David Brooks: Self-Deluded Mouthpiece or Literate Yahoo?

Brooks' newest column at the NYTimes is full of condescending stereotypes about how liberals stereotype and condescend to conservatives.

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

Excuse me? It has to reassure liberals? How much reassuring are we getting from the likes of William Safire, William Kristol, David Broder, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Novak, Emmett Tyrell, Jonah Goldberg, Frank Gaffney, not to mention those cartoons Ann Coulter and Peggy Noonan? He goes on to say:

He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president.
It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction. (snip)
I've spent the past four years traveling to 36 states and writing millions of words trying to understand this values divide, and I can tell you there is no one explanation. But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are? (snip)
Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man.

After simplifying and misunderstanding the liberal viewpoint on cultural issues and their fellow electorate, he goes on to accuse them of his own failing. He spends 4 long years traveling to try and figure out the "values divide", and he comes to the conclusion that it had nothing to do with the election outcome, and not only that, the people he left behind in Sodom are problem: liberals on the coasts and in academic enclaves. Does that mean that the liberals in the heartland are different, or that they simply don't exist?

Well, surprise! They do exist, and when they live as a minority in conservative communities, they get the same condescending, intolerant, and clueless response from their neighbors that Brooks projects onto liberals in big cities. He spent 4 years flitting around, sampling those salt-of-the-earth conservatives, while I grew up with them and lived with and amidst them for 40 years, and I can assure you that they can suffocate the breath out of anyone even slightly different from themselves. Insularity, clannishness, intolerance, violence? You haven't experienced anything till you try to fit in in a tiny rural town in the Appalachian foothills where half the population is still looking for revenge on the Yankees.

This is not to say that good people aren't living there, too; they are. But these ridiculous stereotypes bandied about by literary masturbators on both sides are harmful and stifling. Stop babbling about things of which you have no real experience. You'll wake up one day and wonder how we all ended up hating each other, and for the answer, you'll need look no further than your mirror.

Meaty Discourse

Once, even against all evidence, I could have accepted the idea that David Brooks was a human being who lived a relatively ordinary life in the gated enclaves of AwSchucksJustARegularMiddleClassJoeMakingSixFiguresville, Virginia. After all, he showed up regularly on The News Hour for good-natured jowl-punching with Droopy Dog doppleganger Mark Shields,, and surely he must have had to leave his habitat to do that. He must have had the opportunity to at least observe other members of his culture from the depths of his brougham-landaulet during the trip. And even though he could predictably come up with this sort of thing at the drop of an Alka-Seltzer:

"On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s. I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it."

I could still picture him at a computer terminal, torn between finishing his latest Times lament and watching cats play the piano.

Well, I've stood by this belief against all odds, but there comes a time when one simply has to face facts. Brooks' inability to find a restaurant in which to spend more than $20 is not the result of spending too much time watching piano cat. Even a sheltered Cheetos-eating basement-dweller could find a way to do that. No, I'm sorry to say, the only real explanation is that Brooks is a tissue experiment grown on a meat scaffold who dictates his "columns" based on nothing more than the freshman philosophy problems fed to him daily by William Bennett and the perfluorocarbonated head of Leo Strauss. And here is your proof:

"The key to wisdom in these circumstances is to make the distinction between discrete good and systemic good. When you are in the grip of a big, complex mess, you have the power to do discrete good but probably not systemic good.

When you are the president in a financial crisis, you have the power to pave roads and hire teachers. That will reduce the suffering of real people who would otherwise be jobless. You have the power to streamline regulations and reduce tax burdens. That will induce a bit more hiring and activity. These are real contributions.

But you don’t have the power to transform the whole situation. Your discrete goods might contribute to an overall turnaround, but that turnaround will be beyond your comprehension and control.

Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins. Then they get angry and cynical when it turns out that it can’t."

Yes, you have sinned by letting the big banks and billionaires destroy your 401(k)--you know, the only kind of pension the Wall Street boys would let you have after they got done with you back in the '80s--and by losing your home in the floods, and your livestock in the wildfires, and your loved ones in the tornadoes, and your job in the layoffs, you fiddle-playing grasshopper! Now you can just shut up about needing a hand from the gubmint, because you're not a patient; you're a zillion zillion decisions! Now go suck it up under a bridge somewhere, and just be glad we're not Greece.

That's just meat talking.
Play it off, Keyboard Cat.

Our Miss Brooks

From the largest manufacturer of well-publicized cluelessness in the U.S.:

For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.

Indeed? Since when was David Brooks a "journalist"? Ellen Goodman, describing what commentators do, said their business was to make sense of all that is happening in the world. Did Brooks ever once accomplish that? All I've ever seen under his byline has been what my dear old departed Dad used to call "popping off"-- bullshitting readers blind about how things are in the heartland, a place he never spent one moment in except to gather confirmation for his indigenous prejudices.

Logic Is Dead. Long Live Logic.

Busy week. But not too busy to get sucked into responding to yet another of David Brooks' "Adventures in Logic Murder", which can be found over at Corrente. And BTW, am I the only one who thinks he wears way too much makeup on The News Hour?

Also check out Juan Cole this morning. I'm still trying to get my head around a mindset that can justify the cold-blooded murder of scores of children. The logic is incomprehensible. Maybe Brooks, king of incomprehension, can help me understand.

Natalism-Gazing

(Originally published 2/15/05 @ The American Street)

David Brooks has been on a roll for years, babbling ever-more-ludicrous inanities on social matters about which (as his rhetoric usually reveals), he seems to have little or no direct knowledge. The lefty blogs have had great fun at his expense, dogpiling on each nugget of dumbth that sifts out of the grit of his NYTimes page, but one of the most interesting of them was his lamentation over the tragic lack of fecundity displayed by white American womenfolk and their wayward mates. His conclusion was that this could all be rectified if only women would leave the work force and stay home, possibly enticed by those irresistable Republican mainstays, tax credits. Never mind the broad body of evidence on factors that seem to impact reproduction in our species: stress, fear, overwork, education, self-interest. Axes must be ground! The heterosexual Christian white middle-class is under seige, and their subtle self-genocide must be thwarted!

Although I've been following this development for awhile, it took some deeper digging for me to finally locate the pithy proper noun being used by pundits and ideologues to pin down the trend: Pro-Natalism. That is, "an attitude or policy that encourages child-bearing". Based on events shaping up so far, this is apparently a pet project of the anti-family planning Nouveau Regime. One of Bush's first budget-cutting stunts was his proposal in 2001 to eliminate birth control coverage for federal employees. An amendment saved the coverage, but now it has morphed into a faith-based,Roman Catholic-friendly proposal for coverage (remember "rhythm"?)

And in keeping with his record of utilizing ideologues in place of scientists, his appointments reflect his agenda. Dr. W. David Hager, appointed to the FDA reproductive health panel, refuses to prescribe birth control to his patients and prescribes prayer for menopause and PMS. Tom Coburn, appointed to the Advisory Council on AIDS/HIV, is on record as opposing condoms. The manipulation and distortion of scientific information has become so blatant that even The Union of Concerned Scientists cries out for relief.

His minions in the Ninth Circle have been a big help, too. Rick Santorum won't go so far as to ban birth control himself, but has no problem letting the good folks in the next state do it:

"There is no constitutionally based right to privacy, (Santorum) says, arguing that it is a phony legal concoction foisted on the country by liberal judges. As it happens, the 1965 case which declared the existence of privacy rights legitimized contraception. He calls that case, and others that followed it, a "massive usurpation of power by the judiciary." "Would I ban contraception in the states as a state legislator? No way. Would I do it as a federal official? No way." Even so, he said, each state should be free to legislate the matter on its own. If that means the banning of contraception (or, presumably, adultery or premarital sex), then so be it. "It should be the same with sodomy laws," he said. "Texas should have had the right. People should have had the right."

(As usual, Rick's definition of others' rights is rather circumscribed by his own preferences.)

Red-Blather Babies

Is there anyone who paints things with a broader brush than David "I've Got A Clueless Stereotype" Brooks? Or who has less compunction about spreading his ill-informed mythos around as conventional wisdom?

This morning I pull up the NYTimes, and make the mistake of looking at his column, sucked in by a title promising yet more divisive red v. blue idiocy. What do I find? Now the red people are having babies in a fecund fit of selfless back-to-the-50s ardor, while the blue people are withered and sere and deformed by ill-gotten gains and deviant pleasures:

"They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling."

Kinda makes you ashamed that you may have wasted your life in any other endeavor other than reproduction doesn't it? Of course, those of us in cities could make the point that we look around and see plenty of kids, but a little further down, you see what he's getting at:

" You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.
In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe, "Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas."

White people in the suburbs is what we're talking about. So, ok, maybe the Latinos and Asians and blacks don't count...everyone knows they have kids, but who cares? It's white people we're talking about! Those blue bastards that have let the race down, their pitiful gonads dwindling from underuse, letting those ghastly, unknowable Others get the upper hand. And God knows what may happen if they take over.

Never mind that, where I live, I see plenty of white people, and Democrats, and well-to-do people, having kids, and lots of them. Christ, the better off they are the more they seem to have! After 2 or 3 spouses, the families can get kind of---big. One of the most annoying trends of recent years has been the appearance of those damned two-, three-, and four-child strollers, veritable stroller SUVs, with wheels bigger than your head that take up so much room you have to get out into the street to pass one coming at you on the sidewalk, and God help you if you need to get to something down a store aisle where one is lurking. These contraptions aren't made for couples with only children. And the ones I have to dodge are full.

So Brooks finishes off with this:

"Like most Americans, and maybe more so because they tend to marry earlier, they find themselves confronting the consequences of divorce. Like most Americans, they wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions that are under threat."

How? How, David? Well, I'd guess the same way people have been figuring it out for years, under all kinds of less-than-ideal circumstances, in ghettoes and on reservations and on farms and in trailer parks and in all the places people have always raised kids. People moving to your red suburbs aren't any fucking different. You belie your own argument about the tragedy of all this divisiveness by singing one long paean to divisiveness, and then sitting back with that smug smile and waiting for the sparks to fly.

David Brooks Fixes Haiti

Amidst a voluminous body of work known mostly for its scrupulous cluelessness, this essay really must rise to the top of the junk heap. Who else would shift into finger-wagging gear during a crisis so epically tragic, and who else would be so undeterred by his own smug ignorance? Please people. How does he keep his job?

Doomed to Repeat It

Maybe I dreamed it, or maybe I remember right. But the most tragic thing about this cartoon...



...is that I seem to recall Oliphant used it while the Rwanda genocide was going on. Whether he did or didn't doesn't matter. While David Brooks turns his face from a real genocide, really happening right now, he blathers on The News Hour about the "genocide" that could happen if the U.S. pulls out of Iraq, and actually believes us moral because of it.

Will God ever forgive us oour pride and brutality? Will we ever forgive ourselves?

Drunken Notions

I used to swear I would never blog personal shit, but I guess I've failed to live up to that commitment for some time. Nonetheless, I will spare the occasional passerby the trials and tribulations of my most recent interesting (in the Chinese sense) life chapters, and simply say that the political is indeed the personal, and one day I will have my revenge. Even if revenge takes the form of folding my hands primly against my defeated body and saying, finally, "Fuck it, life is too short to obsess over other people's petty meannesses---let the cosmos deal with it."

If you only just tuned in, this makes no sense to you. That is my gift to you. In the meantime...

It occurred to me that I used to blog about things that mattered to me, even if they might have been completely off the radar. Now, since I started writing for higher-profile blogs, I've felt tempted to write about the things that everyone else is talking about, because after all, if everyone else is blogging it, it must be what people want to read, and it will be what rises to the top of the Google pile. Which shames me into remembering why I started this in the first place: to blow off steam, and put my ideas in order and maybe try to think a little more clearly...none of which has anything to do with seducing other people into reading what I write. Yet there it is. Even the little interest that's been stirred by what I write has tainted my stuff with ambition. And it gets all mixed up with the legitimate desire to be heard and maybe make a little bit of difference, of wanting to be a conduit for information and knowledge, which inevitably leads to a confusion of intent and the rationalization of less-than noble methods. I really never wanted that. Maybe I took on too much in accepting offers to add my voice to bigger blogs, and the whole gestalt suffers as a result.

So much emphasis is put on getting readership, and mentions in the Daou, and getting noticed by the big fish, that I wonder if we haven't become one giant echo chamber, blatting the same old shit around day after day, and mentally masturbating to the porn of the most recent David Brooks column or the latest outrage from the West Wing (God knows, there are so many). This, too, is not a new observation, but really...what's it all for? Isn't life too short to waste screaming into the void or preaching to the converted?

You write something that seems to have great significance, and even may point out something you haven't yet read elsewhere, and who gives a shit? Then you post a picture of some totally irrelevant triviality, and the hits just keep on coming. You start to get the sense that even progressive thinkers are prone to the old bottom-line, lowest common denominator of pop culture attractions, and you may just as well post pictures of two-headed calves and gruesome stories of freak accidents. Maybe I'm just giving in to the stubborn old cynic in me that I've never been able to kill off, and this is just a test of my resolve.

How well can I hold to my own voice and keep from giving in to the inner pressure to do safe, familiar things, things that many others do and do better? I guess time will tell. In the meantime, I have to live with some erratic posting and some personal baggage creeping into the work I do post. And I want to re-commit to writing things that interest me, not the random troller, while acknowledging that I do have a few readers that have pulled me into being part of a community whose give and take I greatly enjoy. You know who you are. Thanks.

P.S.--I wasn'r really drunk first thing on a Sunday morning...it just took me awhile to finally post this. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

In Search of Truth, Wisdom, and the American Way

Sometimes I just love to read quotes. Something about the neat succinctness of those aphorisms and insights just cuts right through the bullshit like a zen koan. This morning David Brooks' typical half-assed history lesson on Abraham Lincoln sent me off in search of something to set the record straight, but in that way the internet has, it sucked me down an information wormhole into a different universe, and I found the Everett Peace Action site, and these gems:

"Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure." - Abraham Lincoln

"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. - Voltaire

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people." - Howard Zinn

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." - Sinclair Lewis

"News is what powerful people don’t want you to hear; everything else is just publicity." - Bill Moyers

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt..... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake." - Thomas Jefferson, 1798"

And for you ironic juxtaposition fans:

"But you’ve got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I’m for the president to chase them all over the world. If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord." - Jerry Falwell, CNN Late Edition, October 24, 2004

"Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name." - Martin Luther King, Jr., April 30, 1967

Amen.

Loonwatch, Ennui Edition

It's been hard to get anything down here at IMCT. Between my other obligations, a general physical fatigue, and some personal bullshit I'm working through, I fear I've let things slide here. It will be better soon. Meantime, David Brooks, the left blogworld's favorite whipping boy, has made an ass of himself again with his idiotic charge that Harry Blackmun and the Roe decision are responsible for the imminent collapse of the Senate.

I'm too weary to deal with this, but I will say that every time I try to be good and make a promise not to indulge in ad hominem attacks anymore, here comes Brooksie with yet another commentary so utterly knowledge-free, so completely broadbrush clueless,
that I just lose all control and I'm back to hurling obscene epithets.

Please, God, make him stop. Where is Reason?

Your Second Amendment Right to Kill Something

A man with two previous restraining orders against him who had been arrested twice for violating them, whose ex-wife (divorced for two years) had sought police protection four times, shoots and kills her at the corner of 57th and Madison in NYC in front of a crowd of people, shoots her fiance, then finally (these guys always get the order wrong) kills himself. The police, in blame-the-victim mode as usual when domestic violence issues are involved, called it "a triangle of romance and jealousy".

And in the same paper, David Brooks is bloviating in one of his patented social science research pieces on how the Democrats can't get a majority together because they're too educated, and look at how the Republicans woo those salt-of-the-earth folks the Dems ignore (read: the ignorant) through such paragons of class-busters as the NRA. Putting aside his argument, which sounds dangerously close to embracing yahooism and the class hatred of knoweldge, Dave is 2 steps behind, as usual, since over at The Hill, the NRA is crowing about Minority Leader Harry Reid's stance against gun control being "the last nail in gun control".)

Yes, we want the NRA to be our bellweather, those radical extremists who never met a reason they liked for withholding a weapon from the hands of any cracker with 2 nickels to put together for the price of a bullet. The NRA, whose fine work over the years has made it possible for people like the killer in the above story to get his hands on a gun in spite of a history of threats, assaults, and arrests. The NRA, who gets behind any 3 strikes law that get a guy life for stealing a video for his kid, but lets violent domestic predators torture and murder their women, and gives them 4 months in jail for the trouble.

The fact is, the powers that be in Washington rely on organizations like the NRA to act as a buffer for them against masses of people who are well-armed and could be potentially dangerous to the status quo if they were allowed to focus on anything other than the phantom possibility of having their weaponry stripped from their cold dead hands, a manipulation that has a long and well-sublimated history in this country since Revolutionary days. (See Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" on this.)

And you know what? Save the outraged letters. My husband has been a hunter for 30 years, we have 2 shotguns and a rifle in the house right now, and I have been on the target range with handguns and rifles any number of times in my life. We need fucking gun control in this country, because we are killing each other and nothing else we have done is working! And until we have it, as far as I'm concerned, the blood from every gun death in this country is on the collective hands of the NRA and all those fine, salt-of-the-earth people who support it. You know who you are. You're even proud of it.

How does it feel to be an accessory to murder?

Tidbits

David Brooks discovers social inequity, and suggests Bush mention it.

Tim Roemer and the new Democratic movement to jettison abortion rights. I understand the need to be inclusive of those who have problems with abortion, but an anti-choice head of the DNC? Dean looks more viable all the time, especially since Florida threw its weight behind him.

Brian Whittaker at The Guardian notes the new marriage of Christian and Islamic fundamentalists to bully their "family values" agendas through at the UN. Their goals? The usual: oppression of women's rights and family planning, persecution of gays, social regression, blah blah blah. And who said we couldn't win Muslim hearts and minds? All we need is that common ground of religions everywhere: intolerance.

And speaking of social inequities, The Village Voice's Anya Kemenetz provides some insight into the cannon fodder database that is the No Child Left Behind Act, and what poor kids are trying to do about it.

Check me out later at The American Street, where my ravings will no doubt be lengthier, and I'll have an update to my last entry on Arnold the Barbarian,

A Tale of Two City-States

Another Country Heard From

Iraq's oil workers banded together after the fall of Baghdad and formed a union. Less than impressed with our attempts to re-make their government, they now invite us to take our leave:

"When the occupation troops stood back and allowed Basra's hospitals, universities and public services to be burned and looted, while they defended only the oil ministry and oilfields, we knew we were dealing with a brutal force prepared to impose its will without regard for human suffering. From the beginning, we were left in no doubt that the US and its allies had come to take control of our oil resources...
The occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division of Sunni and Shia. We never knew this sort of division before. Our families intermarried, we lived and worked together...
Bush and Blair should remember that those who voted in last month's elections in Iraq are as hostile to the occupation as those who boycotted them. Those who claim to represent the Iraqi working class while calling for the occupation to stay a bit longer, due to "fears of civil war", are in fact speaking only for themselves and the minority of Iraqis whose interests are dependent on the occupation.
We as a union call for the withdrawal of foreign occupation forces and their military bases. We don't want a timetable - this is a stalling tactic. We will solve our own problems. We are Iraqis, we know our country and we can take care of ourselves. We have the means, the skills and resources to rebuild and create our own democratic society."

Read the whole thing for a perspective that has been utterly absent from the news stories we're fed,including how KBR tried to force out Iraqi workers to make way for foreigners, and how Bremer tried to enforce a rule paying them $35 a day while paying foreign mercenaries up to $1000 per day.
And then read Riverbend's latest, to get it from a woman's-eye view, also usually missing from the MSM.
Good times, eh?


This Land Isn't Your Land

This land belongs to the millionaires. At least according to Brooksie, who today turns his keen hindsight on the scandals of Medicare and the proposed changes to Social Security. Dave's feeling a tad shrill about the Republican government's lack of fiscal restraint, having been taken aback by the revelations of the large amounts of money tha will need to be thrown at these programs in order to facilitate their transformation into Bush's Ownership Society poster children---amounts heretofore undreamt of by good little Heritage Foundation shills but pretty well guessed at by those of us who've been conscious for the last couple years. And what does he think will save the American people? Well, a strong leader of firm moral fiber and the ability to mobilize their outrage. And where might we look for such a one? Not from the common clay, that's for sure:

"There's going to be another Ross Perot, and this time he's going to be younger. There's going to be a millionaire rising out of the country somewhere and he (or she) is going to lead a movement of people who are worried about federal deficits, who are offended by the horrendous burden seniors are placing on the young and who are disgusted by a legislative process that sometimes suggests that the government has lost all capacity for self-control."

He never explains---but why should he start now?---why he thinks this paragon is going to come from the caviar class (or for that matter, why he has to be "younger"). My guess is that for David, as for most other Americans these days, the rich have become the ruling aristocracy, and there's no reason to expect that anyone with less modest means could get the public's ear, much less get elected. We don't even question this assumption anymore. Oh, sure, there's the mandatory railing against candidates who have too much money, but that's just a complaint that they're giving the appearance of being too snooty (too French, too educated, too whatever the adjective-of -the-month is). We even cling to our illusions that the millionaires we do elect are just plain folks, risen up out of the laboring masses with dirt under their fingernails and the fumes of the mill on their breath. The self-made myth. Our schizophrenia about this couldn't be more clearly evoked than in Brooks' op-ed, whose subtext is, "Don't look for someone to save you amongst yourselves. You can't do it, you don't have the money or the smarts. Just wait there like good little workers until your next messiah comes down from Mount National Bank." Unlike the Iraqi oil workers in the story above, ordinary Americans couldn't possibly be expected to take on the problems of their own nation without a trust fund and a dynasty or two in their pedigrees.