 1830s created the societal conditions we now refer to as "Dickensian."
ReplyDeleteHere's Some Stupid For Lunch
ReplyDeletePierce's title alone was worth the click.
Brooks has a point. This is what happens when the poors slack off on their responsibility to uphold moral standards:
ReplyDeleteYou got the tone down so well, I wanted to sprinkle this comment over my garden for a minute.
ReplyDeleteI understand, he's not even close to being the worse, but the combination of total aloofness and witless arrogance is infuriating.
ReplyDeleteThis is just a desperate hail mary by Brooks to have people take him seriously again. By "people" I mean the .01% who own everything.
ReplyDeleteIts a regular feature.
ReplyDeleteOr he was headed straight for a leadership position with the RNC.
ReplyDeleteProbably not. The abyss also gazes.
ReplyDeleteWhen you gaze into the anus, it winks back.
ReplyDeleteWell, "the tendency to self segregate" is to "drunk, violent, sexually depraved and indifferent to the welfare of children" as the MRA complaint that women want the right to "rape, kill, and berate" men. One of these things is not like the other. Self segregation is clearly a sin left over from reading (one of the other books left on his bedside table: The Great Sort) and its really a pretty venal sin. Its like he had to throw something in there to get to a "I'm being fair to both sides" of the divide.
ReplyDelete"Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary."
ReplyDeleteWhat, you mean we haven't got one? How's this for a moral vocabulary:
1. "I could get you all fired in five minutes. I know your boss!"
2. "My father will pay this out, he has done it before. Dad paid $300,000 last time."
3. ""I will shpxvat own anyone on this flight; they are shpxvat peasants."
I know of no vocabulary more moral than that; it refers clearly to standards and the standards it refers to are distinct. I doubt a mere newsman could improve upon it, let him try ever so hard. After all, there are reasons why the prosperous among us have succeeded so greatly. There are reasons why they are where they are.
Remember?
...because of The War.
ReplyDelete"You've got to get over this unsanitary habit of sleeping on the floor. Why, next you'll be lying around in a hammock."
ReplyDeleteHow about the shitheads who sent a letter to Iran saying they wouldn't keep any treaties Obama's Administration made?
ReplyDeleteRemember the kid who got of lightly for drunk driving and killing a bunch of people... the one who "suffered" from affluenza? Yeah, the rich kids behave a lot better than the poor's kids.
ReplyDeleteAmerica is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry.
ReplyDeleteIOW, rich people don't get to boss the rest of us around enough.
Yes, the notion that conservatards are non-judgmental! Really! Like Rush sLimebag is non-judgmental? Like Pat Robertson? Like all the anti-abortion crazies?
ReplyDeleteRight up there with "May you have a house with 10 master bedrooms--and not be able to sleep well in any of them!"
ReplyDeleteIt's unmarked because it's at the bottom of a lake of urine from all of his "admirers" who stopped by to mark it.
ReplyDeleteThat's just it, though. You give poor people money and they just waste it on complete bullshit like food or housing--stuff that doe nothing for the economy. But you give money to someone who's wealthy like Our Miss Brooks and he puts that money in his bank and then off-shores it as quickly as possible to avoid taxes.
ReplyDeleteI highly recommend the book, btw. It was written by a guy who was raised in a largely litvak speaking yiddish canadian community, who also seems to have been a stand up comic, and who really has a grasp of the linguistic and philsophical issues encoded in the language. I learned so much about Hebrew, Yiddish, and the dark, sardonic, aspects of our world in reading it.
ReplyDeleteThat case making it through court was indeed a sign of the End Times.
ReplyDeleteI think this might work just as well for Friedman, with the addition that he is injured by an Uber driver gesticulating wildly while illustrating an important political point and then the fact that Uber doesn't properly insure their drivers, and the cannbal-capitalism of Uber's management, mean that they strip mine Friedman's reputation and clear cut his finances even as he's suing them to get an award that will cover his health care costs after the accident. The eBay thing definitely belongs more in a Friedman tragedy than Brooks.
ReplyDeleteAww - los hermanos Kinman ! I missed their glory days as Rank & File but caught 'em whenever I could when they played as Blackbird (brain-pulping, effects heavy electrogrunge) and then Cowboy Nation (yep, singing cowboys in the vein of Gene Autry and Don Edwards). Last time I worked in Burbank, I'd occasionally see Tony walking his dog when I went out forlunch.
ReplyDeleteSenator Snopes tried to shit on Obummer and ended up with shit running down his own leg.
ReplyDeleteIn any failure this massive, you've got to suspect the hidden hand of Bill Kristol. Just waiting for it to come out that Sen. Snopes was taking his advice.
your wish, m'lady
ReplyDelete"If that doesn't fix things, nothing will." Well, that and a tax cut. It's the bailing wire and duct tape of policy.
ReplyDeleteYep...as always:
ReplyDeleteConservatives whine
And Conservatives bitch:
"Our rich are too poor!
And our poor are too rich!"
Oh yeah? C'mere a minute!
ReplyDeleteMister we could use a man like Edward Murdstone again.
ReplyDeleteAmong other things.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiWIjWh3MNA
And to make matters worse, the head of the agency intervened and approved the adoption over the objections of the social workers who'd acted as the girls' foster parents. They didn't think Harris and his wife had the proper training to deal with the girls' problems.
ReplyDeleteBut Harris was the vice-chair of the committee that controlled the agency's funding, so he got his way.
Bobo's choice of eras of "moral repair" is kind of telling. If anything, the corpus of Dickens' writing would suggest that the Victorian Age was a cesspit of duplicity and hypocrisy; that, despite the trimming of the language in an attempt to eradicate tendencies to public lust, the main players were disgustingly similar to today's tenth-of-one-percenters, i.e., scumbags in expensive suits.
ReplyDeleteAnd the notion that the Great Depression was somehow a rebirth of moral character in the nation seems intended to obscure the by-now obvious fact that the moral failures were in large part those of the same tenth-of-one-percenters, and they didn't so much return morality to everyday life as to work, relentlessly and tirelessly, to undo the rather straightforward rules government imposed on them to protect us from them, a task they have very nearly succeeded in accomplishing today.
What Bobo is suggesting, I think, is some sort of variant on Andrew Mellon's dictum about depressions, that depressions "purge the rottenness out of the system," and that in depressions ":assets return to the their rightful owners," and, of course, by "rightful owners," Mellon means other bankers and the wealthy. So, when Bobo starts nattering on about the Great Depression as a time of moral rejuvenation, he means, mostly, that the depression put an end to all that high living of the `20s, when ordinary people imagined they were well-off enough to enjoy life. Deprivation and starvation were morally uplifting for the people most in need of moral instruction (the Elect being exempt, of course, from such drastic measures, as they certainly were during those dark days).
What Our Mr. Brooks ultimately conceives of as "moral rejuvenation" is a feudalism enforced by illiteracy, innumeracy and an all-powerful church, with wise men such as himself guiding the gilded hand of the aristocracy in all matters social and political. As with so many conservatives, Bobo is, deep down in his heart, a courtier and a monarchist.
Almost reminiscent of Jay Gould: "I could hire one half of the people to kill the other half."
ReplyDeleteAnd to think that this "moral vocabulary" is that of a more or less minor heir to the Hilton fortune, a poncy little wanker with money and a chip on his shoulder. Gawd help us when the heirs of Mark Zuckerberg come of age.
Posterity will ne'er survey
ReplyDeleteA nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
What Bobo is suggesting, I think, is some sort of variant on Andrew
ReplyDeleteMellon's dictum about depressions, that depressions "purge the
rottenness out of the system,"
In a similar vein, whatever happened to the return to pagan virtues of stoicism and temperance and self-reliance in the face of adversity, which (according to Kristol and Kagan back in the 90s) would happen as soon as America emerged from its long nightmare of peace and prosperity, and found some new enemies?
The floor is a slippery slope? I am disappoint; I was assured that it was a level playing-field.
ReplyDeleteBecause if a rich kid follows the rules, that rich kid will be showered in praise and gifts
ReplyDeleteAnd if that rich kid doesn't follow the rules, he'll be acquitted on grounds of affluenza.
Not recognising Simpsons' quotes?
ReplyDeleteThat's a paddlin'!
People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?
ReplyDeleteThis all sounds good until you realize he's really lecturing a toddler who wants nothing more than to take off running, crying all the way.
I got your "reintroducing norms" right here:
ReplyDeleteThis is certainly my take on Brooks's recent columns. His insistence that we need to return to the old-fashioned morals means that he's getting divorced against his will.
ReplyDeleteHeh. You can make a puppet say anything.
ReplyDeleteAnd Robin Masters gave Magnum unlimited access to his Ferrari. You think some rich guy would step up today to help a poor, struggling P.I. with his transportation needs? Hell no... it'd be "Fuck you, moocher... take the bus!"
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's the Brooks Corollary, that time in the misty golden American past of the Great Depression:
ReplyDelete"We were poor, but we didn't know it because we were ALL poor. But we looked out for each other, and shared what little we had with our neighbors, and gave sandwiches to the hobos who would come to the back door, and made sure that kids respected their elders, elders who weren't too proud to take ANY job, no matter how menial."
Doncha just long for those days? Sheldon Adelson does....
I'm stealing that.
ReplyDeleteNext it will require holding people responsible. So David you're saying that we should toss the Bush cabal into jail for the rest of their lives, or, perish the thought all the top bankers on Wall Street who destroyed the economy? I hear ya /s
ReplyDeleteOh, I remember! "In its majesty the law equally forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg on the streets, or steal a loaf of bread."
ReplyDeleteAre you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?
ReplyDeleteAnd the self-awareness award goes to...
The Republican plan for America:
ReplyDeletehttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rBlaOMiSqyM
Today, Master would indeed be handing the keys to Magnum P.I., except "P.I." stands for "Polish It."
ReplyDelete"Magnum, Polish It!"
Like that time I went to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe. So I took the ferry to Morganville. which is what they called Shelbyville in those days...
ReplyDeleteUbi sunt the mores of yesteryear?!
ReplyDelete[wails, rends garment]
It's a crime that the Dils never recorded an album. When they had John Silver on drums they were one of the best live bands ever, like the Clash, the Who, and the Everly Brothers all playing at once.
ReplyDeleteThat's why ya gotta sleep in the bleachers, or under them, if you prefer.
ReplyDeleteAnd Magnum polishing and detailing Master's Ferrari would be a hit reality show, with lot's of tie-ins to car care products.
ReplyDeleteAnd for ordinary, everyday purposes (Dress British, speak Yiddish) here's a good Yiddish glossary:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pass.to/glossary/Default.htm
We already have a moral vocabulary. It includes terms such as "rich asshole,""war criminal," "bankster," "racist cop," "Washington lobbyist," etc., etc. Highly descriptive and useful for making judgments.
ReplyDeleteWell if you look at the overall conviction rate of rich people charged with crimes vs. poor people charged with crimes, the conclusion is obvious: rich people simply behave better. Nothing to do with quality of or access to legal representation, nosiree.
ReplyDeletePut in your ear plugs, put on your eye shades, you know where to put the cork.
ReplyDeleteI have barely got over Pat Robertson's vegetable bondage.
ReplyDeleteBrooksy don't get very far into the internet does he.
ReplyDeleteDavid Brooks: How can anyone so full of it be such a big success? This latest column is his worst yet, which means it's awful.
ReplyDeleteBobo is all for big, TED-talk-type lateral thinking and third ways and such, until he catches a non-caucazoid teenager passing the sidewalk cafe where he's going over the canned talking points that he's going to spout on his weekly NPR gig as if they just sprang full-blown from his mind, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, looking at his laptop in a manner that might be interpreted as covetous. Then he detects the chill touch of "social chaos" nibbling at his privilege and it's time to rebrand compassionate conservatism, which in this iteration would seem to involve The Man expressing regret for keeping you down.
ReplyDeleteThat... makes a surprising amount of sense.
ReplyDeleteThe amount of rage that the Harris case creates in me is indescribable.
ReplyDeleteRage mixed with intense nausea.
ReplyDelete{late reply; sorry}
ReplyDeleteThe outcome in that case wouldn't have been entirely favorable for Jay Gould because he'd be left with the more bloodthirsty (and greedier) half of the people, so maybe that's why he didn't follow through with his plan. On the other hand, he could have just kept setting half-of-the-remaining-half of the people against one another with the promise of lavish rewards in the event of success, until eventually he was left with one bicameral dude who'd keep trying to slit his own throat with his right hand {symbolism} while his left just barely fended it off — Gould stuffing both back pockets with cash in the meantime, of course.
(Gould would find himself greatly edified by this sight and would regret having no one with whom to share it.)
I know this reply is late, but if there is one episode of The Simpsons which is truly and absolutely essential it's "Last Exit to Springfield" (from which the above comes). Or "Marge vs. the Monorail." Or "Cape Feare." Or . . . oh, fuck it, just watch all of Season 4.
ReplyDeleteWe suffer far more from the undeserving rich than from the undeserving poor.
ReplyDeleteWhat is more destructive of norms than capitalism's version of the Market?
ReplyDelete'Creative destruction' is just the Right's 'add a purr-word to make it all better' spin on 'All that is solid melts into air.'.
Just thinking of the open-air, high-up, cell in "A Song of Ice and Fire".
ReplyDeleteThey want to live in Singapore, I guess? Elections that are over before they start, everyone is extremely polite, or else.
ReplyDelete