brooksisadork

2005-04-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

My daughter in her room in our house in Togo

Onward Christian Soldiers

2005-04-24T21:47:00.000-07:00

A floating church on Lake Tonle Sap, Cambodia.

So I was watching CNN yesterday, content=more bloviating about the new Pope, and some berobed padre was yabbering about how one issue for the Church is expansion in the 3rd World, because everywhere that Christianity comes into contact with Islam, Islam is winning.

I don't know what the stats are on this, if in fact there are any stats, but this flies in the face of what I've seen in the 3rd World. In West Africa and here in Southeast Asia, it seems to me that everywhere Christianity and Islam come into contact, Islam is having its ass handed to it on a silver platter. My impression is that while Islam is expanding in sheer numbers, that's chiefly a function of the birthrate: pumping out Muslim babies. Whereas, if you're talking evangelism, Christianity is unequalled, unparalleled, and unrivalled.

Not that I approve of any of this; I feel that religion, in general, can be a positive thing, as long as people don't actually believe in it. But as a purely intellectual query: who's winning? Christianity or Islam? Anybody know?

Your point being?

2005-01-25T02:43:00.000-08:00

So today Brooks spends practically the entire column essentially rehashing an argument from no less than Paul Krugman: that the US is increasingly becoming a class-based society as social mobility slows to lower levels than that in Europe. (Though of course he doesn't give Krugman credit.)

This is a pretty convincing and powerful argument, and goes to the heart of progressives' fear and fury at the prospect of four more years of the Bush administration. It's shocking that Brooks is raising this topic, given that virtually every effort in Bush's first-term domestic policy was devoted to increasing and solidifying the class gap: the vast tax cuts tilted towards the richest 1%, the elimination of the estate tax, et cetera. Though of course Brooks never mentions the ways the Bush administration has worked to strengthen the class gap and limit social mobility.

Anyway, there are two key questions here: why is this happening? And what do you propose to do about it? It should come as no surprise that Brooks doesn't blame regressive tax policy, failure to raise the minimum wage, underspending on education, and the demise of unions for the increasing class divide. Instead he blames meritocracy. "Now, the upper class doesn't so much oppress the lower class. It just outperforms it generation after generation." There is some logic to this argument, though it implies that "merit" includes the ability to pay for an Ivy League education.

Finally, we get to the part about proposing what is to be done. Or rather, we don't. Brooks doesn't actually propose doing anything to redress the growing class divide. He does say this: "We can spend all we want on schools. But if families are disrupted, if the social environment is dysfunctional, bigger budgets won't help." So Brooks's grand proposal for promoting social mobility is to not increase public education budgets. Visionary!

But actually, this is all quite consistent in its own terms. The point of the article is to call on President Bush to make the same kind of commitment to social mobility in his State of the Union address as he did to promoting international democracy in his inaugural address. In other words, a purely rhetorical commitment, which he will then betray and undermine in his policy decisions.

Those pesky litmus tests

2004-10-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

And so we have come full cycle: Brooks today is back in pompously tautological, it-is-thus-as-it-hath-never-been, universal common-sense pronouncements mode, with a column entitled "The Osama Litmus Test" regarding, you guessed it, today's OBL videotape. Brooks's enlightened analysis? Well, it goes something like this: "This proves Osama Bin Laden is not a nuisance! Contrary to the malicious distortion of John Kerry's views which I have just implied, without actually stating."

It's something of a relief to see that after a series of columns in which he showed off his mildly perceptive side, Brooks today is back to raving idiot mode. The column today is so weird that it takes some effort to try and figure out exactly what Brooks is saying, if anything. But let's at least give it a try.

Essentially, Brooks is arguing that because Osama Bin Laden released a videotape in which he said a bunch of nasty things about the United States and bragged, yet again, about having caught the US Government napping on 9/11...geez, I just got stuck again. I started the sentence with "because", and now I'm supposed to follow with the "thus" part of the statement, but I just find it really hard to figure out what the hell Brooks is trying to say. As near as I can figure it, this is the idea: we saw OBL on TV, and he looked like a very, very bad man. And the most important thing about our future president is that he prove to us that, "deep in his gut" (YUCK! Can we declare a freaking moratorium on use of the intestinal tract in political rhetoric? I'm gonna get a perforation here!), he understands just how bad a man OBL is.

Aside from scheduling an appearance on the Daily Show to dismember a realistic blood-spurting OBL life-sized doll with a sharpened crowbar, I am not sure how much more either candidate can do to reinforce the American people's confidence in the sincerity of their OBL-loathing. I also do not see what in God's name this has to do with the question of which candidate will make a better president. It seems to me that to elect someone based on their demonstration of the deepness of their hatred of America's enemies (regardless of whether or not they can accurately identify those enemies) is a good way to wind up with, say, Alan Keyes as president. Brooks:

"Remember when John Kerry told Matt Bai of The Times Magazine that he wanted to reduce the terrorists to a nuisance? Kerry vowed to mitigate the problem of terrorism until it became another regrettable and tolerable fact of life, like gambling, organized crime and prostitution."

And? Is there anyone in the US who would object to reducing terrorism to the state where it was no more bothersome than gambling, organized crime and prostitution? Incidentally, 2 out of 3 of those items are seen as top-flight entertainment by a significant percentage of Americans, rather than as regrettable facts of life. Maybe all 3, if you count "The Sopranos". Careful, David - you've already lost New Jersey, you don't want to lose Nevada too.

"Well, the Osama bin Laden we saw last night was not a problem that needs to be mitigated."

He wasn't? I do not understand what you are saying. The problem of terrorism does not need to be mitigated? Terrorism is just fine? I am not trying to be cute, here. Brooks is saying one of two things: either that terrorism is just fine, or that it doesn't need to be mitigated - it needs to be entirely eradicated. But he never comes out and says the latter, because if he did he'd get himself into a quandary: like everybody else, George W. Bush included, he knows terrorism can't actually be entirely eradicated. It can only be...mitigated. But then he'd have no article.

"He was not the leader of a movement that can be reduced to a nuisance."

I don't know what he is saying here. This is a negative proposition which is clearly intended to lead to some positive proposition, but I cannot figure out what the positive proposition will be. The best guess is that it should be something like "He is instead the leader of a movement that..." What? Nothing there. Brooks doesn't actually have a lear conception of what Al Qaeda is; he just leaves it blank. That way it's more useful as a protean all-purpose scary campaign bugaboo.

"Here was this monster who killed 3,000 of our fellows showing up on our TV screens, trying to insert himself into our election, trying to lecture us on who is lying and who is telling the truth. Here was this villain traipsing through his own propaganda spiel with copycat Michael Moore rhetoric about George Bush in the schoolroom, and Jeb Bush and the 2000 Florida election.

Here was this deranged killer spreading absurd theories about the American monarchy and threatening to murder more of us unless we do what he says.

One felt all the old emotions. Who does he think he is, and who does he think we are?"

Actually, no. I didn't feel any of the same emotions I felt on Sept. 11. Only an idiot who had spent the last 3 years neither studying nor thinking would feel exactly the same emotions. What I felt was curiosity. Where is OBL? What is his current role in the universe of Islamic terrorism? Are the vague demands which he outlined in this tape - basically the withdrawal of American troops and other organiations from the Islamic world - in fact representative of the goals of Islamic violent political movements generally? Could radical political Islam ever be brought to the point where its demands did become concrete political ones, and where deals could be made and enforced with radical Islamic leaders?

Brooks's rhetoric evinces a kind of hysterical fear of penetration - "trying to insert himself into our election," e.g. I guess I just am not that freaked out by the idea of people I loathe trying to participate in the American political sphere of discourse. Hell, I can't get Pat Robertson to shut up either.

"One of the crucial issues of this election is, Which candidate fundamentally gets the evil represented by this man? Which of these two guys understands it deep in his gut - not just in his brain or in his policy statements, but who feels it so deep in his soul that it consumes him?"

Append to Yuck: Even More Yuck! "deep in his gut - not just in his brain" -- STOP WITH THE GRODY ANATOMICAL STUFF! I know Christians are all into this body-of-our-lord shit, and I know Bush is God's chosen leader on Earth, but the rest of us DON'T NEED TO HEAR IT! I feel perfectly capable of voting without knowing anything about either candidate's digestive tracts or medulla oblongatas.

On a substantial plane: Why should I care whether a candidate is so fixated on how evil Osama Bin Laden is that it "consumes him"? Actually, would it really be a good idea to vote for a candidate who is pathologically obsessed with a thirst for revenge? Has American political discourse really come to this?

"On Milwaukee television, he used the video as an occasion to attack the president: "He didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden. He outsourced the job." Kerry continued with a little riff from his stump speech, "I am absolutely confident I have the ability to make America safer."

Even in this shocking moment, this echo of Sept. 11, Kerry saw his political opportunities and he took 'em. There's such a thing as being so nakedly ambitious that you offend the people you hope to impress."

Shut UP! Shut UP! (whap-whap) The issue of whether or not President Bush committed enough resources to Afghanistan to capture OBL and eliminate al-Qaeda, rather than getting distracted by the big juicy lollipop of Baghdad, is one of the clearest pointed issues in this election. It serves as a referendum on whether President Bush "gets it": whether he gets that terrorism is a decentralized, networked, internet-age phenomenon which breeds and multiplies in the free-flowing trade and information currents and weakened states of the globalized economy; whether he gets that Afghanistan was thus always MORE dangerous than Iraq, not less; whether he has any idea who Osama Bin Laden is and how to fight him. I don't fucking care how much Bush hates OBL; what I care about is whether he has a clue as to how to fight him. John Kerry has been hammering on this point throughout the campaign. To suggest that because OBL made a videotape and sent it to a network (How dare he! The gall! This is a second national tragedy - we must observe a moment of silence, except, of course, for the Bush campaign) John Kerry should stop talking about the fact that Bush let him get away IS in fact shameless, shameless, naked electioneering, of a disgusting and putrid and vile sort, and only a completely intellectually dishonest hack would be capable of formulating such an idea.

"When we rely on allies everywhere else around the world, that's multilateral cooperation, but when Bush does it in Afghanistan, it's "outsourcing." In Iraq, Kerry supports using local troops to chase insurgents, but in Afghanistan he is in post hoc opposition."

This little paragraph verges on cogency for a moment. The key here, of course, is the difference between "insurgents" and "Osama Bin Freaking Laden". It's one thing to take advantage of local political legitimacy to suppress insurgents in general; it's another thing entirely, when you think you have the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks cornered, to deputize a posse of half-trained locals with their own political interests, rather than dropping in a giant honking division of American regulars to make goddamned sure we get the guy. But we didn't have a division of American regulars; we were getting ready to invade Iraq, so we could fail to find any WMD and open up all the bunkers full of explosives to looters.

"This is why Kerry is not cleaning Bush's clock in this election. Many people are not sure that he gets the fundamental moral confrontation."

Many people must really be incredibly stupid. Do they think John Kerry thinks OBL is an okay guy? That he's gotten a bum rap? What exactly is it that George Bush "gets"? That a nation founded on the principle of government of, for, and by the people is morally superior to a bloodthirsty mass murderer who deliberately targets and slaughters thousands of innocent civilians purely in order to score a political point? Gee, what a piercing insight.

The only content to the claim that George Bush "gets it" is the assertion of a kind of nakedly fascist identification of the soul of the nation, and the souls of citizens, with that of the leader. It is not okay for Brooks to use this kind of language. It isn't. It isn't okay to say he "gets it" without saying what it is he is supposed to "get". It isn't okay to suggest that whether a leader understands the world and proposes intelligent policies is less important than whether he "gets it". That is the language of fascism. Down that road lie endless warfare and ultimate defeat.

"We are revealed by what we hate."

Who said that? I think it was Goering, right? "When someone uses the word 'civilization', I reach for my revolver. We are revealed by what we hate." Oh no, wait. It was David Brooks.

Also Sprach Brooks

2004-10-28T23:19:00.000-07:00

Today we have yet another guise of the master: Brooks as Dave Barry. Or perhaps Art Buchwald is the better analogy. I personally find these columns intensely irritating; Brooks is no professional humorist, and his talent for screwball comedy is not the reason why the New York Times decided to give him all those column inches twice a week. So it kind of feels like a ripoff. But in general I find op-ed pages have been giving humor much too much space over the past decade; I find Maureen Dowd almost as infuriating. I go to op-ed pieces to read opinions, well argued and supported by a modicum of data. If I want wacky political satire I'll go see "Team USA".

Anyway. Having grown up in Washington DC, I have some recollection of the kinds of politically expansive dinner guests Brooks attempts to spoof in his latest column. ("It is only now that the dinner party lion emerges to stake his claim to greatness. While others quiver with pre-election anxiety, their mood rising and collapsing with the merest flicker of the polls, he alone radiates certainty.") However, I usually found these guests rather interesting. Perhaps that is because I actually enjoy political discussions. It is my sense that political discussions over dinner became rarer and rarer from 1985 to 2000 or so, as people began to feel that to raise a political subject at dinner was to be, as Brooks puts it, a "blowhard".

Perhaps this is why we've wound up saddled with a political universe full of morons.

Anyway, most of this column is really beneath discussion. However, there are a couple of revealing Brooksisms which are worth teasing out. First, take a look at the ridicule of the "dinner party lion"'s knowledge of electioneering minutiae:

"...he unfurls a series of impressive, counterintuitive but probably meaningless factoids: "You know, historically, polls conducted during the third week in September have proved to be more accurate in predicting the final result than ones conducted closer to Election Day." ...He runs through the bogus subdemographic groups that could swing the vote: cellphone-using creationists (undersampled by current survey methods) or African-American gun-owning deacons, who have been so intriguingly cross-pressured for several months."

One of Brooks's most consistent and immutable characteristics is his contempt for expertise in almost any field. I am particularly reminded of a column about two years ago in which he proclaimed that after attending a foreign-policy conference in the UK some years back, he had realized: "I don't believe in foreign policy." All those complicated ideas, all those complex political formulations, all those tentative theses which need to be supported by data! Who needs it? Just a bunch of mumbling bureaucrats and liberal perfessers. Right?

It's a startling thing to say you don't believe in foreign policy, but of course this is exactly the attitude which pervades current lumpen-GOP circles, as well as the Office of the Vice President and most of the Echo Chamber advisers closest to President Bush. The last 4 years have been an experimental trial of whether it's a good idea to turn the United States government over to people who don't believe in foreign policy, and the results of that trial are now in: the world hates us, our soldiers are being killed at about 10 a week, we're pouring money into a bottomless oil pit called Iraq, North Korea has half a dozen nukes pointed at California, and the self-satisfied smirk of Ariel Sharon looms over the smoking ruins of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, taking an occasional potshot at a Hamas teenager trying to launch a homemade rocket.

But to get back to this column, the subtext to the ridicule of someone who would try to back up his predictions about the election with actual data, particular detailed or complicated data, is that it is absurd or boorish to demonstrate in conversation that one is knowledgeable about an issue. This contempt for knowledge, for data, for expertise, and for intelligence in general is to be expected from Republicans, enemies of the "reality-based community" that they are. For Republicans, the proper place to discuss hard facts is in the corporate boardroom. The general public should be kept in a state of blissful ignorance, so that they can be persuaded to elect a chief executive they'd like to have a beer with - not one who might have intelligent, evidence-based policies on concrete issues.

Personally, given a choice between a beer with Geoerge Bush and dinner with a "blowhard" who's well versed in the minutiae of the current election, I'll take the blowhard anytime.

Then, there's Brooks's curious final point. "He must make sure his listeners do not recall that most voters have only the foggiest notions of what they are voting on. As a Cato Institute study reminds us, 70 percent of voters do not know about the new prescription drug benefit, 60 percent know little about the Patriot Act, and during the cold war, only 38 percent of voters knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO.

"These facts suggest that in close elections, the results are a crapshoot, which would undermine the pundit's claim to expertise."

Does Brooks actually believe this? Brooks does occasionally display a fleeting openness to the possibility of uncomfortable facts which might require a substantial change in his thinking. For example, over the summer, he grudgingly and painfully began to acknowledge that things in Iraq were not going very well. He even began to try to seriously examine what the mistakes might have been which led to the quagmire, and what potential strategies offered the best hope of a way out. But such a serious investigation quickly proved too frustrating and complex for his whimsical, bullshit-prone rhetorical style, and he dropped the whole thing by late September.

In any case, if Brooks really does have such a dim view of the intelligence of the American electorate, it could have serious consequences not just for his view of the legitimacy of electoral support for President Bush, but for his entire weltaanschaung. Consequence 1: it seems pretty clear that anyone who thinks Americans don't understand what they're voting for is thinking primarily of Bush supporters. No one has identified large groups of voters who are just wild for Kerry but don't understand his positions on the issues; and in fact PIPA surveys show just the opposite - large majorities of Kerry supporters do know where he stands on the issues, while the majority of Bush supporters think he supports the International Criminal Court. For Brooks to address the issue of ignorance among American voters is to come perilously close to calling Bush supporters dumb.

But of course he'd never follow through to that logical conclusion.

Consequence 2: David Brooks has throughout his career proven himself incapable of sustaining a gloomy thought for more than 2.3 seconds. His whole tone is one of sleepy, fat and happy triumphalism: the average American is richer than 99.9 percent of the human beings who have ever lived, as his NYT Magazine cover story of summer 2003 put it. (This was another great moment in idiotic Brooks rhetoric - simple back-of-the-napkin demographics shows this figure to be impossible, off by an order of magnitude. But never mind.)

Of course the thesis that Americans are ignorant, yet successful, rich and happy, and that knowledge of facts is therefore not terribly important, is perfectly consistent with the Brooks oeuvre, which is basically an elaboration of Disraeli's thesis that God protects idiots, small children, and the United States of America. Still, if things continue to go demonstrably poorly over the next several years of a Bush second term, and Brooks sustains the suspicion that the American people are kind of dumb, is it possible that he might eventually, inexorably reach the inescapable conclusion that Americans are stoopid bad - and that ain't good?

Don't bet on it.

Changeling

2004-10-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

The longer I work on this blog, and the more Brooks I grudgingly force myself to read, the more I come to realize that he seems to be two different columnists, appearing on different days. Sometimes Brooks's columns are surprisingly detached, mildly clever pieces of sociopolitical observation. More often, they're dunderheaded confabulations of nonsense built on clonkingly stupid presumptions, papered over with a veneer of middlebrow wit.

The most recent piece, though, is one of the tolerable ones. Brooks makes an observation that, as far as I know, hasn't been much fussed over in the media: the electorate's nearly fifty-fifty split year after year seems curiously detached from any of the concrete issues on which election campaigns are supposedly based. Either people are not basing their votes on the issues at hand, or their attitudes towards the issues at hand are actually determined by prior political loyalties; either way, the issues don't appear to be affecting people's politics. Brooks:

"Over the past four years, we've experienced a major terrorist attack, a recession, a dot-com shakeout, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate scandals and an active and tumultuous presidency. We've had an influx of new citizens. Millions have died of old age, and tens of millions have moved to new towns and new states

"Yet the political landscape looks almost exactly the same. We're still divided right down the middle...Why does everything in America change except politics? That is the central mystery of this election."

This isn't a bad question to raise. The only problem is that Brooks then goes on to explain the abiding fifty-fifty split in a typically ham-handed, dull-witted manner. Viz.:

"First, partisanship...Human beings are tribal. When they find themselves in a closely fought contest with a rival group, they become ever more tightly bound to their tribe. They see reality in ways that flatter the group. They nurture the resentments that bind the group."

This is a very stupid explanation; it doesn't actually qualify as an explanation at all. Human beings have always been tribal, but American presidential elections have not always been split almost fifty-fifty. You can't explain a novel phenomenon by referring to a permanent condition; the permanent condition can't, by simple logic, have any explanatory value in accounting for the novel phenomenon. I'm sure classical rhetorics has a term for this error, but I don't know what it is. It does strike me, though, as the kind of error to which conservative thinkers are peculiarly prone, for some reason. Give me a few minutes and I'll try and think of some examples - I'm just sure I've seen Brooks and other conservative writers make exactly the same kinds of meaningless appeals to eternal nature in explaining novel, conditional, contemporary phenomena before. I don't know exactly why they would be particularly prone to that sort of logical error, except perhaps for a fondness for ideas about human nature being fixed and unchanging, whether genetic or God-given.

Ronald Reagan's famous notion that trees cause air pollution involves a somewhat similar failure of logic. (There have always been trees; air pollution is new.) But it's not quite the same thing. I'll keep thinking.

Anyway, Brooks's second explanation is at first less obnoxiously stupid. "We're in the middle of a leadership war," he writes. "Underneath all the disputes about Iraq, we're having a big argument about what qualities America should have in a leader. Republicans trust one kind of leader, Democrats another.

"Republicans, from Reagan to Bush, particularly admire leaders who are straight-talking men of faith. The Republican leader doesn't have to be book smart, and probably shouldn't be narcissistically introspective. But he should have a clear, broad vision of America's exceptional role in the world. Democrats, on the other hand, are more apt to emphasize such leadership skills as being knowledgeable and thoughtful. They value leaders who can see complexities, who possess the virtues of the well-educated."

This isn't bad, either, as far as it goes. Though I quibble with the use of the word "leader", which already, to my mind, sneaks in an implicit Republican bias. I think much of the time Democrats don't even particularly want "leaders"; we want good politicians and public servants. We don't need to be "led", we want our views represented in open, democratic debate, and we're comfortable with the idea of somewhat fractious polities that don't march in goose-step to the vision of a Glorious Leader. Republicans seem profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of dissent and of governance by compromise, not by unanimity.

But the more important point here is that the fact that Democrats and Republicans prefer different leadership styles doesn't actually explain in any way the fifty-fifty nature of the current political divide. As Brooks notes, Reagan and Mondale also epitomized the respective Republican and Democratic leadership styles, but Reagan walloped Mondale fifty-seven to forty-three. So what is Brooks writing about here? How does he think these different preferences in leadership styles contribute to the narrowness of the split in the electorate?

Here's Brooks's explanation: "It just so happens that America is evenly divided about what sort of leader we need." Which, obviously, is no explanation at all. "It just so happens"? What the hell is that? Brooks is supposed to be explaining a novel and disturbing phenomenon - the persistence of a fifty-fifty divide through two presidential elections, despite immense changes in the concrete issues the country faces. And his "explanations" for this phenomenon are irrelevant appeals, first to the eternal, and then to the arbitrary.

To be fair, Brooks's discussion of leadership styles does have some relevance to the question of why new events and issues don't seem to change the political map; he's saying that people are voting based on character, not issues. But why fifty-fifty? That's the question he's raising, and that's the question he then fails even to address, much less answer.

Update: looking silly even faster!

2004-10-20T06:27:00.000-07:00

Hey, this is probably the quickest-acting wish-I-hadn't-written-that-one Brooks column yet! Within 48 hours of his "Kerry's slide in the polls due to overly harsh attacks" column, 2 new polls show the race tied - yesterday's Times/CBS poll, and today's Zogby/Reuters. To what will Brooks's next column attribute Kerry's miraculous recovery? A sudden and incredibly powerful dose of moderation? Or could he possibly be so intellectually dishonest as to ignore the issue? We're waiting, David...

Off the Leash

2004-10-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been away for a while - had a new baby. But I return to address a Brooks column which is simultaneously infuriating and content-free - so content-free that it seems scarcely worth the trouble to rebut it. Nonetheless, here goes.

The thesis of today's Brooks column is that the reason Kerry's daily tracking poll numbers have not improved over the past week, despite his generally acknowledged victory in the third presidential debate, is that he's spent the week attacking Bush too viciously. Brooks claims Kerry's attacks don't hold water, that voters recognize this, and that that's why his poll numbers aren't climbing. Brooks calls Kerry's campaigning "incompetent, crude and over-the-top".

Let's pretend for a moment we don't know that Brooks is acting as a flack for the Bush campaign, and take his piece seriously for a moment. What are these supposedly undisciplined and overly harsh Kerry smears?

1. "On Monday, Kerry told seniors in Florida that Bush is plotting a "January surprise" to cut their Social Security benefits by as much as 45 percent...As Kerry knows, that's ludicrous - it's a stale and transparent canard that Democrats have brought out in election after election, to less and less effect. President Bush has not entertained and would not entertain any plan that cut benefits to seniors."

President Bush has declared he intends to replace the current pay-as-you-go Social Security system with a system of tax-free retirement savings accounts. He has never explained where the money will come from to pay for current seniors' monthly checks when payments from current workers are deposited into their savings accounts, rather than paying for checks today. This trivial little mathematical oversight runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The US government is already out of money, so the only way to fund the switchover would be to reduce current seniors' checks.

Bush's promises not to reduce Social Security payments to seniors should thus be filed along with his promises during the 2000 campaing not to create deficits. They are lies. Brooks's argument here amounts to "Bush says he won't cut Social Security payments, so he won't." Why anyone should trust the fiscal promises of a president who promised a balanced budget 4 years ago, and has run up over $1 trillion of deficits since, is not clear.

2. "Kerry's second wild attack is that Bush would reinstate the draft. The administration, which hasn't even asked for trivial public sacrifices in a time of war, does not want to bring back the draft."

Brooks's evidence-free assertion that the administration doesn't "want to" bring back the draft is a pretty pointless rhetorical exercise. Whether or not the administration "wants to" bring back the draft is immaterial; the administration may not "want to" increase the US's $5 trillion debt ceiling either, but it doesn't have much choice. Bush is committed to a continuing confrontational and militaristic foreign policy which will entail ever-increasing commitments of US troops abroad, as far as the eye can see. At some point, Bush will either have to reinstate the draft or change his foreign policy - and changing policies in the face of difficult realities is something this administration does not do.

3. "Kerry's third attack is the whole Mary Cheney thing. That's been hashed over enough. But remarkably, Kerry has not apologized."

Brooks is forced to use the sleazy construction "the whole Mary Cheney thing" because if he described what it was that Kerry actually said, it'd be clear that it wasn't an "attack". Kerry said "I think that if you asked Dick Cheney's daughter Mary, who is a lesbian," whether she had known her sexual orientation since birth, she would say yes. Mary Cheney is an out lesbian. To describe her as one is not an "attack". Kerry was simply pointing out that there are out homosexuals on both sides of the aisle who feel their sexual orientation is part of their nature, not something learned.

The GOP is desperately trying to convince the American public that pointing out that some Republicans are homosexual is somehow sleazy. This is ridiculous. But they have managed to make enough hay in the press that they're no longer forced to actually repeat their absurd argument; they simply refer to "the whole Mary Cheney thing". Well, I think George Bush should lose the presidential race because of "the whole Iraq thing". How's that for reasoned argument?

4. "The fourth assault is Kerry's attack on the Bush administration's supposed "ban" on stem cell research. John Edwards's ludicrous statement that if Kerry was president, people like Christopher Reeve would be able to get up and walk was only the farcical culmination of a series of exaggerations about the possibilities of finding cures for Alzheimer's and spinal cord injuries."

Here's another dumb elision bereft of argument - "supposed 'ban'". It's unclear who used the word "ban", other than Brooks. But in any case, the charge is substantially true: scientists say they need more stem cell lines; the Bush admin says they can't have them. When Brooks calls Edwards's statement "ludicrous", he's simply insulting the hopes of everyone who needs help from the kinds of treatments stem cell research might provide.

What's really infuriating about this kind of tactic on Brooks's part is that he knows perfectly well what Edwards was trying to do with his statement: he was trying to illustrate, in a concrete fashion, the possible benefits which a certain rather abstract type of scientific research might provide. The real benefits of stem cell research are hard to predict, but the scientific consensus is that they are extremely promising in lots of different fields. What we're really talking about here is freedom of scientific inquiry versus know-nothing religious irrationalism and the maniacal evangelical cult of the foetus. But we all know voters often have trouble relating to claims made in complex or abstract terms - no one has ever won an election running on the freedom of scientific inquiry. It was Ronald Reagan who pioneered the technique of using concrete, folksy examples of individual people to illustrate the goals of complex policy decisions. Yet when Democrats try to use this technique, Republicans call the tying of complex policy initiatives to specific cases "ludicrous".

Okay, here's a thought: what adjective would you use to describe President Bush's linkage of the war in Iraq to the prospect of democracy and freedom in the Arab world? Does "ludicrous" come to mind?

In fact, it's telling that Brooks repeatedly uses the word "ludicrous" to describe Kerry's current campaign themes. Of course, if Al Gore had charged during the 2000 campaign that Bush's policies would result in a $420 billion deficit by 2004, Brooks would no doubt have called the accusation equally "ludicrous". Unfortunately, this administration is so nuts that when you describe what they're doing accurately, the description appears...ludicrous.

Hawk vs. Hawk

2004-09-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

David Brooks Likens Iraq War to "Vietnam":

"The lesson of Vietnam is that you can't win these wars via military means."

"These wars", David? So Iraq and Vietnam are fundamentally the same kind of war? Nice to see this finally acknowledged; let's keep it in mind for future reference.

Today's column is, by the debased standards of the Brooks oeuvre, a pretty good one. Brooks distinguishes between two camps of Iraq counterinsurgency strategists: the "gradualists" and the "confrontationalists". Gradualists would prefer to keep US troops out of rebel strongholds like Falluja over the next year or so, while helping the Allawi government build up its own military strength and political support for an eventual, Iraqi-led assault. They think attacking now only strengthens anti-US and anti-Allawi sentiment, and the US can't take and hold rebel territory alone. The "confrontationalists", on the other hand, argue that letting the insurgents control whole swaths of the country lets them build up their own strength and stymie stabilization efforts, and may prevent the Allawi government from ever getting a firm footing. They think we should go in now, guns blazing.

This is an okay characterization, as far as it goes. The problem is that it's kind of irrelevant. As Brooks says, the Iraq war resembles the Vietnam war, right down to the fruitless conflicts over tactics and strategy between bomb-em-all neanderthal generals like Westmoreland and hearts-and-minds enlightened junior officers like John Paul Vann. Ultimately, these arguments are just footnotes to history, because by the time the brass starts getting into these kinds of dust-ups, there is no longer a correct US strategy; the mistakes have been made, and every approach will fail. The biggest resemblance between Iraq and Vietnam at this point is that, barring a miracle, the US is going to lose.

Brooks says "the lesson of Vietnam is that you can't win these wars by military means. You have to build a political structure that organizes public support and mix it with military might." But he then spends his entire column talking exclusively about what the US military should or shouldn't do. He seems to have no more detailed notion of what "build[ing] a political structure that organizes public support" might entail. One might think that, having acknowledged that building a political structure is the most important task, Brooks might then take a look at the extant political actors in Iraq - religious, ethnic, and clan-based organizations and leaders, their strengths and interests - and talk about how the structure of the newly established Iraqi interim government interfaces with these forces, and what strategies it can pursue to grow roots and create stability. But such discussions are clearly too complicated and boring for Brooks. He's really only interested if it involves tanks and fighter jets - American ones, please.

Let's go to the play by play.

"The debate on how to proceed in Iraq is not between the hawks and the doves: it's within the hawk community, and it's between the gradualists and the confrontationalists."

Well, yeah, when you're in the middle of fighting a war, the debate on how to fight that war doesn't tend to involve people who don't think you should fight. It's not exactly clear what Brooks means by "doves" here, so it's not clear who he thinks he's dissing. If by "doves" he means those who didn't think we should invade Iraq, we actually have a very clear position on the war: we told you so. As for our position on gradualism vs. confrontationalism, we say: good luck, and it serves you morons right. In about six months, once it becomes politically acceptable, our position will probably change to: it's too late; Iraq is fucked. Bring the troops home now.

"The gradualists argue that it would be crazy to rush into terrorist-controlled cities and try to clean them out with massive force because the initial attack would be so bloody there'd be a debilitating political backlash.
The terrorists would fight as long as there were heart-wrenching scenes of dead children on satellite TV, then would melt away to fight another day. And if the U.S. did take control of, say, a newly destroyed Falluja, we would find that we didn't have enough troops to control the city and still hunt down terrorists elsewhere. We'd end up abandoning the city (as we have other places), and the terrorists would just take control again. We'd be back where we started.
There is a reason, the gradualists point out, that counterinsurgency wars have tended to take a decade or more. They can be won only with slow, steady pressure. The better course, they continue, is to allow some time to train and build up Iraq's own security forces, and allow some time for the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, to build up a base of anti-insurgent political support. The lesson of Vietnam is that you can't win these wars via military means. You have to build a political structure that organizes public support and mix it with military might.
The gradualists point to what just happened in Najaf as their model for how the Iraq war should proceed. First, Allawi laid down tough conditions: that Moktada al-Sadr's militia had to go. Then he convinced many of the locals that their lives would be better without lawless thugs in their midst. Then the U.S. attacked and weakened the terrorists. Then Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani brokered an agreement that led to the re-establishment of government control. Now development aid can flow to Najaf again. Aid projects worth roughly $6 million are resuming, and $37 million more is on the way.
Najaf, the gradualists argue, showed it's possible to marginalize the extremists and rally the decent majority. Now the task is to build on that success in other towns, and slowly rob the terrorists of sanctuaries."

That's the task all right - assuming the government does actually control Najaf now, rather than simply depending on the political clout of Sistani and the military clout of the US marines to claim a fictive sovereignty over the city. Slowly robbing the terrorists of their sanctuaries sounds nice. So did Ngo Dinh Diem's plan to slowly rob the Viet Cong of its sanctuaries. Perhaps, unlike Diem, Allawi will turn out to actually preside over a government that's more than a hapless and corrupt house of cards, propped up by US money and armed force. We'll see.

"The confrontationalists can't believe the Bush folks, of all people, are waging a sensitive war on terror. By moving so slowly, the U.S. is allowing terror armies to thrive and grow. With U.S. acquiescence, fascists are allowed to preen, terrorize and entrench themselves.
Moreover, they continue, there's no reason to think the Najaf model will work in Sunni cities, where we don't understand and can't exploit the local rifts, where there is no Sistani figure to come in at crucial moments.
In Sunni cities, the so-called moderates may make deals with Allawi, but they break them just as quickly - or else are beheaded by the terrorists. Members of the Falluja Brigade, who were supposed to take the city from the terrorists, switched over and joined the other side.
The gradualist approach, the confrontationalists conclude, has allowed terror to thrive. Now there are about 100 attacks a day. U.S. troops find themselves engaged in a modulated half-war in which they engage the enemy enough to suffer casualties, but not enough to win. The Iraqis are demoralized because it doesn't look as if the country will be pacified in time for full national elections, and because without security there can be no economic development - only more misery and more terror. U.S. troops are demoralized because if they are going to hit the enemy, they want to hit the enemy hard.
The gradualists clearly have the upper hand within the Bush administration. When administration officials talk about Iraq, they emphasize that this is a deliberate process, leading to elections in January but continuing long after. But when pressed, they tend to search for some compromise approach, emphasizing political solutions in places like Sadr City and the military approach in Falluja.
It's depressing to realize how strong the case against each option is."

Sure is. In fact, it makes you think: what if neither strategy works? What if Iraq turns into a bleeding, flaming, anarchic hellhole and a breeding ground for terrorism - permanently? What if it is simply impossible for the US to bring stability to Iraq? What would Brooks advocate doing then? Hm? How about the Lebanon solution - let a vicious, dictatorial, powerful neighbor invade and assume political control? How'd you like to see an Iranian-controlled Iraq, David?

Gosh, that decision to invade Iraq looks better all the time. The US sure is safer with Saddam Hussein out of power.

"But the weight of the argument is on the gradualist side. That's mostly because people like Ayad Allawi deserve a chance to succeed. These people in the interim government are scorned as stooges and U.S. puppets, but they're risking and sometimes giving their lives for their country. Let's take the time to give them a shot. "

After all, we haven't got any other ideas. Gosh, this nation-building thing is hard.

Ruling Class war

2004-09-11T06:44:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Davie was in deep moral thoughts zone - a zone he is manifestly not comfortable in. Today he returns to more comfortable ground: off-the-cuff insta-sociology, slicing and dicing the population into niches gussied up with cutesy demographic monikers which are intended to hide the fact that they don't really make much sense.

Today's effort to further polarize the American political landscape (uniters, not dividers, anyone?) takes on "the information-age elite", the symbolic analysts who are, per Robert Reich etc., the new leading class of American society. (Since when do conservatives embrace political models based on economic class? Since now, apparently.) Brooks gives us the categories "spreadsheet people" and "paragraph people" as the red-blue divide within the information-age elite. Spreadsheet people, like CEOs and accountants, are pro-Bush. Paragraph people, like academics and journalists, are pro-Kerry. Brooks supports his claims with data from a survey of political donors broken down by profession, carried out by PoliticalMoneyLine.com.

Why is this cute idea so stupid? Let's put it this way. Brooks doesn't bother to mention one group you'd think would qualify as classic "spreadsheet people": economists. Who could possibly be more spreadsheet-oriented than an economist? Brooks leaves economists out of his column for a simple reason: in PoliticalMoneyLine.com's survey, the ratio of economists for Bush to economists for Kerry was...zero. No economists gave money to Bush. Thirteen donated to Kerry; the rest of the 61 economists surveyed overwhelmingly gave to other Democratic candidates or to the DNC. (Just 3 gave to GOP candidates; one gave to LaRouche.)

Let's go through the groups Brooks terms "spreadsheet people". Actually, there are just three: CEO's, bankers, and accountants. Not exactly a broad donor base, but what they lack in breadth, they make up for in depth...of pockets. Now, what do these three groups have in common? They're all heavily affected by federal tax and regulatory practices which the Republicans are trying to curtail or abolish. For example, the GOP is currently trying to eliminate taxes on corporate dividends, and prevent stricter government oversight of the accounting and banking industries. The reason CEOs, bankers and accountants are Republican isn't some mystical affinity of thinking styles; it's that the Republicans are in the pockets of bankers, accountants, and big corporations. Bankers, accountants, and CEOs give to the GOP because they are buying legislation that puts more benjamins in their briefcases. Or that allows them to deceive clients, form cartels and misuse insider information without being punished.

Now let's look at Brooks's "paragraph people": academics, journalists, actors (?), authors, librarians, lawyers. Does it make sense to argue that any of these people are voting their wallets? Trial lawyers, maybe. And I guess you could make a case that librarians are voting against tax cuts that force libraries to close. But for most of these people, it seems obvious that their opposition to Bush stems from conviction - or, especially in the case of economists, from EXPERTISE. Economists are just as much "spreadsheet people" as CEOs. The difference is, economists are impartial. CEOs support whoever they think is good for their business. Economists support whoever they think is good for America.

This, in sum, is a sneaky little column. Bush's donor base is overwhelmingly composed of the tiny business class - CEOs, bankers, and accountants - whom his policies directly benefit, at the expense of the rest of America. Brooks is trying to disguise this fact by making it look like just an innocent difference of intellectual proclivities, no more serious than the choice of majors in college. In fact, it's what the title of the column aptly suggests: class war. But only one class is fighting.

A few choice bits out of the column:

"Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats."

Shine their shoes? Would that be while debarking from the 20th Century Limited, or perhaps exiting Ebbetts Field? Someone please alert Mr. Brooks that it is no longer 1956.

"Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people and lean Democratic."

Would that include, like, professors of particle physics? How about professors of environmental biology? Or do spreadsheets only count when the data that's on them is money? How about professors of medicine - surgeons, say? "Paragraph people"?

"Academics have had such an impact on the Democratic donor base because there is less intellectual diversity in academia than in any other profession."

There may be little POLITICAL diversity in academia. But support for George Bush is not "intellectual diversity", unless you argue that, to be intellectually diverse, a group must include a fair proportion of stupid and greedy people.

"Why have the class alignments shaken out as they have? There are a couple of theories. First there is the intellectual affiliation theory. Numerate people take comfort in the false clarity that numbers imply, and so also admire Bush's speaking style. Paragraph people, meanwhile, relate to the postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist, co-directional ambiguity of Kerry's Iraq policy."

"Numerate people" could support George Bush only if the sole thing they're enumerating is the number of dollars in their tax refunds - and then, only provided they make more than $200,000 a year. "Numerate people" would have to recognize that an administration that turns a $397 billion projected surplus (for FY 2004 as of end 2000) into a $422 billion actual deficit has gone fiscally mad - and that, furthermore, an administration which deliberately issues wildly inaccurate , politically biased deficit estimates, over and over again, is not to be trusted. And to speak of the "false clarity that numbers imply", at a time when the numbers show that we are mortgaging our children's future to pay for billion-dollar tax giveaways to the richest people in the world, is simply evil. It's like the casino barker telling you not to pay attention to those scary thousand-to-one odds - that's just the false clarity that numbers imply. Go ahead! Put it all on 17! You might win big! Oh, you lost - too bad. Try it again! Maybe you'll win!

And then to contend that Bush's speaking style appeals to "numerate people" because he states things in short, declarative sentences, even though these sentences are frequently false, and never contain accurate or detailed numbers...this is just bizarre. Bill Clinton's speaking style was filled with numbers - percentages, budget amounts, population sizes, down to the last detail. But apparently "numerate people" aren't attracted to speakers who are actually numerate. They like speakers who say short, decisive things, which never actually include any numbers.

The "paragraph people" relating to Kerry's "postmodern" blah blah - apparently there were no progressive academics supporting the decidedly non-postmodern, unambiguous Howard Dean. Oh, wait - actually the campuses were for Dean; Kerry won the nomination because of a bunch of folks in Iowa. Gosh, those Iowans are so...postmodern.

"...people who majored in liberal arts subjects like English and history naturally loathe people who majored in econ, business and the other "hard" fields. This loathing turns political in adult life and explains just about everything you need to know about political conflict today."

Except for the fact that "hard" economists overwhelmingly support Kerry. Incidentally - business is a "hard" field? Funny, I thought physics and pre-med were "hard" fields. I always thought of business as a "bullshit" field.

"I myself am thinking of founding the Class Traitors Association, made up of conservative writers, liberal accountants and other people so filled with self-loathing that they ally politically with social and cultural rivals."

THis would be funny except that it touches on a truly upsetting, deeply held conviction of Republican thinkers: they actually feel that to do something political which would be good for anyone other than oneself is to be guilty of "self-loathing". This dismal Nietzschean heritage goes a long ways towards explaining the behavior of, say, Dick Cheney. Democrats, fools that we are, actually believe that human beings can occasionally help each other out without being guilty of self-hatred. What they call "self-loathing" we call "solidarity", or, sometimes, "patriotism".

Cult of Death

2004-09-07T16:18:00.000-07:00

Today Brooks is in his Big Tautological Pronouncements mode: nothing is as it was, all is now as it never was then, they are they and we are we, and so forth. Let's take a look.

"We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life."

Hello, David, and welcome to Planet Earth, where various events sometimes cause large numbers of innocent people to be killed, almost always while going about the daily activities of life. (Seldom are people killed while not going about the daily activities of life, since such people tend to be already dead.) These events include earthquakes, aerial bombardments, epidemics, terrorist attacks, ships striking icebergs, famines, genocides and political purges, and the formation of the Black Sea in the early neolithic period as a result of rising sea levels. You may be surprised to learn that these events did not commence on Sept. 11, 2001 - indeed, some took place even before you were born!

"We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder."

Which death cult was the one that sent waves of teenagers to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Somme, again? Well, okay, it's a quibble - the rest is fair enough so far.

"This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood. "

Again, fair enough. But here comes the fun part...

"But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying."

Ahhh - the sheer pleasure of killing and dying! Man, you just gotta love the refreshing flavor of killing and dying. Can't get enough of it! God knows I've had a hard time keeping my toddler from killing and dying. I try offering her favorite breakfast cereals, a trip to the zoo, a horseback ride, but she just keeps going on about killing and dying! "Daddy, can't I please kill someone? Can't I please die?" I guess it's just a natural human urge. Some people think killing and dying are gruesome and repulsive activities which humans aren't naturally prone to, that only complex organizations with strong political roots and broadly shared aims or grievances have the capacity to train people to overcome their natural aversion to killing and dying, in order to carry out acts of political violence. But that's just ignorance of human nature! Why, there's nothin' folks love better than gettin' them some good killing and dying.

"It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide."

Aha, the plot thickens. It looks like human nature is actually against the joy of killing and dying...which means the urge to kill and die actually stems from...uh...something. Hm. The urge to freedom! Oh, that's a terrible thing, that freedom. Oh no, wait. Isn't that what we invaded Iraq to bring people? Okay, not freedom...What about the joy of sadism and suicide? Not that I personally enjoy either one, you understand...Note to self: will have to work on this point further.

"We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan."

Wait -- now the urges to kill and die ARE "parts of human nature"? I can't keep this straight. On, off, on, off - very flip-floppy on this issue.

"Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings. "

Note to self: do not think about it too deeply, as may undermine faith. In fact, better not think about anything too deeply.

"Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage."

Like the authorities not having any ambulances present at a days-old hostage crisis. As if ambulances could have saved anyone! Wait, maybe they would have saved someone. But not more than, you know, a few dozen people. A hundred, tops.

"The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.
The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened.""

Damn those Dutch, always wanting to know how things actually happened. Can't they see it's WAR ON TERROR WAR ON TERROR WAR ON TERROR

"It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. "

See you could tell it was a pure mass murder operation because, instead of taking the kids hostage and holding them for a few days, which is what they would've done if they had some political demands, they just immediately massacred them all. Oh, no, actually they held them for several days. Well, whatever.

"And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away."

Though in Grozny, they did bomb entire apartment blocks flat while the residents were still in them, actions which I denounced at the time as "state-sponsored terrorism". Not.

"Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up. "

And thus we know that the people who committed this act were very, very bad! And the further conclusion which this leads to is...is... They were very bad people! And any attempt to draw any political conclusion whatsoever, either about the Chechnya conflict or the nature of the Putin administration or the nature of other conflicts involving terrorism, is totally illegitimate, because the real point is - they were baaaaad!!!

"Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve? "

They weren't 'separatists' - they didn't want Chechnya to become independent! Or actually, they did, but you know, whatever. And "hostage-takers" - how dare the press apply such a positive, complimentary term to them! Just because they took lots of hostages? Doesn't the media understand that these people have no goals - they're just mad killers, bent on the joy of pure destruction? That's why they just massacred those kids immediately, instead of holding them as hostages and making demands, which...oh yeah, that's what they did, but like we said before, whatever.

"They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.""

Okay, here we drop the cutesy tone and instead address a basic failure of language and reasoning, both on Berman's and Brooks's parts. The words "reason" and "reasonable" are being bandied about in a confused fashion here. First, because something is unreasonable does not mean that it cannot be reasoned about. A bowling ball is not reasonable, but we can use the faculty of reason to think about what kind of force might have driven it to roll down the alley. Second, the phrase "the enemies of reason" is an ellipsis for a whole pile of ideas about European and Mideastern intellectual history. Berman uses "reason" here to stand for "Reason", or the European Enlightenment commitment to secular rationalism. The contention is that Islamicist terrorists are "enemies of reason" because they are enemies of secular rationalism. Now, nobody knows whether the terrorists in Beslan were in fact Islamic fundamentalists or Chechen nationalists. But more importantly, Berman is being slippery with words when he implies that the "enemies of reason", in the sense of enemies of Enlightenment-style secular rationalism, cannot be "reasonable". All human beings are "reasonable", in the sense of using reason to achieve goals. This, indeed, is one of the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. If enemies of secular rationalism are impervious to reason, then ... well, that certainly helps us to understand a lot about President Bush. Anyway, Brooks is trying to use Berman's line to take things a step further - to claim that the terrorists in Beslan and terrorists in general are simply insane, that they are beyond human comprehension. This is just stupid.

"This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate. "

This is beneath commentary or contempt, and I think I've made the points already above. Let me just add that the return of the McCarthyite "they" in political speech heralds a new dawn for fascism in American discourse.

Onwards and upwards, Brooksie!

An Introduction: Why David Brooks is a Dork

2004-09-07T16:04:00.000-07:00

This blog is motivated by two convictions. The first is a formal or structural one. I believe that the blog, as a form, is most effective where it is tightly focused on a subject about which the blogger is either knowledgeable or holds pronounced and well-thought-out opinions. With this in mind, I have let myself be prompted by my second conviction, one which I hold deeply and to which I have devoted much reflection: that David G. Brooks, conservative op-ed columnist for the New York Times, is a dork. This blog will be devoted to making fun of the columns of the eminently ridiculous Brooks. I will try to respond to each of Brooks's columns as they are loosed upon the aether. Today, to inaugurate our blog, an initial stab, in response to Brooks's painfully error-riddled piece in today's Times, "Cult of Death"...