speakingcorpse writes:

Here's a smart column by the always useful Todd Gitlin, analyzing the "writings" "of" "David Brooks." It's worth a read, though I was a bit frustrated that Gitlin didn't touch on one important aspect of Brooks's "work"--the fact that it is excrement emitted from his mouth. All questions of wit and smugness aside (and I know they're important, as Brooks apparently is good at "playing" whatever "game" it was that got him on the NYTimes editorial page) it's hard to imagine how Gitlin ever managed to make this careful analysis. It clearly required him to examine, at close range, and perhaps even to consume, a large number of turds. Gitlin also fails to mention Brooks's latest emission, in which he claims that Dean can't be trusted because he's the internet candidate (or something to that effect--I couldn't bring myself to smell more than a sentence or two). In all honesty, I think Brooks wrote that column by trying to think of how a sketch-comedian would have parodied his (Brooks's) own "writing." Brooks couldn't possibly have believed a word of it. Woops! There's that concept again--always irrelevant in analyzing the "writings" of "conservative" "commentators"--belief. There is simply no question of belief. It is simply a matter of making words that fit a premade mold with sufficient closeness as to make interpretation (or questions of truthfulness, or belief) totally unnecessary. Thus, a columnist like Brooks, trying to squeeze out the day's emission, REALLY COULD AND PROBABLY DOES derive his ideas by trying to come up with parodies of RNC blastfax talking points. Because for his readers--and for him, too, as he approaches a state of pure mechanical shit-production--there is no distinction between parody and sincerity. There is just the pure, hard, excremental form of the utterance (emission). Brooks maintains enough of a consciousness of this dehumanizing procedure to get a bit of smug self-delight out of it. That, if anything, is his only recognizable human affect--and hence it must be part of his appeal. "Look how well I can play this game! Don't you wish you too were paid to produce this empty meaningless crap, which by this point I can do as easily as taking a shit? I get paid to shit! Ha-ha! Isn't America great?"