…and our BoBo is a past master of such self-and-other-abuse.
His column yesterday is sufficiently egregious, I’m going to indulge in way too many words to say that Brooks has written a piece of disengenous crap that ultimately adds up to yet another distraction from the wreck his heroes are making of the nation.
There — just saved you a 3,000 word or so excursion into BoBo-bashing. That said, let’s set off, shall we?…
The TL:DR of Brooks’ piece, titled “America: The Redeemer Nation” (sic!), is that the US used to have a national narrative that could unify us all: that of an escape from oppression to a new state of grace in a new land. We’ve lost that story now, Brooks says, but we can solve that if only we recalled America’s unique role as a place of “redemptions, of injury, suffering and healing fresh starts” — we would reclaim a history that could, if embraced, once again act as a light among the nations.
Yeah, he really writes that.
You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, that to construct this argument, Brooks has to ignore almost all the relevant history. So, for a few paragraphs I’ll fisk out some of that nonsense, before looking at what he’s really trying to do in this wholly craptastic attempt at myth-making.
Let’s start at the top. He writes:
We once had a unifying national story, celebrated each Thanksgiving. It was an Exodus story. Americans are the people who escaped oppression, crossed a wilderness and are building a promised land. The Puritans brought this story with them. Each wave of immigrants saw themselves in this story.
No.
The history of the Thanksgiving celebration in the US is many things, but it is not, for most of its history, an echo of Puritan religiousity. The story of the Plymouth thanksgiving of 1621 doesn’t even reach print until the mid 18th century, and the various thanksgiving observances called by, say, the Continental Congress have essentially nothing to do with any Exodus narrative, as in this one, drafted by Sam Adams and promulgated by the Congress in 1777:
And it having pleased him in his abundant Mercy, not only to continue to us the innumerable Bounties of his common Providence; but also to smile upon us in the Prosecution of a just and necessary War, for the Defense and Establishment of our unalienable Rights and Liberties; particularly in that he hath been pleased, in so great a Measure, to prosper the Means used for the Support of our Troops, and to crown our Arms with most signal success…
Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation transformed the various and regional thanksgiving traditions into an annual and national holiday. Unsurprisingly, given the time and place, Exodus wasn’t on the menu:
In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom.
And, just to beat this dead horse some more, the final transformation of the holiday into its current form came as Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 tried to fix its observance on the fourth — and not the last — Thursday in November, thus setting off a die-hard rejectionist stance in states like Texas, which until 1956 continued to celebrate the day on the fifth Thursday of those Novembers that sported such an excess. Roosevelt’s reason for imposing such a rule? So that in the ongoing depression, the Christmas shopping season would run as long as possible.
In that context, Brooks opening gambit is just a lazy fiction. Yes: the “First Thanksgiving” has been used as an all purpose rhetorical set piece. No, the US immigrant/redemption story isn’t contained within it, not at its origins, nor in any of the evolution of that tradition as actual Americans have developed it over four centuries.
Onto paragraph two:
But we have to admit that many today do not resonate with this story. This story was predicated on the unity of the American people.
No. First of all, and most obviously, this story, and Brooks’ particular (and familiar) gloss on it excludes African Americans. The “unity” Brooks asserts never existed, if you take all of those who crossed the ocean to dispossess those already here. Brooks acknowledges as much in the next sentence:
But if you are under 45, you were probably taught an American history that, realistically, emphasizes division — between the settlers and the natives, Founders and their slaves, bosses and the workers, whites and people of color. It’s harder for many today to believe this is a promised land. It seems promised for the privileged few but has led to marginalization for the many.
OK: so here Brooks acknowledges that a deeper engagement with the actual facts of history explodes a comfortable myth. What’s the problem? Well…over to Bobo’s next insertion of foot in mouth:
The narratives that appeal today are predicated on division and disappointment.
“Division and disappointment?” How about honesty and justice? Seriously: is it divisive to say that slavery was central to American history and that it had terrible consequences?
That is to say: who does it divide, and on what basis — and how should we understand a living history in which saying slavery was bad is up for debate in certain quarters? It takes a special intellectual dishonesty to dismiss as divisive claims of attention and historical clarity on such matters as the Native holocaust and the enslaved.
Brooks’ “argument” (sic) gets worse:
The multicultural narrative, dominant in every schoolhouse, says that America is divided into different biological groups and the status of each group is defined by the oppression that it has suffered.
I count at least four lies there. I’d say mistakes, or falsehoods, but that would do too little honor to Brooks. He’s clever enough to know what he’s doing, to understand the meaning of the words he strings together.
Lie 1: “The multicultural narrative…” There is only one? A gospel or a manifesto? Horseshit.
Lie 2: “dominant in every schoolhouse…” Oh yeah? Show your work, you hack.
Lie 3: “says that America is divided into different biological groups….” What? I mean wut?
This recalls the Brooks of some years back when he was eugenics-curious and dallied with HBD folks in asserting group outcomes had genetic roots and/or were so deeply embedded in “culture” as to be as deterministic as a gene for coding skill would be. In any event, as the parent of a kid who is in his senior year at a high school right in the heart of godless liberal country, I can tell you that not once has one of his history teachers claimed explanatory power for the biology of Germans vs. Irish, Jews vs. Christians, blacks vs. whites and so on. It’s a nonsense claim, but dangerous nonetheless — and it is arrant bullshit as both a description of what goes on in modern accounts of American history and as a way to think about conflict in that historical sequence.
Lie 4: “the status of each group is defined by the oppression that it has suffered.” This is as much word salad as it is a simple falsehood. What does he mean by “status”? Place in society? Moral hierarchy? Precedence entering the room on Thanksgiving?
In context, he’s pretty clearly complaining that African Americans, for example, might have a claim on society given the lasting consequences of their historical circumstances, but such claims aren’t a marker of status. Rather, a more nuanced understanding of our national story than “the melting pot” and “a city on a hill” compels at least some recognition that different communities and different times have wildly divergent historical experiences. Given that history as written and taught is always about what the present in which that writing and teaching occurs finds most urgent, that’s not a failed national story; rather it reflects the process of creating a more complete such story.
To continue!
The populist narrative, dominant in the electorate, says that America is divided between the virtuous common people and the corrupt and stupid elites.
OK. More BS. To begin…what’s this “dominant in the electorate” effluvium? To repeat, wearily, Hillary won the popular vote. The polls since show that the Trump electorate, though way too large for comfort is not even close to a plurality. There is exactly no evidence that a “dominant” majority of the electorate has succumbed to or is committed to Trumpian populism.
And, of course, more important, this is merely a Brooksian twist on the “economic anxiety” trope that suggests that the Trump/GOP voter sees as its core motivation class conflict. Brooks cannot stand the fact that Trump’s great political move was to divert such “common man” identification into race and religion-centered bigotry. There’s no testament to virtue even in the seemingly endless New York Times sequence of stories on WWC voters.
Rather, at best, there are replays of a Hunger Games approach to social life: I gotta get mine, more of it and before those people get theirs. IOW, as we’ll see in a moment, Brooks wants a particular kind of national reconciliation, and in order to do so he has to pretend that most of what is genuinely dividing the nation isn’t what it clearly appears to be.
Back to Brooks. The common man and the multiculturalist have left us in a pickle, facing a problem that is more fundamental than any particular question of politics or policy. What is that existential crisis?
Today, we have no common national narrative, no shared way of interpreting the flow of events. Without a common story, we don’t know what our national purpose is. We have no common set of goals or ideals.
This reads to me mostly as civic masturbation. “National purpose” is one of those phrases that seems pregnant with meaning, but is enormously tricky once you get up close. This is the rhetoric not of nations but of empire…and as such it’s a way of asking folks to agree to/acquiesce in getting lots of people killed. When genteel GOP apologists come asking you to buy into goals, check your wallet, and whether or not their kids have preemptively managed to sign up for the Texas National Guard.
Anyway, Brooks’ solution to the impertinant fact that actual history doesn’t fit comfortably into myths of power is to come up with a new national narrative. How to do so?
Well, he writes,
One way to identify one is to go back to one of the odd features of our history. We are good to our enemies after wartime. After the revolution, we quickly became allies with Britain. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson was humane to our European enemies. After World War II, America generously rebuilt Germany and Japan.
Umm…”After the revolution, we quickly became allies with Britain” — except for that unpleasantness in 1812. To speak of an alliance with Britain before 1917 is…stupid.
Umm…”After World War I, Woodrow Wilson was humane to our European enemies…” I’m guessing Brooks has heard of the Treaty of Versailles. There’s plenty to debate there, but no reasonable observer would assert that the war guilt clause and the reparations requirements were “humane.”
Umm…”After World War II, America generously rebuilt Germany and Japan.” If history as a rigorous discipline, and not just series of Hallmark card cartoons, actually mattered to Brooks he might have recalled that the Marshall Plan was conceived not as charity but rational self interest: in the emerging conflict with the Soviet Union, restored counter-balances were essential.
That’s leaving aside those smaller wars we’ve fought for power and gain. Were we generous to Mexico after 1848? To Spain fifty years later? To those who lost the Indian Wars? To pretend the US has not (and won’t continue to) act as a great power is make Brooks’ readers less informed than they were at the head of the column. Or to put this another way: Brooks is asking for a national story that cloaks the actual motives behind American policy in pious bullshit. We’ve done that plenty, and I’d advice BoBo to spend some time here before he asks us to do that again.
But I digress. Onwards:
Elsewhere, enmities last for centuries. But not here.
Umm.
Umm.
Umm.
Yo! David: check this out. If we leave our enmities behind, tell me why Robert E. Lee still rides in so many town squares and courthouse entrances. Or if you want a more personal account of lasting division, perhaps this would be common-man enough for you.
Brooks is, of course, undeterred by the pure fabulism of his essay at this point. If he says it, it must be so!
The story of America, then, can be interpreted as a series of redemptions, of injury, suffering and healing fresh starts.
That “can be” is doing a ton of work there, isn’t it.
Look at the mottos on our Great Seal: “A New Order for the Ages” and “Out of Many, One.”
Well, yeah — but the question of whether those claims stand close scrutiny is kind of what this whole piece was supposed to be about. Those mottos are the question, not the answer.
In the 18th century divisions between the colonists were partially healed. In the 19th century divisions between the free and enslaved were partially healed. In the 20th, America partially healed the divisions between democracy and totalitarianism.
And again, “partially” is taking on a heavy load there.
In the 21st, we have healing fresh starts still to come.
It would be nice to think so. Can’t happen if we don’t come to grips why prior healing has been so consistently incomplete (at best).
Brooks closes by invoking Lincoln and his second inaugural address. It is, as you might imagine, a partial and motivated reading. I won’t go word-by-word through it (hallelujah–ed.). Rather, I’ll just note this one turn in his exegesis:
Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years. The scourge of war, which purges this sin, falls on both sides.
That’s almost right. Lincoln famously said near the end of the speech that
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
So, yes, slavery was an offense whose consequences strike both sides. But Brooks ignores that part of this speech in which Lincoln was equally and absolutely clear on the why and the who of the start of the terrible war:
Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
That is to say: to assert Lincoln saw no absolute right and wrong in the causes of either side in the war is worse than foolish. It is to choose, deliberately, to pursue unity at the expense, say, of that peculiar interest whose legacy is still so much with us, so much at the heart of Trump’s appeal.
Brooks elsewhere deprecates moral relativism, the “wet” tendency to try to see a matter from the other’s point of view. Here, he’s all in on the idea that it’s not possible to decide where the moral balance lay back in 1864:
We cannot really understand the course of events or God’s will. Therefore, we can’t be certain of our notion of what’s right, or rigid in clinging to abstract principle or dogmatic ideology. Everything should be open to experiment, flexibility and maneuvering.
So, Jim Crow was just an experiment. Japanese internment, an experiment? And so on…
Yes. Moral certainty gets us Roy Moore. But to see in Lincoln a justification for eliding the experiences Brooks derides at the start of his essay, that “multicultural narrative,” is both feckless as a reading of that one speech and the tell that gives away his whole game.
That is: Brooks knows, none better, of the bankruptcy of the Republican party and its program. Its policies are kleptocratic (and he can read well enough to know this). Its patrons and driving engines are oligarchs, a category of people that is in itself inimical to any kind reading of an American democracy that can act as a beacon. Its fundamental popular appeal turns on race and divisions of all kinds, and has since at least Nixon’s Southern Strategy of 1968. What we’re seeing now is the mature form of that pathology, not a sudden, de novo outbreak.
The loss of a national story, the destruction of any core claim of unity derives from that real, event-by-event sequence of political history. The Republicans aren’t the sole source of either disunion or policy failure. But the two parties aren’t the same — just as Lincoln was, eloquently, subtly, pointing out in the address Brooks can’t bring himself to confront in full.
In the end, this column, as howlingly crappy as it is, remains nothing new. Brooks hates politics. He loathes the fact that the grubby choices we make actually matter.
He’d rather preserve the basic power structure by rendering the messy business of deciding who pays taxes and what we get for them something most of us don’t need to trouble our pretty little heads about.
And that’s why he writes such piffle about a national story, and how sad it is that an intellectually rigorous history makes the most comfortable stories untenable. All that is really just Brooks saying “pay no attention to what the GOP is doing to you — and by no means ask for a cigarette after.”
Alright. That’s enough. Rather more than, I’d say.
Have fun, y’all.
Images: possibly Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, The Laughing Fool, c. 1500.
Jan (Godfrey Jervis) Gordon, HMS Castor. Wounded Received After the Battle of Jutland, 31st May 1916, 1918
PhoenixRising
Wellll…no. If you’re under 55, you were taught using the books bought for Boomers, in the tattered schools that were no longer being generously funded by taxpayers, because the Republican party told white people that they could have a democracy with universal suffrage at a tax rate no state can sustain itself on.
But let’s not get distracted by facts!
Villago Delenda Est
I have long held that the day that Brooks’ exsanguinated, broken body is found in an alley is a day the world will be a much better place.
Patricia Kayden
My blood pressure was great this morning but after hearing about that NYT fluff piece on an actual Neo Nazi, it’s spiked back up. Dang. I need a vacation from the news.
As to Brooks, I can’t read his foolishness right now.
karensky
Thanks for that analysis, Tom. For some insane reason I decided to read the David fucking Brooks piece after reading drift glass’s piece on it. I thought my head was going to spin off my neck.
He is just such a turd and he can’t write.
Also, you pictures are just perfect.
efgoldman
Anyone who reads Bobo or his paper, and takes either seriously, deserves it when their grey mush squirts out their aars, deserves it.
Cheryl Rofer
The “biological groups” thing really hit me. I doubt that the cultural divisionist hippies he is excoriating are advocating eugenics. That anyone could even think of an accusation like this in today’s world is kind of amazing.
But my kittehs told me what Thanksgiving is really about. It is the celebration of the victory of small mammals over the dinosaurs.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
Why is he still employed? I demand justification from the NYT. I really want to want to hear their reasoning.
efgoldman
Hey, Tom, are your kids old enough to be bringing significant other home for the big family holidays? Can be wonderful and really scary at the same time.
p.a.
hey bobo, we already have a history of redeemers:
~ Study.com
Mnemosyne
We are all aware that “elites” is the new code word for Black people, right? That’s how friggin’ Lady de Rothschild was able to go on cable news in 2008 and complain about Obama being an “elitist.”
Steve in the ATL
@efgoldman:
Well said, new poster–hope you stick around and post some more!
raven
@efgoldman: How’s it hangin?
Dia
Awesome rant. You read Brooks so we don’t have to. Thank you!
Jeffro
Wasn’t there some murderous group of mutant-haters in the X-MEN called the Redeemers that went around trying to kill any mutants, good or evil, that were found?
(or is that just the plot of every X-Men arc?)
DougJ
Good title
Steve in the ATL
@Jeffro: is that the one where the mutants were defended by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dweezil Zappa?
Jeffro
Also, apologies if this has already been linked to in an earlier thread, but I thought this was fascinating: We Know How to Turn Conservatives Into Liberals – Help Them Ramp Down Their Fears
(which explains hella EVERYTHING Fox Snooze puts on air: it’s all fear, Fear, FEAR with them, all the time)
jl
This particular kind of Brooks column isn’t supposed to mean anything, other than to smooth things over and deliver some very genteel and discreet disses towards liberals, so tearing it apart is a little unfair.
But…
” The multicultural narrative, dominant in every schoolhouse, says that America is divided into different biological groups and the status of each group is defined by the oppression that it has suffered. ”
Yeesh. OK, that is bad.
M. Bouffant
Schmuck can’t even type. Shouldn’t the story resonate w/ “many today”, rather than “many today do not resonate w/ this story”? Everything he types is 180° wrong/backward.
feckless
We don’t do moon shots.
We don’t do hoover dams, or manhattan projects.
We cut taxes.
A simple mantra that is dogma and theology in one,and it is our national story. We don’t like to pay our bills. We don’t render unto caesar what is caesar’s. We don’t have an uplifting national narrative because there is nothing noble about being a country of freeloading deadbeats.
Nearly half of the voting population believes that the highest possible aspiration of our government of the people by the people is under-funding government to the point of societal suicide.
How do you compromise with apocalypse hungry morons?
JanieM
Go Tom!!!! A phenomenal righteous rant of a fisking.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)
I’d say only that Wilson isn’t to blame for Versailles. He did his best to head off a punitive peace, but he got outvoted by the other allies. He was indefensibly wrong about race but he was a long way ahead of his time as far as staving off future wars goes.
Eric S.
@Steve in the ATL: This new guy had some insights.
Viva BrisVegas
“Once again”?
American mythology really doesn’t play well outside of the US.
And Congress.
Jeffro
Btw this guy needs a Balloon Juice lifetime membership card: Here’s Why We Won’t Visit The White House-Steve Kerr
Just say it, Steve: we’re not going there while Shit Midas is in office.
bcw
Bobo found his sinecure comforting the comfortable. Long ago he made the decision to stay on the Republican party train as it went deeper and deeper into the crazy hatred swamp and now has no way out. He has two columns: Trump isn’t a real Republican which he alternates with a deeply shallow psychobabble designed to wrap the flag and razzledazzle of myth around the stinking paranoid mess that is Trumps America.
JanieM
@M. Bouffant:
And doesn’t the NYfuckingTimes have editors who should catch shit like that? Is Brooks too important to have editors look at his stuff? Or does the NYT just use spell-check these days?
Baud
@Steve in the ATL: Do not feed the trolls.
azlib
Good read, Tom. Bobo’s probelm is he has a really simplified and often incorrect view of our history. Our conceit which gets us in trouble is we are somehow exceptional among nations when nothing could be further from the truth.
Chyron HR
@M. Bouffant:
No, the story is fine, it’s all you dirty plebeians who need to change your attitude to match it.
Dave
@Jeffro: Interesting. Not new to me but interesting. Take COS Kelley for instance. I think he’s a great example of the link between fear and conservatism. I’ve thought ever since I heard him discussing his awareness of the threats to civilization that are out there and how terrible it is as if civilization isn’t always threatened and isn’t always hanging by a thread. He seems to think this is new it’s not. (While ignoring that the people he’s backing are doing nothing but making those threats worse and eht even acknowledge the most severe genuine one; climate change) (It’s also possible that this was a wholly cynical comment on his part; that he knows better but wants there to be more fear because it’s in his perceived interest.)
Johannes
The picture says it all. But the words were deeply satisfying. Thanks, Tom.
Major Major Major Major
Reminds me of that book of 90’s Rorty lectures that were going around after the election (called Achieving Our Country I think). He has a section about how our science fiction is failing us, holding up Snow Crash as an example of how we value “smug knowingness” or something over “striving”, unlike the way it was in his imaginary history of sci-fi.
danielx
You could have stopped right there.
smintheus
Along the same lines, did anybody bother to read Friedman’s bizarre piece arguing that M. bin Salman is an Arab Spring reformer type, rather than the ruthless autocrat everyone else recognizes him for? It’s the Platonic ideal of a Friedman column: willful perversity in service to the powerful, cloaked in the guise of naivité.
Mary G
I love it when Tom takes Bobo apart.
Brachiator
Brooks is so full of shit that a battalion of plumbers could not clear this rhetorical sewage. And he is clearly in sync with the Trumpian/John Kelly insistence that if non-whites, sassy women, transgender people just STFU and go along with the narrative pushed by their white betters, then all will be well and the White People in Charge might, just might, include them in the neoconfederate vision of New America.
Fuck him.
Villago Delenda Est
@smintheus: Utter fucking idiocy. The only way Saudi will “spring reform” is if the House of Saud-Wahhabi alliance is annihilated.
smintheus
@Villago Delenda Est: In six months’ time Friedman will be telling us (I look forward to this future column) that the next 6 months will show whether the reforms are taking hold.
Achrachno
Does Bobo know how the rest of us feel about him? Tom, you should send a copy of this to him just to be sure he sees it.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Villago has the right idea for this dunce.
Bill Arnold
@Cheryl Rofer:
Well, Brooks could conceivably have left that as an irritating little trap, since male-female differences are significant. Probably not though.
E.g. The landscape of sex-differential transcriptome and its consequent selection in human adults (7 February 2017)
Anyway, to the original post by Tom Levenson, delightful. Smiled.
Princess
Bobo is getting worse. I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but there it is. His new marriage is obviously taking a toll.
Amir Khalid
Bobo misunderstands everything he sees or hears. His thinking is shallow and incoherent, his writing sloppy. All this was also true of Bill Kristol. Kristol failed his one-year probation at NYT only because every single one of his columns was full of obvious errors of fact, and the NYT found it embarrassing to run corrections on his work twice a week. (And Kristol is a magazine editor!)
I guess Bobo’s errors are not so embarrassing because they are (mis)interpretations of historical fact and thus (very) superficially defensible, rather than glaring errors of fact. Also, Brooks will have built up a fan base by now that believes he’s a proper smart and serious writer, just as “reality”-TV fans believe der Scheißgibbon is a proper smart and serious business leader.
J R in WV
Tom,
Glad you read David’s screed so I won’t have to. Really good take down, too. Brooks is obviously not all there mentally, hasn’t been for a long time. No doubt partly why his first marriage broke up. Suddenly woke up and his wife was an old woman!!! Never noticed that he was an older guy too.
I hope the new wife continues to run him crazier than he already is!!
And sudden eugenics? Where did that come from? Race-based classification? Crazy!!!
Take care up there in snowy NE !!!
JR down south, kinda.
Steeplejack
@Princess:
Sapping his precious bodily fluids. He’s probably not drinking his rainwater and pure grain alcohol.
brettvk
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.): He also caught Spanish flu at the peace talks and was so sick his aides thought he’d been poisoned. He suffered an abrupt mental change after he fell ill and suddenly agreed to punitive measures he’d previously opposed.
Amir Khalid
@J R in WV:
Hey! Brooks is four weeks younger than me.
eemom
What ever happened to the thing about him not writing about politics anymore? Did I hallucinate that?
eemom
@Amir Khalid:
The relative meaning of “old” aside, I’ll never forget my dismayed astonishment when I found out that he’s only a year older than I am. He LOOKS older than death; but the worst part is, I can’t assume he’ll get there before I do.
Luthe
@eemom: I think that was George Will. Same dumb look, same dumb glasses, same dumb writing, only Will has a thing for bow ties and baseball.
Jeffro
@Dave: It shuts their brains down…makes them pliable to the appeals of demagogues…makes them stick with only ‘System 1’, their gut, (h/t Daniel Kahneman) and never engage ‘System 2’, their analytic processes.
It’s why Fox is all about MS-13 these days. Say what, who, huh? Next FEAR TOPIC, coming riiiiight up!
rikyrah
You read Brooks so that I don’t have to
Villago Delenda Est
@Jeffro: That’s pretty much everything the X-MEN are all about. If it’s not Bolivar Trask, its some other idiot who wants to wipe out the mutants because THEY WILL TREAT US THE SAME WAY WE TREATED THEM.
Librarian
We were not only not Britain’s “ally” after the revolution, but it was considered to be our main enemy in the world until well into the 20th century. One of the things I hate about Brooks is how he presents as “facts” total bullshit that he pulls out of his ass without a shred of evidence to support his “theories.”
Spaniel
When did Brooks decide to throw his self-respect and decide to wallow in the mud with the pigs? Once an outspoken critic of the New Republicanism put forth by Trump and his henchmen, but now he is a water-carrier. I guess making a living expressing standards and morals became too hard. He should count himself lucky to have a job whitewashing history for his new masters.
Cthulhu
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.): Yeah, people tend to over-estimate the US involvement in WWI. And it certainly stimulated a stronger isolationist movement rather than engagement.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: It’s also why, as Kay said a while back, it’s very hard for Democrats to swing any election on fear of Republicans. Fear is their best emotion, not ours.
And it’s a problem when, logically, fear of Republicans ought to be our best selling point. I think the Onion once ran an article in which Dick Cheney sought your vote by promising to personally murder your family. Sometimes their appeal actually sounds like that, especially when Republicans seem to be using the failure of Republican government as a reason to vote for them because they’re anti-government.
Keith G
I don’t stop around these parts much anymore. Tom, your writing is what I miss the most. This is an example of why that is.
Mike G
Brooks has Right-Wing Magic Words Disease, where simply saying a word magically makes it true.
And saying it louder makes it even more true.
Barb 2
Fantastic deconstruction of the great boob or Bobo!
Thank you
Waspuppet
Not the most important criticism, but:
Schoolhouse?
Schoolhouse?
Kind of indicative, I think.
Plarry
This is an excellent fisk, and I applaud your effort. One minor point though, and I almost dread to say it but Bobo is more or less right in his point about slavery being an American institution. It’s true that Lincoln didn’t say that, so you are correct, but the larger point is that the Northern maritime merchants were heavily involved in the slave trade, slavery remained legal in some northern states up through the Civil War, and Northern slaveowners would infamously sell their slaves south as abolition approached in their state. Lincoln was a politician speaking to the North for political purposes and glosses over this, as all politicians do.
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
Standing, holding lighter in the air…. Bravo!
jefft452
@Librarian: “We were not only not Britain’s “ally” after the revolution, but it was considered to be our main enemy in the world until well into the 20th century.”
YES, to back that up:
Plan Red (the joint planning board’s plan for war with the UK) was last updated in 1936, it was updated to include using aircraft to launch chemical weapon attacks on Canadian population centers
Wilson insisted on the US being referred to as an “associated power” in WWI because the American public was hostile to being “allied” with Britain
Eamon de Valera came to the US to look for support for the Irish Republic because of our well known hostility to “perfidious Albion”
White Star objected to Congressional hearings on the Titanic because they said British subjects could not get a fair hearing in a hostile country
The Great White fleet was built specifically to challenge the Royal Navy
The Imperial Russian Navy’s Atlantic squadron was based at Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Civil War in a show of anti-British support