Brooks is Risen

DAVID BROOKS

The Cruelest Month

Starnbergersee, Bavaria. CreditPhoto by Tourismusvarband Starnberger Fünf-Seen-Land.

Image

By David Brooks

April 1, 2018

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

First, winter kept us warm. It covered earth in forgetful snow. It fed a little life with dried tubers. Second, summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain. We stopped in the colonnade and went on in sunlight into the Hofgarten. Third, we drank coffee and talked for an hour.

The other day, a woman I'll call Marie told me, “I'm not Russian at all. My family is from Lithuania, authentic German, and when we were children, staying at the archduke's place, he took me out on a sled. The archduke is my cousin. I was frightened. He said, ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight.’ ”

In the mountains, there you feel free. I read much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch? What branches grow out of this stony rubbish? I can't speak for everybody, but I suspect it will be something higher and more lovely, reminding me of Abraham Lincoln, as things usually do.

More Rhetorical Excess

Via.

More Stephens on Williamson:

Dear Kevin, 

I’m sorry to have to write you, for two reasons. Sorry, first, that you have to endure having your character assailed and assassinated by people who rarely if ever read you and likely never met you. Sorry also that your hiring as a writer for The Atlantic has set off another censorious furor in media circles when surely there are more important subjects on this earth.

(1) "I'm sorry to have to write you" is the form of an apology, when you're going to give somebody pain but your position obliges you do to it, as in "As Tiffany's teacher, I'm sorry to have to inform you that she is a very unpleasant little girl." Since this is not your plan, why are you doing that? (2) You don't have to write Kevin D. Williamson in any way, as a matter of fact. If you did, publishing your letter in The Times isn't the best way to get to him. I'm sure you could just pop him an email. Moreover, it's clear that you're not writing him. You're writing me, as a subscriber to the paper. And I didn't ask you. (3) I don't think anybody is in fact assailing, still less assassinating, Williamson's character. I think they're complaining about the shit he writes for public consumption, which is his job, which, to be sure, makes him look as if he had a pretty bad character (it's unlikely somebody would try to hide his true character by saying he believes women who have abortions deserve the same punishment as criminal homicides). I must say I love the idea that people can't judge your writing unless they've met you. (4) So this column is to quiet the censorious furor in media circles by publishing a column on the subject, in a censorious tone, in The Times? Or is that what you meant in the first place? "I'm sorry my censoriousness obliges me to contribute another 800 words to the furor when I'm sure you and everybody else would prefer me to be writing about something important."

Rhetorical Excess

Mr. Bret Stephens writes a letter to his pal Kevin D. Williamson, newly appointed columnist for The Atlantic, commiserating with him over the sad fate of being criticized ("The Outrage Over Kevin Williamson"):

The case against you, as best as I can tell, rests on three charges. You think abortion is murder and tweeted — appallingly in my view — that doctors and women should perhaps be hanged for it. You believe “sex is a biological reality” and that gender should not be a choice. And you once boorishly described an African-American boy in East St. Louis, Ill., “raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.”

My view is that there are more important charges than these: he is a bad writer and dishonest. For example, he falsely accused Jonathan Chait of using a strawman argument in a piece in which he himself used an idiotic strawman argument, an awful ad hominem argument, and two serious falsehoods, followed by a second post in which he falsely accused Chait of dishonesty, and falsely claimed that the great socialist writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., agreed with him (Williamson) that human inequality is genetically determined (of course the basic criticism there applies to Stephens too). I wrote it up in 2015:

Trepidation Now, Trepidation Forever

I think it's Hindi. From somebody's tumblr.

David Brooks's headline, "Integration Now, Integration Forever" (which I'm pretty sure he wrote himself, as marked by the fact that it's in the url), composed by palimpsest over George Wallace's famous cry of defiance of 1963, sounds like a pretty stirring call to action that I wouldn't want to be arguing with, but what he came up with is more ambivalent, on more than one dimension, indeed so ambivalent that it doesn't make any sense at all:

Shorter:

The prospect of racial integration in the United States, which seemed so promising in the 1960s as the integration of the school system began, has clearly failed, gone the way of the gramophone and the nylon stocking, as people failed to create intimate bonds across racial lines, as Tamar Jacoby observed 20 years ago. This depressing outcome is probably because integrating schools was the wrong way to go. The authorities should have begun by integrating neighborhoods instead. This is proven by the fact that neighborhoods have become more integrated over time, and people have created intimated bonds across racial lines, as intermarriage rates have climbed and churches have become multiracial. Therefore we need to integrate neighborhoods by building public housing in low-poverty areas, eliminating exclusionary zoning, and more gentrification, and schools will integrate themselves. Also everybody should join an organization where they meet once a week with people who are different from themselves.

Terrifyingly, this glass is half-empty! Fortunately, it's half-full! We must do something to rectify this situation by making it more the way it already is, I think!

For the Record: Ben Shapiro's Working Class

I didn't watch Roseanne back when she was still alive, so to speak, s so I can't imagine why I'd be watching her now, but I've still managed to acquire enough opinions to take issue with young Ben Shapiro, who's pissed off because Roseanne and Dan voted for Trump but are not in his opinion authentic Trump voters, who are all, in his view, identical:

The whole premise of "Roseanne" is that this pro-abortion, pro-LGBT woman who is happy to watch her grandson wear girls' clothing voted Trump -- because she's blue collar. That isn't an accurate depiction of Trump voters. (/3)

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 28, 2018

I started out trollishly agreeing with him:

You're right, it would have been better if Dan was more clearly self-employed and somewhat better off, but the age and lack of education fit the profile very well. I'm pretty sure sexual puritanism wasn't a factor either way.

— Smash-Mouth Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) March 29, 2018

Smash-Mouth Liberalism

Apparently Smash Mouth was the name of the first band to give Trump permission to use their music at his rallies. Not sure how that relates to the way Douthat's using the expression, but it must be relevant.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, does not love the kids; he is deeply distressed by them, in particular their chillingly violent calls for the destruction of Senator Rubio ("Marco Rubio Must Be Destroyed"):

Since the Parkland shootings in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has done many of the things liberals say they are desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to do. He has changed his position on gun control, expressing support for new restrictions: age limits on gun purchases, new background check rules, possibly magazine restrictions. He has co-sponsored legislation encouraging states to issue restraining orders that temporarily would strip people deemed dangerous of their guns. Some of these measures have conservative support, but in other cases the Florida Republican has effectively bucked the N.R.A.

When he showed up for the CNN town hall he met boos and heckles; one of the shooting survivors told him that just looking at him was like staring down the barrel of an assault rifle. Notwithstanding his subsequent policy concessions, at the March for Our Lives the students wore price tags around their neck, $1.05 each — the amount of money Rubio’s campaigns have received from the N.R.A. divided by the number of students in Florida schools. David Hogg, one of their leaders, began his speech with the price tag line, and told a CNN interviewer that if anything he feels that their attacks on the Florida senator haven’t been provocative enough.

I'm not having any luck finding cases of liberals saying "I am desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to" do anything. It's certainly not something I would say. I suspect Ross is making this up.

Privilege Has Its Memberships

Naomi Wadler, 11, via Mother Jones. David Brooks is pretty sure she's too nice to check his privilege, but I wouldn't be so sure if I was him.

Isn't this nice! David F. Brooks ("In Praise of Privilege") loves the kids! He thought the Saturday marches were terrific!

The crowd was good-hearted, gracious, diverse and welcoming. At a time when trust in democracy is waning, everybody kept underlining their faith in our democratic system, that voting is the way to make change. There was no culture war nastiness, no hint of resentment. Hunters and farmers and vets were celebrated. There was no ill will toward anybody but the N.R.A.

A little ill will isn't such a terrible thing!

Stormy Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Barbara Stanwyck in Alfred Santell's Breakfast for Two (1937).

The brethren on the "Sure Trump is awful but he's not a criminal like Hillary" right have had an easy time as you'd expect deciding that "he fucked her and lied about it to the American people" is a triviality after all and they're mystified as to why anybody should care about it—

People didn't vote for Trump because of his marriage fidelity. No one cares. https://t.co/j5wZjMLfVZ

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) March 25, 2018

—but cannot comprehend that we don't care about it either, any more than we did when Bill Clinton was president, beyond the sheer fun and Trumpery of it; I especially liked the detail that the rolled-up magazine she spanked him with was not Forbes but Trump, and the scene as Stormy narrated it could just about have been played by Barbara Stanwyck:

It lacks (damn the word!) empathy

Another Blast From Kevin D. Williamson's Past:  Remember how he took on the white working class Trump supporter in March 2016 as "whelping human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog"? That's the kind of spirit they need at The Atlantic!

Mr. Trump Potato Head, by Hannah Rothstein. Via Time.

Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review, a day or two ago, telling us how he really feels about those white working class Trump voters (rearranging slightly):

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization.... Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.... nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

You seem nice, Kevin.

And now he can't believe everybody's so pissed off with him! Well, I guess he remembers it a little differently, because he doesn't wonder if he was wrong to compare people to dysfunctional, negligent, incomprehensibly malicious stray dogs who are 100% to blame for whatever suffering they may endure. What? No, he thinks it's about the advice he gave them; he's

For the Record: How Many Divisions Has the National Review?

Via.

The genial Jeet Heer of what we used to call Even-The-Liberal-New-Republic is flummoxed, and he's not the only one, by the Atlantic's hiring of Kevin D. Williamson not just because he's a colossally bad, pretentious and malapropic writer (in The Atlantic of all magazines, whose founders included Emerson and Longfellow and whose first editor was James Russell Lowell, with a history of immense literary distinction down to Ta-Nehisi Coates), not just because he's unable to refrain from insulting persons of genders or skin colors other than his own—but just because who cares what Kevin D. Williamson thinks, or the brave little coterie of anti-Trump conservatives in general (including Bret Stephens recently posted from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, and Megan McCardle from that same Atlantic to the Washington Post a movement of less intellectual significance now than it has had for more than 60 years, a bunch of utterly discredited cranks with no ideas at all:

On the Kevin Williamson thing, leaving everything else aside, I'm just puzzled by mainstream editors elevating Never Trump conservatives, who nearly rival tankies for political irrelevance.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) March 24, 2018

So I believe I actually have a piece of an idea:

Meanwhile, in the Palace

W.W. Denslow, "Dorothy and the Giant Head". from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Struck by this tweet:

Trump Plans Expulsion of Russian Envoys Over U.K. Attack, Sources Say https://t.co/bdUMdBVU5P

— Ming Nethery (@MingGao26) March 24, 2018

Really? What sources?

two people familiar with the matter said on Saturday.

Trump agreed with the recommendation of advisers and the expulsions are likely to be announced on Monday, the people said, though they cautioned that Trump’s decision may not be final. Trump is prepared to act but wants to be sure European allies will take similar steps against Russia before doing so, aides said....

Kevin Williamson's Heart of Darkness

In honor of Kevin D. Williamson's accession from the National Review to the hallowed precincts of The Atlantic, I'm reposting what I'm pretty sure is the funniest piece I've written about him and his remarkable literary style (plus bonus Duke Ellington), from August 2014:

Papa K illustrating the "West Side" sign, possibly making a universal gesture of primate territorial challenge as well.

I just found out (via Sick Horses) that National Review has taken to running literary fiction, starting with a charming effort by its "roving correspondent" and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kevin Williamson, entitled "Where the Sidewalk Ends: Danger and Despair in Pat Quinn's Crumbling Illinois".

The story is a journey narrative, a re-imagining of a trip to East St. Louis, Illinois, as an enchanted, surreal landscape seen through a child's eyes, taking its cue, as the title makes clear, from Shel Silverstein's poem:

Brooks is Asking This Sincerely

Hannah Arendt in the US, 1944. Photo by Alamy, via The Guardian.

Dsvid F. Brooks, "Speaking As a White Man", which sounds hilarious, of course, because we all know David Brooks isn't speaking as a white man but as the raceless and genderless voice of pure reason, a kind of Ken doll of the mind (even the passionless multicentenarians of 32,000 years from now in Shaw's Back to Methusaleh are divided into He-Ancients and She-Ancients, but Brooks thinks it's so obtrusive to insist on one's gender as if you thought it might make a difference, and really not very genteel to force on other folks the possibility that you might possess a dick), just wants somebody to answer a simple question:

How much are you in control of your own opinions? I ask this sincerely because, as you’ll see, I’m trying to think this through and I’m not sure how.

No, he's not asking this sincerely because, as you'll see, it's not the question he wants to explore, he's thought it through already, and he knows exactly how he wants to approach it.

What he really wants to know is how he can stop people from insisting that they are black, or gay, or Zoroastrian, and insisting that that gives them a right to say they know something he doesn't know and challenge him, because it makes him feel bad. And his chosen way of addressing it is to complain that the blacks and gays and Zoroastrians of today, unlike those of the good old days, have adopted the belief that your opinions are entirely dependent on your identity and that nobody can have thoughts that are not black or gay or Zoroastrian or white man's thoughts and that must explain why they keep telling him to shut up.

Or something.  I'm just trying to read this through and I'm not sure how.

For the Record: Bolton Addendum

John Bolton as the proverbial boy with a hammer, by the inestimable Donkey Hotey, March 2015.

I forgot a couple: A response to somebody who thought it was funny that Senator Rand Paul opposes Bolton

Bolton triggers everybody who's ever worked with him. For one thing he's the most abusive boss ever. https://t.co/MMSxuu6vmF

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 23, 2018

And to CNN's Josh Rogin, who was concerned that Bolton was being characterized as a "neocon" which is apparently inaccurate in the terms of the intensive difference-splitting of the American right

He was totally happy to work with neoconservatives in 2003 on the project of destroying Iraq. Disavow him philosophically all you want but forgive the rest of us for not getting excited about these nuances.

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 23, 2018

For the Record: First Thoughts on Bolton

Another secret Muslim betrays himself with the tawhid. Photo by Dennis Cook/AP via Breitbart (I won't link them).

.@realDonaldTrump you haven't tweeted about stock market in so long, what's up? Not S&P, that's in negative territory for the year. You did it with your trade war. https://t.co/zgUM1DRv2i

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 22, 2018

I mostly thought the Bolton nomination was funny at first:

Flatulent, Infidelistic Literature

David Brooks attempts to wrestle the woolly American spirit—"Vive, the attack -- the perennial assault! Vive, the unpopular cause -- the spirit that audaciously aims -- the never-abandon'd efforts, pursued the same amid opposing proofs and precedents"—to the ground. Photo via Mommy Poppins: Get More out of Houston with Kids.

David Brooks ("What Holds America Together") muses on the Houston Rodeo:

Last week I went to Houston to see the rodeo. That rodeo is not like other rodeos. It’s gigantic. It goes for 20 days. There can be up to 185,000 people on the grounds in a single day and they are of all human types — rural ranchers, Latino families, African immigrants, drunken suburban housewives out for a night on the town.

When you are lost in that sea of varied humanity, you think: What on earth holds this nation together?

There are quite a lot of immigrants from African countries—Nigeria and Ghana, Ethiopia and Kenya, and many others—in Houston, and they certainly deserve to enjoy themselves at the rodeo, as do the drunken suburban housewives, though I hope they weren't driving. Take an Uber, girls!

I'm not sure I'd be asking myself, "What on earth holds this nation together?" But David Brooks certainly did:

Hillary and Libya: Update

That's "Aidez-moi!" on his fingers. Image via Freaking News.

The extremely remarkable news coming out of France this week about ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, under arrest in a grotesque illegal campaign financing case, sheds unexpected light on a question we were working on two years ago, as the presidential campaign and the calumny campaign against Hillary Clinton were intensifying, and one of the angles of the latter was the portrayal of Clinton as a bloodthirsty warmonger against peace-loving Donald J. Trump, as in this example featuring a strange pro-Trump alliance among Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, Green candidate Jill Stein, The New York Times, and young Conor:

Coaster

The Thunderbolt, Coney Island, over the Kensington Hotel, before it was razed in 2000. Photo by Charles Denson, via New York Folklore Society.

Jordan, in comments to yesterday's post (the thread's gotten so long that I feel we have to start a new post):

It's everywhere now. Digby's got it again, and Slate, and a dozen other places. "Trump unleashed." All those people who could talk him out of things (which is a way of reading the Wolff book, at least) are now gone -- so it's not that Trump has changed ("feeling his power" etc.) but that his idiotic moves get unchallenged.

I don't know what to make of all the Republican Senators/Congresspeople (Lindsay Graham etc.) coolly assuring reporters that there's no need to create legislation to prevent Trump from firing Mueller because they're sure that could never happen.

I'm genuinely puzzled by this whole thing. It's very easy to jump at shadows right now...and there is a lot of historical precedent for this particular nervousness and confusion (and, the scare images of jumping too late in the correct direction)...but I don't trust either side of that argument right now.

"Now that I don't have any friends, look how powerful I am!"

Sadly, no, Donald. You're just crazier.

Trumps Fall Apart

Drawing by John Darkow, 1./28/16, via George H.'s Pinterest.

At the end of an anxious post Friday, Digby wrote:

Trump is getting stronger every day. Don't let the chaos fool you. 

Which is somewhat the opposite of what I've been thinking, that he's starting at last to really fall apart, which is pretty daunting. I'm diametrically disagreeing about something with Digby! A friend was shocked enough to ask about it, by email, but it's going to take me a while to get around to the point, so bear with me.

A lot of people, Digby included, think we can't know much about the official grounds for the firing of Andrew McCabe until an official report is issued—

It is certainly true that we don't know all the facts underlying the firing of Andrew McCabe. Maybe he was leaking damaging information to the press about Hillary Clinton and/or Donald Trump and then blatantly lied about it. From what we understand his crimes so far, they are much more vague than that but we'll have to wait and see. 

—but that's not quite correct. Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman for The New York Times seem to have found out a good deal, though they also don't seem to think it's a very important part of the story, and don't get there until paragraphs 22-23, and it turns out to be about an FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation:

Was Lukoil just asking for a friend?

Lukoil station in New York City, via Wikimedia Commons.

Well, this (from Danny Hakim and Matthew Rosenberg at the Times) is sort of interesting:

When the Russia question came up during a hearing at the British Parliament last month, Alexander Nix did not hesitate.

“We’ve never worked in Russia,” said Mr. Nix, head of a data consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign on targeting voters.

“As far as I’m aware, we’ve never worked for a Russian company,” Mr. Nix added. “We’ve never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country, and we don’t have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

Only Nix's interrelated companies, the UK SLC Group and US Cambridge Analytica, the Robert Mercer–created "psychographic profiling" firm hired by Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner to create the in-depth picture of how Trump's message resonated around the country that dictated the candidate's travel schedule in 2016, did claim that they worked in Russia in some of their promotional material (SLC says one employee did "commercial work" for a "private company" in Russia 25 years ago, but the brochure suggests that SLC has clients on its active list with the firm's elections division), and then apparently they had at least three meetings in 2014 and 2015 with executives from the privately owned but deeply government-connected Lukoil oil export firm, discussing some possible work that never got going.