I haven’t read a David Brooks column since the Milquetoast Radicals of October 11,2011. It was so much hysterical chatter by a frightened bourgeoise conservative, as he confronts the great unwashed hordes,all very typical of a self-aggradizing public intellectual sounding the alarm: the barbarians are at the gates of the city,etc. I grew tired of commenting on the carefully framed and argued, but totally transparent propaganda and needed a respite from this showy intellectual vulgarity. I found my respite, my spiritual refreshment, in the pages of Susan James’ book Passion and Action, The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. This book provided an intellectual place of repose and learning, while reactivating my response to ideas, not divorced from historical time and place, but active, alive, to the currents of the thought of Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes,Spinoza,Descartes,Malebranche, and other relevant thinkers of that time. It was beautifully written and argued and well worth the time and attention it deserved.

Now, I am back to the task at hand, a reading of Mr. Brooks column of October 31, 2011 titled The Wrong Inequality. Here is David Brooks as Platonic Storyteller, a role that he has a particular talent to bring to life. It is a tale taken out of our recent political history, but abstract enough to be easily manipulated toward conservative ends. And it pertakes of the frame of current political cliche masquerading as thought i.e. Red State vs. Blue State, the educated and the un-educated i.e. the college graduate vs the non graduate, the political popinquity between OWS protestors and the media that reports on them. The sum of his thought is to portray the Blue Inequality as less important than Red Inequality, with the usual conservative chatter about out of wedlock births, with the additions of social stagnation, stagnant human capital,and disorganized social fabric, to boot. The failed Free Market Experiment of 1999- 2008 is not even given an honorable mention, as an apprehendable cause of this fracturing, but that is no surprise.The political dishonesty in located in the abstraction from historical time and place, political actors shorn of those parameters and reassigned to the Platonic Realm: a fictionalized, ersatz collection of metaphores, masqurading as portrait of our current poltitical quandries. Mr. Brooks has the ability to construct these narratives and make them them a felt echo,a highly embroidered simulacre, of political actualities.

Political Observer