Babbling Brooks

I leave for one little vacation, and the NY Times gives David Brooks free reign to blather on about religious crap! Oh, they do that every week? What's with that? Didn't they used to be the paper of record or something?

Anyway, David Brooks is a noted moron, for those of you not in the loop. He became well known a few years ago for the book "Bobos in Paradise," which I have not read, because it sounds dumb. He's basically an evil corporate/Republican apologist, railing on in the NY Times about how greed is still good, even though it's not the 1980's any more and Gordon Gecko was just a character in an Oliver Stone movie.

He's also one of the main guys behind this constant "you blue state people don't understand the red staters" yammering, as if (1) no one had ever made this idiot accusation before and (2) there was such a thing as a clueless blue stater who doesn't understand that people in America are sometimes religious.

This particular article, which I found courtesy of Brad DeLong's perfectly delightful weblog, finds Brooks trying to make hay...um, I mean sense...of this unbearably horrible tsunami tragedy that has traumatized several Asian nations.

Things get unpleasant almost immediately, with Brooks attempting to use tragic circumstances currently affecting the lives of literally billions of people to make a point about religion in America:

Most cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In most of these stories, God is meting out retribution, punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than the old.

Okay, so far all we have is a dumb columnist stretching an important international news item into his typical kind of column topic. Fair enough, I guess, although debating the significance of flood myths at a time when so many people are dead, dispossessed, starving or displaced feels a bit crude to me.

But it gets worse.

Stories of a wrathful God implied that at least there was an active God, who had some plan for the human race. At the end of the tribulations there would be salvation.

If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the universe's main concern. We're just gnats on the crust of the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.

Meh? The media are reporting that these tsunamis happened because there isn't a God, or at least because there isn't a vengeful God? That's odd, because most of what I've been seeing on the news is images of people being killed or injured by flood waters. There were fucking 80 foot waves bearing down on Indonesia, and Brooks wants MSNBC to take time out to acknowledge that God's anger has been what killed these people?

Of course, this notion is overflowing with implied racism. Point it out for me, you say? Well, if you insist...

Brooks is accusing the news media of overlooking the possible religious interpretation of these events, I guess, although his meaning gets a bit muddled other than "conservatism GOOD" once you start reading his columns closely. It's a dumb argument, but let's entertain it for a moment.

What would be the religious interpretation of a massive flood in Asia? Depends on what religion. Since we're discussing David Brooks here, that would be Your Favorite, America's #1 Religion, Meet the Fockers. I mean, Christianity. And what reasons does the Judeo-Christian scripture give for God deciding to flood the world, or a certain part of the world? Oh, yeah, that's right...malicious anger.

So, if we take Brooks' argument at face value, the media has lost touch with the people because it's not implying that God is punishing dirty, filthy Muslims, Buddhists and other assorted brown people by flooding their countries and killing them by the thousands.

You've got to wonder why his last book didn't sell better, with airtight logic like this.

Believe it or not, the article goes on. Brooks thinks he has more interesting things to say! It's incredible.

Here's a chestnut:

"Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds," Thoreau wrote.

Nature doesn't seem much like a nurse or friend this week, and when Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of combat.

Can you believe this guy? As if Thoreau had never considered the awesome power of nature before writing "Walden." That's what the goddamn book is about, shithead! If you had to summarize "Walden" in a few sentences, you'd say something like...a man gives up the rigors of daily city life to live in an isolated cabin for several months, to better absorb the awesome powers of nature.

And Thoreau's point has utterly nothing to do with massive floods. He's talking about communing with nature, blaming our discomfort in the natural world on the softening affects of civilized society rather than on some fault of nature to provide us with a livable environment. He's not saying that Nature is incapable of doing humans any wrong. Remember, kids, this guy's a columnist at the most famous, respected newspaper in this country.

The weirdest line is also the last:

This is a moment to feel deeply bad, for the dead and for those of us who have no explanation.

What? Brooks wants everyone to feel as bad for him as they do for the victims of this terrible tragedy? I mean, I'm alive and these hundreds of thousands are not, and it's disturbing to me. But, you know, I'll be okay. I was still able to go about my life this week, thinking about this issue but not unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of day-to-day existance on Earth. You shouldn't feel bad for me, or David Brooks, or anyone else who is alive and comfortable. Yeah, we may have the occasional existential crisis, but that's fortunately a condition you can live with. Your entire house being suddenly covered in sea water isn't.

Dumbass.