David Brooks: Our Pretty White Heads Waste Too Much Time on Politics:
One day, when the mixed race Americans who survive the zombie apocalypse, started, no doubt, by the early failures of the Obamacare website, are looking to piece together a cultural history of this nation from the ruins of the United States, they might come across what David Brooks wrote today. Oh, how they will laugh as they realize that they have discovered what might be the purest example of the narrow, narcissistic thinking of the wealthy white male of the last days of America.
Because, truly, in his "column" (if by "column," you mean, "the delicately farted emanations of a powdered asshole") today, Brooks tells us that (really and no shit), "[P]olitics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun."
Somewhere, a poor black woman in Arkansas read that on her break between her second and third part-time jobs cleaning toilets and thought, "Oh, yes, David, I'm definitely more inclined to think about what I'll say about Wittgenstein over champagne on the yacht off East Hampton this summer just as soon as I figure out how the fuck I'm gonna feed my kids and pay my rent, you elitist cockhead."
See, unless you're David Brooks or allowed in the clubs he belongs to, every moment of your day is political on a deeply personal level. Food stamps cut? That's political shit not affecting Brooks or the Brooksians. State not expanding Medicaid because your governor is an Obama-hating twat? Better fuckin' believe that's political.
Brooks reaches some kind of fever pitch of self-parody where he masturbates to "intelligent television talk" on the TV. "Shows would put interesting people together, like Woody Allen with Billy Graham," he informs us, "and they’d discuss anything under the sun." You know when that incredibly entertaining interview occurred? In 1969. You wanna go back to Stonewall riots and the daily carnage reports out of 'Nam? You wanna go back to Bloody Sunday and Soviet nuke threats?
That doesn't even get into the fact that the people who were watching Dick Cavett or Tom Snyder or Billy Buckley have these oh-so-intelligent conversations were mostly David Brookses because everyone else was trying the fuck to survive.
Brooks is right about one thing: the best government is a boring, functioning one. So why doesn't he talk to the motherfuckers in his party about getting back to that?
You gotta hope that one day David Brooks wakes up as a recent immigrant to the United States, his hands full of callouses and cuts from the day labor, living in a three-room apartment with ten or more others, his wife pregnant and his teenage son trying to go to school. Maybe he could tell everyone not to worry about politics so much before he's dragged to a detention center and beaten by guards.
