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The great piano virtuoso Arturo Benedette Michhelangelli is said to have arrived at concert appearances just as the curtain rose, and to play the entirety of his concert in his overcoat. Here is David Brooks in his latest essay at The New York Times titled The Wonky Liberal of December 6,2011, imitating Mr. Michhelangelli: in the sense that here is our pundit dressed to go out for an evening, with his overcoat on, tapping away at his old, refurbished IBM Selectric I, you know he is a Conservative, but he really can’t resist the feel of this miracle of last centuries technology, and he learned to type on one just like it .He found a man in town that actually sells refurbished typewriters of all kinds.

The center of this particular essay is based on statistics provided by The Center of Progressive Reform, or more directly, on how that information should be interpreted. And it’s unsurprising data that President Obama and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, headed by Cass Sunstein, have been very friendly to ‘reform’ of business regulation, tilted in the direction of relaxed rather than restrictive government interventions. And on cue, enter the ‘Left’ to provide the necessary antagonists to this, the enlightened reform, although Mr. Brooks doesn’t spare the critics on the ‘Right’ ,either, for their charges of ‘Socialism’. It is a celebration of the moderation of President Obama’s position on regulatory issues, and a proclamation of Mr. Brooks’ assent to that moderating practice. Although one could identify that Moderation as defined by parameters introduced by Reaganism and adapted by the New Democrats , who thirsted after power, so much so, that they willfully forgot the imperatives that fueled the Party for nearly fifty years: rationalized as modernization or as staying competitive with the winners. The Market being the ultimate test of economics, as well as the practices of governance.

Mr. Brooks acts as if his readers are incapable of interpreting this, or any political document, without his interpolation being determinative. He re-enacts the Conservative worldview that renders null the seminal ideas of Emmanuel Kant, of the self-emancipation from tutelage and the self-responsibility that inheres in freedom. Conservatism is about authority wielded in the name of superior knowledge: making questions to that constituted authority verboten. Mr. Brooks makes just that argument, in a rhetoric softened by it’s tone of the mean between the two extremes, and it’s asserted self-evident rightness.

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All my readers must remember the elegant prose,the thought of that dear Hollywood wordsmith Joyce Haber, and her many contributions to our national discourse.( If your reading this, do not pretend that you don’t know this writer and her exalted status, in the pantheon of American Letters.) A part of that singular contribution is the power stratifications of The A List, The B List etc. Enter the Foreign Policy honcho Mr. Leslie Gelb, who freely adapts Ms. Haber’s social/political metric, to his prescient examination of the job prospects, of the many contenders for positions that will open up, post the 2012 election. Of course, this all takes place with the aid of his editor, the illustrious Tina Brown, her husband or even an unpaid Ivy League intern, garnishing his leaden prose with maladroitly inserted one liners. This is amusing, but not in the way intended by the editor. To my regular readers who need some diversion from our grim political condition, see Mr. Gelb’s latest essay, it might just provide a diverting cognitive dissonance, amid the squalor of our collapse.

Sincerely yours,

Myra B.          

Day by day we see the cumulative evidence of the failure of Capitalism and the concomitant victory of authoritarian principles and practices of governance,these essays are highly instructive:

Detroit in a hostile takeover bid at the CBS News web site. An attempt by Governor Rick Snyder to cancel valid public sector union contracts, using the economic crisis as rationale for precipitate authoritarian action: the reduction of a once great city, to the status of vessel, by a more powerful and corrupt Free Market political radical.

From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security by Max Blumenthal, a report on the siege mentality of the Apartheid State of Israel and the importation of the technology of repression to America, and some it’s domestic political consequences.

The We-Are At-War mentality by Glenn Greenwald, an essay on the continuing legacy that the War on Terror and it’s Neo-Conservative enactors that have become permanently installed in the thinking and actions of established governmental agencies,even the actions of the New Democrat,President Obama.

Paying attention to Zizek’s recent comment about the loss of the automatic legitimacy of the system, starkly contrasted with the ancient concept of the cultivation of civic republican virtue: we are in a crisis that has been precipitated by the failure of Capital to demonstrate any civic responsibility, in fact to simply manifest thievery on a vast scale, without any legal penalty. The perpetrators are walking as free citizens, while their political allies destroy what is left of The New Deal, in the name of ‘Reform’ along the line of institutional peonage of the middle class. All this is taking place while social unrest grows exponentially, as a function of that failed Market paradigm. And the rise of a repressive,militarized police force and the neutralization of Habeas Corpus protections, in the name of National Security, by way of the ticking time bomb argument, and the conformist and craven politicos of the U.S. Senate. We are in deep trouble as a nation, as a republic, as a people. Let me posit an old question, in a new context: What is to be done? Who will answer this question, our Chernyshevsky, our Tolstoy, our Lenin, our Nechaev? Or will the Republic be suffocated from within by it’s elected protectors? 

Publius       

If you are looking for some political entertainment while the Republic self-destructs, amid the clamor and bad faith of career politicians, that stumble over themselves,and each other, trying in vain to prove their fealty to that modern hybrid, the National Security State: here is The Great Will spewing invective in several directions, but mostly at one of America’s favorite politicians, Newt Gingrich. It’s like one old intellectual prostitute calling another a whore, although not filled with any real insight into the character of the poverty stricken Mr. Gingrich, but filled with irresistibly quotable one liners, perfect for the waning age of television and the triumph of the Internet:

“Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive.”

“Granted, his grandiose rhetoric celebrating his “transformative” self is entertaining:”

“His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment.”

“Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.”

Mr. Gingrich is perennially making his political comeback- recall the New Nixon, but in halting endlessly repetitive stages, and always with a new consort.

Truly yours,

Myra Breckenridge

David Brooks in his latest essay titled The Spirit of Enterprise inhabits the spirit of a besotted lover, but the love object is Capitalism and the villains are the lowly, lazy Southern European countries of Spain, Italy and Greece. It reads like the many and varied complaints of Anglo-Saxons about their good-for-nothing relatives, from those dissolute southern climes. Mr. Brooks can with difficulty contain his indignation, even contempt, for those lazy,shiftless southerners. Who do not share the Teutonic gene of self-sacrifice and iron discipline of their northern neighbors. The central concepts of both Capitalism and Protestant Christianity is the idea of sacrifice and self-blame, in pursuit of a hoped for salvation and Capital accumulation plays the part of the earthly salvation, a precursor to the salvation of the spirit that awaits the soul. Mr. Brooks has turned to the Christian Theology of Calvin and Luther for political inspiration and sustenance in this time of the continuing failure of Capitalism. This polemic rehearses the themes of the No-Nothings of America’s nineteenth Century,during the mass immigration of southern Europeans:but argued in the rhetorical register of economic profligacy. It reeks of the aroma of a selective xenophobia wedded to a protestant ethical mainstay, of self-loathing directed at another: here Mr. Brooks acts the part of the amiable ventriloquist.

Almost Marx        

Max Boot in his December 1,2011 column for the Los Angeles Times titled The Iran Threat fully commits himself to the analogies of the rise of Nazism and the dithering and equivocations of the politicians, who should have been more prescient about the danger of a mad man and his allies, posed to the Democratic West and to the fate of European Jews. This is the rhetorical frame within which he constructs his latest piece of political hysteria mongering, with Iran as the central protagonists, as historical stand-in for Hitler and the Holocaust. Mr. Boot pulls out all the stops- he makes manifest the notion of crisis as real and present – the Holocaust waits in the wings, as another political generation equivocates and rationalizes the existence of the political toxin of the Iranian Revolution, and it’s pernicious ambition to acquire atomic weapons. Now, the fact of Israel’s production and possession of from 100 to 400 atomic weapons is not relevant to the project that Mr. Boot undertakes: which as a Neo-Conservative is about the political imperative of war making as a policy of first resort. The choice of enemy as being Political Islam as the natural antagonist to the Zionist project, an integral part of the the Neo-Conservative political mythology and it founders Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. If one had any doubt of this abiding political/theological connection one need only consult Mr. Murray Friedman’s friendly history of the this political creature, The Neo-Conservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. Mr. Boot is only one of the many voices that can be heard in the Establishment Press calling for a ‘preemptive strike’ against Iran in the name of the crisis: one is reminded of the of the virulent Cold Warrior’s calls for ‘preemptive strikes’ against the Soviet Union in that, past, benighted age. One can also see, in the caricature of Iran sketched by Mr. Boot, the perfect reflection of the Iranian Revolutionary propaganda of the ‘Satan of the West’. Any attack on Iran will not be confined to the ‘region’ but will engulf the world, a prospect that Mr. Boot and his allies, among them the braggart and bully Mr. Netanyahu, have failed, in their limited strategic thinking, to realize the danger of their own ideological and perceptual blinders. Even the act of consideration of the existence of such impediments, of checks on possible actions, seems beyond the ken of these political actors. There is the danger, the inability to consider an alternative, to consider the possibility of another course of action, predicated on a different view, of the perceived political alternatives. Or are we, the readers of this essay, to come to the conclusion that Mr. Boot is simply another propagandist for The Party Of War?

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