Today in Fuckwittery #2: David Brooks
David Brooks, NY Times toolinist, caricatures Occupy Wall Street to make a further caricature of critics of American plutocrats, all wrapped in glowing gauze of let's all work together- of course completely ignoring the gigantic shift of economic and political power that is making political desperation necessary.
As the Laird pointed out recently, Brooks skipped-to-my-lou'd down the path of triangulating centrism after being a reporter who satirized and then worked for William F. Buckley, because he was very, very impressed by wealth and power.
Compare and contrast with Beardy on the same topic.
posted by JAB at 11:42 AM
3 Comments:
Also: his fiction is crap. If he followed the advice to "Kill his little (un-funny) darlings," his latest novel would probably have been six pages long.
I'm trying to think of great conservative writers in English: Churchill comes to mind, and a limitless fucknut on India was he, but he was also conservative of liberal democracy at shall we say a key moment.
Some I can think of many would be conservative if transplanted in time, but absolutely not relative to their time: say Kipling. I've heard puddingheads argue, quite stupidly, that Mark Twain was conservative. Shakespeare- Liberal catholic, I suppose by modern standards.
People argue Shakespeare was essentially conservative because he did not challenge the state. But of course he did: he presented kings as flawed, doubt-twisted human beings, as something far, far short of the divine. Radical really, and beloved of Elizabeth I think for that humanizing recognition. People also argue he was secretly another man, an aristocrat, because a commoner could never be that educated. People say all kinds of self-inflating things. And by people I mean actual elitists.
Great writers do not idolize wealth and power - that's as dull as the souls of the saved praising God all day forever. Great writers attempt universal empathy. That's pretty well it. When they don't, they aren't great, literally. If you are short of some form of attempted universal empathy, your concept IS going to be small and forced and limited. Even Homer, HOMER, covered both sides of the war with empathy.
There are of course exceptions, no doubt you can think of some- in the same way there are Vatican Astronomers. Maybe the guy that wrote all those "Left Behind" books.
Now Patrick O'Brien comes to mind- a shelf of books in love with the British navy of 1810. He's anti-revolutionary as far as Napoleonic France; but that doesn't qualify you as a modern conservative. With his unflattering portrayals of aristocratic privilege, at best, he's basically Whigish- and approving of the need of defined social roles. He's conservative in the long-gone literal sense of conservation- the slightest reading of Maturin shows no possible love of anything in the GOP.
Here's your test: would Patrick O Brien have voted for George W. Bush?
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