A Tiny Revolution on David Brooks
June 13, 2012 9:17 AM   Subscribe

The Aristocrats! A Tiny Revolution translates David Brooks into vaudeville.
posted by sensate (30 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
It still astounds me that someone like David Brooks is given a weekly column in the journal of record in this country.
posted by spitefulcrow at 9:21 AM on June 13, 2012 [9 favorites]


I actually enjoyed reading the Brooks column linked to in the OP, although I disagree with Brooks' concept of "just authority". It's an illusion that an individual can wield "supreme power". Jefferson, FDR, MLK etc were obviously great leaders, but leading is about more than wielding power.

However, I get what Brooks is writing about. I just disagree about the significance of a statue or a monument.

Although I'm familiar with the joke, I didn't understand Tiny Revolution's Aristocrats spoof. But maybe I'm just dumb.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:25 AM on June 13, 2012 [1 favorite]


Yeah why this guy gets paid is a mystery.
posted by Max Power at 9:25 AM on June 13, 2012




I didn't understand Tiny Revolution's Aristocrats spoof.

Everything in the act is obscene, but the comedian delivers the description as if it's wonderful.
posted by localroger at 9:29 AM on June 13, 2012 [3 favorites]


Meh, I read the rest of the damn thing. My apologies - I forgot. David Brooks is a loon.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:35 AM on June 13, 2012


Even the more successful recent monuments evade the thorny subjects of strength and power. The Vietnam memorial is about tragedy. The Korean memorial is about vulnerability.

Why can’t today’s memorial designers think straight about just authority?
It's as if the answer is right on the tip of his tongue... somehow he could taste why an American might be cynical about authority and he senses something is up with the Vietnam memorial, but what could it be? Why, would an American think maybe their is something crooked in the authority of our betters and the government they run?

Although I'm familiar with the joke, I didn't understand Tiny Revolution's Aristocrats spoof. But maybe I'm just dumb.

I'm actually a little confused about the original "Aristrocrats" joke, but I feel like this one encapsulates everything I could possibly say about David Brooks and the people he represents:
Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following.
The aristocrats indeed...
posted by ennui.bz at 9:37 AM on June 13, 2012 [3 favorites]


Honestly he could have just written this paragraph and still gotten an entire article's worth of idiocy in:
Those “Question Authority” bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.
Reading those sentences and trying to understand the thinking behind them - the thinking that caused someone to believe they formed a coherent and likely-to-be-agreed-with argument - is the mental equivalent of shifting without a clutch.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:41 AM on June 13, 2012 [5 favorites]


Personal to David Brooks: Show me a great leader, and I'll get started on building that monument right away. In the meantime, shut your pie hole, you sycophantic little toad.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:41 AM on June 13, 2012 [5 favorites]


That column was one of the most jaw-dropping I've read from Brooks in a while, and he's got some doozies. Americans don't trust their institutions not because they're worse than they were in 1925 or 1955, but because Americans are vain and "cynical and like to pretend they're better than everything else around them." Endemic corruption in the legislative branch, an executive with ever greater overreach to the extent that the president now designs his own kill lists because he's read some Thomas Aquinas, the influence of money, Citizens United, a SCOTUS hellbent on rolling the clock back to pre-1912, all of that -- utterly irrelevant.
posted by blucevalo at 9:42 AM on June 13, 2012 [3 favorites]


You know after a certain point it's just easier to assume Brooks is some kind of charity case or cynical panglossian lapdog cause the idea that he actually believes the things he writes is both humbling and terrifying.
posted by The Whelk at 9:49 AM on June 13, 2012 [2 favorites]


Others have said it pithier:

God bless the Squire and his relations.
And keep us in our proper stations.

Maybe we need forelock-tugging lessons too.
posted by emjaybee at 9:52 AM on June 13, 2012 [3 favorites]


Metafilter: charity case or cynical panglossian lapdog?
posted by ikahime at 9:52 AM on June 13, 2012


It is a bit miuddled, but he has a few good points in there though, doesn't he?
The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.
Call it elitist, but I have an increasingly hard time listening to people who think that the value of their opinion on any given topic is equal to that of anyone else--including people who have studied and thought about and experienced the issue at hand (i.e., authorities). And so an actress knows better what causes autism than the men and women who went to medical school and did postdoctoral work specifically on that subject. And people who never took an economics course have the answer to what caused and what is the solution to our economic crisis.

I see it at work as well. And it isn't just the younger staff. I have worked with many executives in their 50's who are hostile with people who know more than them. They want their opinions and having someone with a differing opinion backed up by the authority of experience or knowledge drives them crazy.

We don't want and I don't think he is calling for a blind faith in elites. But can we have a little bit more humility?
posted by Cassford at 9:58 AM on June 13, 2012 [2 favorites]


Personal to David Brooks: Show me a great leader, and I'll get started on building that monument right away.

Actually, I think Brooks is kind of on the trail of something here. Or rather, knows something about our government that you don't get taught in elementary school but rather, you have to hang out with Federalist society initiates to fully comprehend. Phrase it as a question: why exactly does a democratic republic have pagan temples built around giant statues of it's presidents?

When I used to teach calculus, during moments when the... well, ennui, got too oppressive, I used to wax eloquently on this topic. To wit: we build temples to our presidents because when a president dies, they ascend, guided by rigid pole of the Washington moment, into the starry heavens and become gods watching over us and when Abraham Lincoln comes back... he's going to be pissed.
posted by ennui.bz at 10:00 AM on June 13, 2012 [1 favorite]


Cassford, for what it's worth I agree with you about the absurd leveling of the opnions of someone with years of study and refereed challenges behind them vs the "shoot your mouth off first and then maybe look at a Wikipedia page" horde. But that's not even remotely what's being challenged in this response.
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:10 AM on June 13, 2012 [1 favorite]


The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.

With me, it's more like “Elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as me and I sure as hell shouldn't be running the world, so the 'elites' must somehow be even worse.”
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:11 AM on June 13, 2012


You have to give Brooks credit for one point, however. The Eisenhower memorial should inspire you with the greatness of Ike's vision, not make you want to give him a piece of gum.

I have an idea in my head for what the memorial should look like:

It would start on a human scale, with hundreds of life size bronzes of emaciated, naked children clawing at the base of a pedestal made up of tanks and bombs and ICBMs and fighter jets and warships all rendered in gleaming chrome. Atop the pedestal, a 500ft cross made up of assault rifles. Hanging on one side is Jesus, on the other, the goddess Liberty.

And atop the cross there should be an inscription: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
posted by [expletive deleted] at 10:14 AM on June 13, 2012 [20 favorites]


I pointed my projection detector at the Brooks article half an hour ago and it's still spitting out dollar slot tokens.
posted by localroger at 10:30 AM on June 13, 2012


We don't want and I don't think he is calling for a blind faith in elites. But can we have a little bit more humility?

Look, I've read the Constitution, which, with the selected passages of the Old Testament and my gut instincts, is all I need to make a decision on anything. We don't need those elites to hijack the process.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:31 AM on June 13, 2012


The second half of that article, beginning with "Why can't today's memorial designers . . .", is simply one incredibly stupid, wrong sentence after another. Good lord what a clueless twit. Picking which sentence is the dumbest might make for a good debate.
posted by Eyebeams at 10:34 AM on June 13, 2012


Cassford, I think you're somewhat confusing authority with expertise. Someone who actually has expertise deserves some deference, some authority. But Brooks advocates no competence test — follow the authorities because they are the authorities.

If this were 1776, Brooks would be strongly advocating for George III.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:40 AM on June 13, 2012 [5 favorites]


Disrespect for government has been a decades long strategy of conservatives starting with Reagan's "government isn't the solution; government is the problem." The objective was to diminish government's role in regulation, taxation and welfare.

Bush's appointment of a horse show manager to run emergency response wasn't a bug; it was a feature. All of the talk after Katrina was about the failures of government and how people just need to take responsibility for their own safety. Putting people who want to dismantle government in charge of government has a predictable outcome. Leaders with a disdain for government result in dysfunctional government. Dysfunctional government is a means to the objective of eliminating regulation, taxation and welfare.

This propaganda campaign has become so successful that even those most dependent on government now hold it in disdain leading to the ironic "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."
posted by JackFlash at 11:38 AM on June 13, 2012 [3 favorites]


Re JackFlash, gauging the effectiveness of FEMA is the most foolproof way of determining which party holds the White House. (Maybe not the easiest, but the most foolproof. Someone on the street might lie to you. You might get confused about what year it is and look up the wrong president in an encyclopedia, but there's no mistaking how effective FEMA is.)

FEMA was created by Carter (D) but he didn't last long enough to really do much with it.

Under Reagan (R) it was basically turned into part of the secret shadow government people like Richard Secord and Oliver North were building to run policy without public or legislative oversight. Indeed much of the preparedness infrastructure FEMA developed during that time was so classified that FEMA's own disaster preparedness staff were not allowed anywhere near it. The Agency basically operated as an arm of the military and the National Security Council.

Under Bush I (R), this led to a pretty useless response to Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew. Indeed during Hurricane Andrew, FEMA's emergency personnel had to run out and buy walkie talkies from Radio Shack because they were still not cleared to use the state of the art emergency communications system the Agency had built to ensure continuity of government in case of... an emergency.

Clinton (D) appointed an actual disaster management expert to run FEMA - James Witt, who turned it around and FEMA responded quickly and effectively to disasters like the 1997 Red River Flood.

Then came Bush II (R) who appointed "Brownie" and we all know what happened with Katrina.

Under Obama (D) FEMA is run by Craig Fugate, who used to run the Emergency Preparedness operations in Florida (the state with all the hurricanes) and the agency's overall reputation and effectiveness has continued to improve.

So ever since it was created, Republicans have either used FEMA as a dumping ground for third-tier political appointees (One imagines James O'Keefe running it under President Romney), or in Reagan's case, actually tried to use it to destroy American democracy. While Democrats actually take its stated function seriously, appoint leadership that has some idea how to run something called an Emergency Management Agency, and tend to respond far more effectively to emergencies.
posted by Naberius at 12:19 PM on June 13, 2012 [12 favorites]


Brooks is perfectly described by Matt Welch here,

"I think I've finally figured Brooks out. More than anything else, he's an anti-anti-authoritarian. And as in all double negatives, there's a much shorter way to express the exact same idea."

Radley Balko has a good piece on this latest drivel from David Brooks. Two quotes:

"(Principled politicians are rarely remembered as “great legislators.” And historians bestow greatness on the presidents most willing to wage war, accumulate power, and exceed their constitutional authority.) The most successful politicians sell voters on their strong convictions and principles, and then, once elected, they do as they’re told, in order to accumulate power and status within the party.

...

People like David Brooks think people rise to positions of power and status because they’re better, wiser, or otherwise more meritorious than the rest of us—they’re “Great Men” touched by the hand of God. (But only if we get out of their way!) He thinks people achieve political power because they exemplify the best in us."
posted by BigSky at 1:04 PM on June 13, 2012 [1 favorite]


Call it elitist, but I have an increasingly hard time listening to people who think that the value of their opinion on any given topic is equal to that of anyone else--including people who have studied and thought about and experienced the issue at hand (i.e., authorities).

And one political movement has definitely mainstreamed this into a major party platform.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:06 PM on June 13, 2012


Fucking David Brooks. Fall of 2003 I was somewhere in lower Manhattan watching a surprisingly good Beatles cover band do "Revolver" and trying (as I did those days) to drink away the last two and a half years. It was a fools errand but I really gave it a good shot. Anyway, there I was with a bellyful of something alcoholic, enjoying the entirely surprising and good rendition of my favorite Beatles album when I suddenly realize that the little fucker in front of me - but it couldn't be.

I revered Buckley Sr. when I was a teen-ager. I didn't agree with a thing he said but the way he said it, the clarity and beauty of his rhetoric was so gorgeous. There was an integrity to it, there really was. I thought he was wrong, but I couldn't fault the way he said it. It dignified positions I found incomprehensible, it made me respect his point and consider that he might be right. He wasn't, but.

One of the many indignities of 'the Bush Jr. years' was how quickly the NYTimes rolled over and let Brooks and Bumiller use the 'Grand Old Lady' as a propaganda rag. There were all those weird 'conversions,' Dennis who-used-to-be-funny and of course Mr. Hitchens, but the Times was a particularly poignant betrayal. There was a dependable stodginess to the Times that I always thought would ride out the crazy - and it didn't. And I blamed -

You would see him on Charlie Rose, or Meet The Press and he would just say the stupidest shit - and he'd say it as though what he were saying not only made sense but was actually a very intelligent thing to say. As though he could sell the stupid with his demeanor- not the venerable Buckley Sr. way, with the power of supple rhetoric. No, he just stuck the shit out there and I despised him for his gall at saying what no thinking person could believe and for the crass way he did it.

And there, I would swear it, there he was in front of me, bobbing along to "She said, she said" as though he hadn't built an entire career not only pissing on thinking people throughout the greater metropolitan NYTimes reading area, but also pissing onto the non-thinking ones too. A professional piss-taker. In front of me. Defenseless. In a t-shirt and khakis.

I swallowed hard. I rehearsed it in my head - I would just reach out my hand, my right hand, and cuff him on the ear. Not hard, but enough to knock him sideways. Enough so he knew that I was not just hitting him for being a dick but a shameless dick. I would manage to impart in one firm, swift clip to his noggin that he had got it all wrong, his entire professional career and he was not the voice for the next generation of 'conservative' political folk, he was a brainless hack who was getting by only because no one, at all, had been found to fill the slot.

I think I even moved my beer from my right hand to my left, then raised my free hand at least shoulder high. He would feel and know - kind of a zen master/Ignatz Mouse imparting of knowledge - all he needed someone to tell him about integrity and not lying to yourself and all the ways he was wrong in the space of one quick moment and thereafter his foul lies would no longer wipe across the editorial page, he would never again blather on at Charlie Rose about mobile WMD labs.

I looked at the back of his head for too long though. I snapped out of it. Maybe my friend gave me a look and I caught it and realized how wide the real gap was between me the short, David Brooks-looking schlub if front of me. I put my hand back down. Should I ask him if he was - ? Not anymore, I couldn't, I didn't want to know. I had either just missed my opportunity or had the good luck to avoid an assault charge. I moved to the other side of the room, hoping to god I wouldn't regret this years later. It could not have been him. I'm sure of it now. I was sure of it a half hour later. It could not be him. I could not have, seriously, passed up such an opportunity I just can't have
posted by From Bklyn at 2:33 PM on June 13, 2012 [11 favorites]


It still astounds me that the New York Times is still considered the journal of record in this country.

Except when I consider the other options for that title. Can we just leave the title open until Journalism redefines itself?
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:24 PM on June 13, 2012


Charles Pierce is good (as usual) on this horrible column also, including on Brook's incomprehensible word-salad about Dr. Martin Luther King.
posted by Eyebeams at 3:31 PM on June 13, 2012 [3 favorites]


Are FEMA the ones with the black helicopters from X-Files?
posted by Damienmce at 5:05 AM on June 14, 2012


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