David Brooks’s political evolution from The Weekly Standard Neo-Con, and author of his ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ now avalable at the Washington Examiner site:
The political evolution of Brooks as writer of not just dubious, but meagar War propaganda, framed by his wan hero ‘20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa’. Reader consider some of the other members of his cast of charcters:
Editor: The Dream Palaces ‘citizenship’ is enumerated in 157 words. Its like a novel written by Ayn Rand!
George Orwell, Fouad Ajami, the Arabists, Western incursion into the Middle East is a Crusade, the Middle East is a Crusade, any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor,any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor,Osama bin Laden becomes an Arab Joe Louis, and Saddam Hussein, who probably killed more Muslims than any other person in the history of the world, becomes the champion of the Muslim cause, the Arab world are never the Arabs’ fault., the Jews, the Zionists, the Americans, and the imperialists who are to blame., of Israelis who blew up the World Trade Center, of Jews who put the blood of Muslim children in their pastries, of Americans who fake images of Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad in order to fool the world. In this palace, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi information minister, was taken seriously because he told the Arabists what they wanted to hear.
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Editor: what remain of this Neo-Con wet dream is 2737 words: what power does this ‘essay’ possesse is to convince the reader to accept as true Brooks’s mastery of the politics of War Mongering. In sum Mr. Brooks writes a long winded ratinalization for Bush The Youngers, Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelds War On Terror: the toxic effects of which are alive and floreishng in the political present!
Editor: The evolution of Brooks from unapologetic war monger, to a New York Times voice of resistance to Trump and Trumpism, places in a conveient shadow, the facts that Brooks was a toxic political actor, who has been very adroit about his carefully crafted political evolution, at The New York Times. To an ersatz ‘voice of reason’ as presented in the first paragraphs of his latest commentary.
After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.
Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.
You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” he declared in his address.
It’s easy to see the appeal. We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were 3,000 miles of railroad track in America. By 1900, there were roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book “The American Mind,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of our 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” So Trumpian.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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