There’s a fingernail-on-the-chalkboard feel to every one of these Gail Collins-David Brooks chats. Brooks is so clueless and Collins so indulging, it just makes me want to throw up. This week, it’s ‘David Brooks goes to the zoo’ and reports back on the great spiritual yearning of your average Glenn Beck fan. When Collins gently tries to remind him that they’re more pissed about being told to press ‘2’ for Spanish when they call their bank, Brooks turns into an anthropologist.
People like those at last weekend’s rally want the Judeo-Christian ethic back, which sweetened and softened life on the frontier (physical or technological). And so they march. They are only vaguely aware of this value system. It is so entwined into their very nature, they can not step back and define it. But they feel it weakening.
Actually, they feel a pang of anger when asked whether they speak a language other than English. They feel unmoored when they see a black man in the White House. The patriotic, nationalist, and xenophobic energy of the Tea Party movement may be dripping with faux-sentimentality but it isn’t primarily religious in nature. It’s ethnic. Beck’s rally may have had a more spiritual tone since it was billed as restoring misplaced values and Beck gave a religious speech. But the Tea Party movement is not about socially conservative values. It’s about economics and it’s about the browning of America. Republican candidates are responding by toning down the god and gays talk and focusing on joblessness and the deficit and immigration.
If Brooks can’t see this, he’s either dishonest or clueless. And Collins is useless for indulging this knucklehead instead of ridiculing his stupid analysis.
More generally the hatefulness of everything around the so-called tea party (Why dignify the term with capitals?, it’s all deceitful PR.)is a reaction to the changes in the wider world. A third to a quarter of the world’s population is Muslim and these US-ians are unashamedly bitching about the proposed Islamic Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan. They don’t get it, Islam is now ‘on the map’ and is here to stay no matter what. So deal with it humanely. Most of these people don’t even have a passport, for gawdzsake (as Digby says), let alone knowledge, firsthand or otherwise, of other peoples and places. They’re completely oblivious to the world outside the USA, for that matter to the lives that millions upon millions in the USA itself are doomed to lead. Great, Brooks, the frontier and the Judeo-Christian tradition. He will never give anyone a break. So I give him a John Wayne movie and Israel as guides to unravel his conundrums. The frontier, whether myth or reality, is so far removed from anyone’s life nowadays that it is ridiculous to invoke it as an explanation of anything happening today—just pretentious, superficial American civ 101 nonsense. And Israel’s colonization of Palestine is the living, breathing reality of the Judeo-Christian tradition to billions of people all around the world. The Islamic Center affair is for me the last straw. The US has completely messed itself.
Beck’s rally was only religious in nature because he couldn’t do a straight out political speech. So he used the only thing that otherwise tied these people together. Their shared Talibangelicalism.
I would prefer “talibangelism.” Easier to say.
Me too.
If Brooks can’t see this, he’s either dishonest or clueless.
He can’t be both?
Brooks is both clueless and dishonest. And btw “Judeo-Christian” tradition is a concept (that goes back centuries) designed to subsume Judaism into Christianity (as its predecessor with the idea that Christianity superseded Judaism). The concept of “Abrahamic faiths”, however, is one utilized by religion scholars to refer to distinct religions all of which trace their origins to the figure of Abraham. There are three of them. Pop quiz: what are they?
To me, the fingernail on blackboard feel comes less from Brook’s pathetic pseudo-profundities than the sense of complacency with themselves that pervades their banter like a stink cloud. Like they think they’re Kant and Schopenhauer when in fact, they themselves are Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana. They take profound cultural questions and turn them into vehicles for their Us magazine-level “wit”, and thereby trivialize them beyond discussibility. By passing as the “serious” pop intellectuals of our culture, they co-opt everyone who tries to talk about real stuff.
Come now, give them credit: Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana do their jobs and do it well.
I wonder if Brooks thinks fruits are decorative.
“And Collins is useless for indulging this (knucklehead) instead of ridiculing his stupid analysis.”
Watch your language.
Is the tea party about economics? I don’t believe so. I do believe the money behind it is about economics. Not the same.