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.
