driftglass imagines a post-apocalyptic future in which virtually all evidence of our present era has been destroyed and historians are left to study fragments of our media’s output, much of it distorted through something called “fuckingblogs.” In this prospective future, there is much debate about whether a writer/pundit named David Brooks actually existed or was some kind of composite. Some, the Historicals, argue that Brooks was “an amalgamation of several real but wildly different people.” Another group, the Fictionals believe that Brooks was a “literary contrivance… a fictional narrator whose own pathological unreliability is integral to the story.” A tiny third group, despised by the other two established schools of thought, is called the Literals.
These “Literals” assert that “David Brooks” existed literally, as an actual person, who really did write every, single viperish, false and self-contradicting thing which has been attributed to him. That he really was elevated to the highest ranks of the Pundit Guild. That his opinions were read and taken Very Seriously by Big Thinkers, government officials and hundreds of millions of ordinary people around the world. And even though the “fuckingblogs” show that the obvious fatuousness of “David Brooks” fables were routinely and effortlessly shredded by “fuckingbloggers”, for reasons the Literals are never able to explain, David Brooks was somehow allowed to accumulate vast wealth and power…by publishing reams of patently silly drivel…all while never once having being challenged by anyone of any stature.
This really could happen. Some massive solar magnetic pulse could fry 95% of all the digital information on Earth, leaving future historians to debate questions like “how is it fucking possible for David Brooks to have written and said all the shit attributed to him?”
But, even in this dystopian future, historians will agree that Richard Cohen lived and that the Washington Post was a goddamned sick joke.
Ever since he first came to my attention, I’ve wondered whether this clueless and fatuous bloviator was a real human being, or some super-computer experiment, gone awry, and can’t be stopped?
Or maybe he’s a very talented autistic kid with a mean streak, an a great set of refrigerator magnet words?
Nah, even autistic children can learn, and be taught to share and play with others.
So, the only conclusion I can draw, is that Bobo’s just another clue-free and fatuous bloviating Conservative pundit, who keeps his job because his bosses don’t want to be accused of leaning too heavily to the left, by either criticizing him, or giving him his well-deserved pink-slip.
Can you imagine if the NY Times ever told this insipid, ignorant, and stupid man to clear out his desk and take a hike, the absolute EPIC hissy-fit that the Reich-Wingers will throw?
Who on the right reads “Bobo” Brooks? What power does Chunky Bobo wield on the right? Bobo and Chunky Bobo only exist so DC Democratic elites can point to them as examples of “reasonable” GOPers.
Wow! The sudden visualization that some future civilization might stumble across the writings of Brooks and Cohen, while missing the almost uncountable more talented and instructive writers of human history, and somehow take them as representative of our particular period of humanity, is one of the most terrifying and depressing thoughts of which I can conceive.
Thanks, Boo. Thanks a hell of a lot for that mental picture. :-/
Future historians and philologists will also be grappling with a still more vexed question, the turning point which made possible “David Brooks’s” career at The New York Times: the decision to hire the mysterious “William Safe Fire,” who seems to have written the speeches of one Spiral Ag Nu before the Times tapped him to pen passive aggressive rehabilitations of the dreaded Dick Nicks On, full bore defenses of the Liquid Party of Zion, all the while passing himself off as a linguist and historian.
David Brooks called and said that if you don’t stop trashing him, he will stop “writing” and providing you with material for your posts.
Whatever the cause of the apocalyptic demise might be, if Cohen and Brooks are prominent among the remaining fragments, historians are likely to conclude that the apocalypse was a positive and well-earned development.
“fuckingbloggers” is great
several dissertations on the origins of the term
Just had to throw this up somewhere:
This really could happen. Some massive solar magnetic pulse could fry 95% of all the digital information on Earth, leaving future historians to debate questions like “how is it fucking possible for David Brooks to have written and said all the shit attributed to him?”
Humor aside, no, it couldn’t. One of the lessons that we probably won’t learn from Fukushima is that nuclear power has become something between a suicide pact and a dead man switch for the species. All it takes is for the power to go out long enough in a handful of locations, and it’s back to the drawing board for the forces of evolution.
If human civilization is ever interrupted to the extent that 95% of our digital data is lost, by the time a new species capable of interpreting archaeological evidence has emerged there won’t be anything left of us for them to examine.
In a truly “just” future, David Brooks memory would last for the extent of a gnat’s fart, right after he is permanently interred in his personal daisy pushing place.