StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Brooks begins his New York Times essay of July 31 2012 Dullest Campaign Ever by paraphrasing the Reagan speech writer and the Wall Street Journal's columnist Peggy Noonan: the Presidential campaign is inconsequential and boring. Ms. Noonan exemplifies, for me, the tone deafness and self-congratulation Modern American Conservatism, pre and post Reagan. As a writer of speeches attuned the the central conceits of that conservatism: Free Market economics, the myth of white victim-hood, the evils of socialism, indeed, even a mild form of social democracy, Ms. Noonan has been an adroit phrase maker. One thinks of the usable political kitsch of 'morning in American', although I don't have knowledge that this is her phrase. Yet no one, who has seen Ms. Noonan opine on television, or read her newspaper column can think that this is a first rate political thinker. She is an opinionator destined to remain superficial, at best. But Mr. Brooks uses her comment as prop for his cliched chatter about his own boredom. Which launches his self-serving ideological line that both the Democrats and the Republicans are guilty of more that just producing the heavy weight of his boredom. Here is just one egregious example of his political dishonesty:

“Instead of saying something new, now they just try to boost turnout within their own demographic niches and suppress turnout in the other guy’s niches.”

Voter suppression laws have been passed in 14 states of the union. All these states are controlled by Republicans. It is an inconvenient truth that Mr. Brooks alludes to, which isn't quite a lie, but mimics that rhetorical entity with disturbing fidelity.As to the campaign being boring, just look at Mitt Romney, a prime example of stupid straight white boy culture. He cannot speak, on any subject, without making a fool of himself. On just the level of the ability to produce cringing laughter, Mr. Romney beats his sclerotic Republican antecedents: Bob Dole, Bush The Elder, Bush The Younger, John McCain, Newt Gingrich. The list is long. Of Mr. Brooks' nine points of complaint: the critical reader of his essay will approach his complaints with a degree of care, as they are deeply immersed in the public vocabulary of his idiosyncratic Neo-Liberalism, that defines itself as post Reagan Republican Conservatism. Mr. Brooks adopts the posture of public scold, in the matter of defending the practice of serious debate about substantial issues, expressed as speeches and position papers that lend the circus of American politics a degree of intellectual and ideological weight. One might simply conjecture that Romney might be an unsafe wager, when it comes to the substance that is the object of  Mr. Brooks' nearly plaintive nostalgia. 

Queer Atheist

David Brooks has a penchant for repeating the most callous, even loathsome, Conservative platitudes about human beings, and tries to pass them off as valuable insights, as the view of a deep thinker, a cogitator on the evil character of 'man'. A kind of moral fatalism he re-animates at will to demonstrate his sagacity. Lets just dismiss his observations on the Olympics as an opportunity to deploy that re-animated cynicism about the human person, in it's group setting, as a political opportunity to tell us, in the briefest of sketches, the lured details of our inherent nature. Reading this essay has the capacity to produce an animus in a critical reader. Mr. Brooks can't pass on the opportunity to give the Liberal readers of the New York Times a firm scolding on their inherent evil. He is driven to lecture on the fallen state of 'man', he quite naturally riffs in a Niebuhrian register of political theology, or to put it in plain language, politically useful moralizing claptrap. I am, of course, pushing polemic to the point of insult. But first we must hear what our thinker has to say about the Dance, a useful and enlightening aside. But, here, he articulates his central concern:

“After the opening ceremony is over, the Olympics turn into a celebration of the competitive virtues: tenacity, courage, excellence, supremacy, discipline and conflict.”

Like so many contemporary American Conservatives, Mr. Brooks is enamored of the martial virtues, but only from the comfort of his study. He celebrates an 'ideal', in a proximate reminiscence of the Hegelian master/slave fight to the death: conflict and cooperation as the dialectic of the human story, in a carefully laundered conservative version. After all this, he neatly sums up with some life lessons about the necessity of incorporating both the practice of competition and cooperation. Mr. Brooks is petit bourgeois to his core.

Political Cynic

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=18272

I would like, in this post, to concentrate on the title of Mr. Brooks July 23,2012 essay titled More Treatment Programs. This imperative/admonition seems to be at absolute odds with Mr. Brooks' long time advocacy of the Free Market, in all phases of American life. The destructive ubiquity of this economic construct is here for all to see, the latest iteration being the bankruptcy of large municipalities. Also the fact that states are also in deep financial trouble, budget cuts that lay waste to vital services like teachers, police and fire departments. Given that sobering picture of austerity and financial collapse, one can easily ask the question of Mr. Brooks: where is the funding for these treatment programs coming from? Also, who will run,fund and oversee the treatment programs? He does not know nor does he care. It is simply a dodge. Combine this good idea, that would be philosophically antithetical to his closely held beliefs, with his defensive and political self-serving fatalism, regarding the ineffectiveness of gun control, and what you get is this bit of fatuous propaganda. Garnished with historical and statistical data that make his fatalism inescapably real, at least in rhetorical terms. And please don't miss the notes of sincerity, concern, and sorrow underplayed but ever-present.  
Political Observer
             

http://www.economist.com/node/21559373?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/troikaiscoming

This is an essay that needs to be read but with a cautionary note:the Greeks have become the focal point of Free Market finger pointing and viscous name calling, indeed ethnic slurs,in the battle against Socialism, political corruption that takes on mythic proportions. The essay itself is rather mild mannered, yet firm, in the belief that something is very wrong in Greece. In the manner perfected at the very conservative Economist.Yet that something points in various directions but never really points to one of the major causes of the collapse, the American economic 'reform' of 1999. And it's destructive effect on the house of cards of the various economies of the EU. If we were irresponsible and heedless, the Europeans were more so. The surprising vicious name calling etc., that I refer to occurs in the comments section, that is alive with vitriol and cartoon versions of the various economic theories,and prejudices: all under the rubric of Free Market Economics.It reminds me of the No-Nothing commentaries of current American political debate: an economic theology as twin of our current political theology.

Political Observer

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Stephen Mack <stephenkmack@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 11:35 AM
Subject: Ross Douthat's essay on Aurora: my comment by Political Observer
To: Posterous <post@posterous.com>

Ross Douthat has used the comic book world of good versus evil from the latest Batman movie as a rhetorical frame for his essay on the killings at the Aurora, Colorado theater, titled The Way We Fear Now. The Dark Knight Rises was the movie, at which this mass killing occurred. Should we either condemn or congratulate Mr. Douthat on this fatuous trivialization? (One might speculate that the final sundering of the notions of high and low culture is completed here by our author?) Although he partially redeems this near obscenity by larding his essay with the high flown words and phrases: evil, depraved, anarchic, civilization, nihilism, Armageddon, cultural phenomenon, cultural touchstone. Mr. Douthat seems to have contracted a case of Newspaper Metaphysics, perhaps from his political ally and colleague Mr. David Brooks.

Might we as critical readers make a more tentative connection between Mr. James Holmes personal pathology, however one can describe that murderous urge with accuracy, and the social pathology of guns, and the political notion, that it is an inherent right of American citizenship to own and carry munitions in public spaces? Even the most sophisticated assault weaponry. Perhaps a better metaphor for the American political self-conception, as to place and time, is more cogently located in the frontier town circa 1875. Rather than the urban/suburban sprawl that the majority of Americans inhabit. The American dislocation as to self-conception, historical location, and the particular expression of a right to 'bear arms', as foundational to the exercise of citizenship, and the personal personal pathology of a murderer in our midst, seems to have met in a horrific denouement.

Political Observer

Is there anything like the collection of cliches, borrowed phrases, and intellectual sundries that make up the body of David Brooks latest essay at the New York Times titled Where Obama Shines. Mr. Brooks stumbles over himself in praise of the Foreign Policy of Obama/Biden/Clinton, in his own disingenuous self-serving way. He likes to remind his readers of his status as expert, in the realm of the political, while not actually possessing anything but an ideology. But to be fair, or even to simply try to inhabit the notion of objectivity, Mr. Brooks is a free floating Conservative, who can, with a certain intellectual dexterity, sound rhetorical notes, that resembles a kind of rationalism, that resonates with what might best be described as an oppositional reader. Forgive me for my convoluted expression in the last sentence, but his methodology is complex enough to demand a rigorous form of analysis, even though it be a clumsy sketch. The ultimate question in regards to Mr. Brooks and his opinionating might be put as: am I describing a pragmatist or an intellectual opportunist? Let me quote the first paragraph, with it's allusion to the essay of Isaiah Berlin, and encourage my readers to read his column in full:

“It won’t help him win many votes this year, but it should be noted that Barack Obama has been a good foreign policy president. He, Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the rest of his team have created a style of policy making that is flexible, incremental and well adapted to the specific circumstances of this moment. Following a foreign policy hedgehog, Obama’s been a pretty effective fox.”

American Litterateur

You must give David Brooks his due, he is gifted story teller, and the political fiction he excels at producing is his political opinion column, that he writes for the New York Times. It isn’t that Mr. Brooks is an inveterate lair, he just manages to take facts and the interpretation of those facts, to his political advantage by a firm,even brutal rhetorical twisting. In his latest essay titled The Capitalism Debate of July 16, 2012 he accuses President Obama of attacking Capitalism by way of Mitt Romney, as a defensive measure, a cover for his failed economic initiatives. But quickly Mr. Brooks moves to his central concern, a defense of Capital as practiced by Bain Capital, that purchased firms, then mortgaged them to the hilt, then declared bankruptcy. It was a winning formula for Mr. Romney and his partners, but not for workers or the state of business in America. Those disconcerting bits of Capitalist Realism elude the grasp of Mr. Brooks. It's all too inconvenient to this backhanded promotion of Mr. Romney, which strikes this reader as completely lukewarm, at best. Mr. Romney remains the least objectionable of the candidates the Republican Party has offered, for the office of the presidency. A Party that seems to be mired in a self-destructive pattern of political nihilism. Mr. Romney's political baggage is self-evident, add to that his unreleased tax returns, his Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts: in sum the expression of certain unmistakable verisimilitude to the attacks on him by the Obama campaign. The question that remains is how Mr. Brooks will redress this unacceptable political imbalance.

Political Observer

In the New York Times of  July 14, 2012 under News Analysis appears Scott Shane's essay titled The Moral Case for Drones. This long apologia for the use of drones is not even surprising, in it's convoluted defense of the notion and practice of American Exceptionalism. All of this garnished by appropriate quotations from technocrats identified as experts in the field of warfare, not to speak of an attributed ethical preeminence, and human rights organizations, it adds to the attempt to anesthetize the moral indignation about the killing of innocents, and the self-aggrandizing, indeed authoritarian increase of presidential power. Habeas corpus was once the great defense against the authoritarians, who sought cover under the guise of  a carefully cultivated republican virtue. But that is no more, the dubious cause of war has emboldened those thinkers,writers, political actors who foment and stage manage the crisis to full political advantage: an increase in power that recognizes their will to power as sovereign, all in the name of the preservation of the state. The state remade, argumentatively re-framed, by the imperatives of that stage managed crisis.                The War on Terror in it's current expression has found a convenient and more precise weapon of war in the drone, rather than massive invasion and occupation that is cost prohibitive and undermines the primacy of American virtue. In the place of that self-defeating exercise of naked but expensive power comes the drone, as answer. Mr. Shane could have framed the ethical argument in terms of the long tradition of ethical thinkers that began with Plato and Aristotle, as an exercise of grounded philosophical thought.  A critical reader of Mr. Shane's essay might conclude that he quotes from the technocrats of the National Security State because he already has his answers, but he simply needs to find the proper evidence to support those conclusions. Everything was changed by September 11, 2001, it emboldened the authoritarians in our midst.
Political Cynic