Saturday, August 3, 2019

David Brooks Needs an Intervention

Give that man an intervention. David Brooks has descended into the swamp, losing control of his rational faculties and arriving at the conclusion that what America really needs is … therapy.

No, he does not quite put it in these terms, but he has dug deeply into his limited mind and come up with the notion that the one Democratic candidate who really understands the stakes of the election is… drumroll and fanfare please… Marianne Williamson.

The high priestess of a New Age psycho cult… a woman who has some ideas that even Brooks considers to be “wachadoodle,” a woman who provides emotional succor to rich and famous celebrities. She alone, Brooks avers, understands how to rescue America from Donald Trump. What Williamson did for Oprah and for Gwyneth Paltrow she can now do for America.

Allow Brooks his own foray into superficial thinking, beginning with his dismissal of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as too wonky… that is, not sufficiently attuned to the American psyche:

But Trump is president, and this election is not about those things. This election is about who we are as a people, our national character. This election is about the moral atmosphere in which we raise our children.

Trump is a cultural revolutionary, not a policy revolutionary. He operates and is subtly changing America at a much deeper level. He’s operating at the level of dominance and submission, at the level of the person where fear stalks and contempt emerges.

For reasons that I will not attempt to explain, Brooks misses the fact that America is in the throes of its very own cultural revolution. The only thing is: it is being run from the left, from the radical left, from the progressive left.

The urge to burn books, to dismiss authors, to defame the founders of the republic, to shut down conservative speakers, to beat down conservatives on the streets of Portland, to harass Republicans in restaurants and airports… all these aspects of the Great American Cultural Revolution are coming at us from the left. I will certainly not claim that the right has been innocent and virtuous. I will certainly not claim that Trump has been decorous and presidential. But we must balance Trump’s bad Twitter habit-- also worthy of an intervention-- against the simple fact that today’s Democratic party has violated the most basic rule of democratic decorum: it has refused to accept an election result as legitimate. It has been throwing an ongoing political tantrum because it is not getting its way.

While Brooks refuses to believe that President Obama had anything to do with this, his people are leading the real cultural revolution. True enough, Obama was a model of decorum, at least when he was not traveling around the world trashing the country and when he was not supporting people who refused to respect the National Anthem, but if he represented decorum, his political party did not get the message. Obama stoked dissension, against bigots, in particular, but also against the prime minister of Israel, while pretending to be bringing the nation together. 

We are still effectively fighting the Obama war on bigotry. And few things can more clearly fragment a nation than a war on the minds of our fellow citizens.

Anyway, Brooks has gotten in touch with his spiritual, more feminine side. He has joined the cause championed by Marianne Williamson, the better to purge the dark feelings that inhabit our collective psyche. Call out the shamans, the witches, your crystals and your crystal ball… there, that is what America needs. Williamson has discovered that Donald Trump is the cause of all hatred and bigotry in the world. Now, if only we can eliminate hatred we will ride off into the sunset singing Hallelujah.

Brooks offers his own pellucid prose:

It is no accident that the Democratic candidate with the best grasp of this election is the one running a spiritual crusade, not an economic redistribution effort. Many of her ideas are wackadoodle, but Marianne Williamson is right about this: “This is part of the dark underbelly of American society: the racism, the bigotry and the entire conversation that we’re having here tonight. If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.”

And she is right about this: “We’ve never dealt with a figure like this in American history before. This man, our president, is not just a politician; he’s a phenomenon. And an insider political game will not be able to defeat it. … The only thing that will defeat him is if we have a phenomenon of equal force, and that phenomenon is a moral uprising of the American people.”

A moral uprising, a moral revolution. Isn’t that what our colleges and universities are doing today? Aren’t they all purging campuses of the least vestige of bigotry? Haven’t they made universities into places where children can be brainwashed into submission? Brooks thinks that Trump is playing a dominance and submission game. He is obviously blind to what is going on on campus today. If you want to see a real dominance and submission game, take a look there.

Aren’t they rebuilding what Brooks calls the “moral infrastructure of our country” one student mind at a time:

They are unready for it, but it falls on the Democrats to rebuild the moral infrastructure of our country. That does not mean standing up and saying, “Donald Trump is a racist!” 500 times a day. It means reminding Americans of the values we still share, and the damage done when people are not held accountable for trampling on them. 

4 comments:

UbuMaccabee said...

This is what Ms. Williams is about. Watch and despair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccKdu5PT5dE

She's just a garden variety Jewess who dumped ethical monotheism because she was too lazy to bother to understand it and instead adopted whatever rubbish was floating in the cultural vortex at the time. She mixed it together with her sexuality (which is now long gone) and packaged it to the gullible fools who, like her, had dumped the religion they were raised with for emotionally soothing garbage. In sum, her mysticism is a cargo cult for stupid women and passive pederasts--and black men looking to score as easy guilt fuck. Where does David Brooks fit in? He watches from that slats in the closet.

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Chesterton nailed that one. It's never been said better.

What is up with Jews and blacks, anyway? How long do Jews have to publicly grovel and genuflect and apologize for blacks in this country before enough is enough? It's disgusting, nobody believes it (especially not blacks) and it is making things much worse, not better.

True story. I had a professor, an elderly Jewish woman, now deceased. We became close friends. She confided in me that she was raped by a black student back in the 1970s and she said nothing. I asked why she didn't go to the police. She said he came from a disadvantaged background, and his raping her was a product of white racism and it wasn't his fault. I nearly fell out of my chair. I could never see her the same way again. I wish she had never told me this. I bet her "student" hooked up with Marianne Williamson eventually.

trigger warning said...

David Brooks is the living embodiment of the word "nebbish".

Nevertheless, the ticket I'm hoping to see is Biden/Williamson. We can cure cancer and emasculate the dark psychic forces of Outer Bitterclingerland in a mighty paroxysm of moral preening.

Sam L. said...

tw, I second your Biden/Williamson ticket. The bad, Bad, BAD Leroy Brown Trump would torpedo them and Let Loose The Sharks. Oh, what a sight THAT would be!

Brooks, though, ought to hie himself off to a monastery in the high Himalayas for 10-20 years to get his head straight.

Sam L. said...

That's a) if he can, and b) if he wants to, and c) if he can get his head straight and actually and fully realizes that d) he'd be a much better person if he does. Personally, I think he'll go Zero for Four on that.