David Brooks explicitly practicing identity politics. What's odd is that Jews are almost always first on the block to be excluded from "Western Europe" whenever someone embarks on the journey that leads to ultimately saying that the only true civilization bearers are the Anglo-Saxons (or the Saxon-Saxons, depending), with the wogs starting at either Calais or Liege, depending. Does he even know that the only sovereigns who made significant outreach to rescue the Sephardim expelled from Spain was named Bayezid II Osmanli?: Yastreblyansky: Identity politics with David Brooks: The wolves are in the henhouse: "David Brooks's hot take on the Trump-Putin summit ('The Murder-Suicide of the West') was that it was like when C.S. Lewis's mother died, not that he was there, it was in 1908, but he's read about it, and it's pretty sad...
...she had cancer and the kid was only ten, and they shipped him off to a boarding school with a psychotic headmaster afterwards, so that it may not sound exactly like the Trump-Putin summit to you, but the thing is Trump has broken up with Europe, and Europe is our mother, as Americans, the source of democracy, universities, good manners, luxury hotels, and public parks!... I'm barely kidding....
But then it turns out it wasn't even Trump's fault. It's the liberals who did it, starting out by referring to Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Mozart as dead white males, and ultimately, under Obama, pivoting, which I think means Obama noticed that the Pacific Ocean and its farther shores from New Zealand and Japan to Malaysia and Indonesia had real places with people in them, and culture, parks, luxury hotels, the whole lot, and before you knew it we'd completely lost track with Europe.... And Europe itself is to blame, come to think of it, with its post-nationalist top-down technocratic administration (it's fun to realize that Brooks was in Brussels working for the Wall Street Journal at the same time as young Boris Johnson was covering it for The Telegraph, and may have gotten all his clichés about the sclerotic European Union from the famously mendacious stories Boris wrote about the horrors of EU regulation....
Brooks doesn't even notice what he did, but gets back to the lament:
His embrace of Putin Monday was a victory dance on the Euro-American tomb.... We’ve lost the bonds that might enable us to fight them together. Worse, the wolves are not only in the henhouse; they are in the Executive Mansion...
It's foxes that move into henhouses, you know. I don't know about executive mansions. Hope the wolves don't eat Jared! At least not before he testifies.
What is really intriguing here is the spectacle of David Brooks practicing some of that identity politics. We are America because we come from approximately three countries. Britain, Germany, and France. With a bit of Italy and Greece but that was a very long time ago. If you call attention to the fact that our culture heroes are all dead white males, you will destroy us. Do not look at Asia and Africa as treacherous Obama did. Even Russia worries him a bit, maybe just because it has Putin in it, but I think he may be wondering if it's really in Europe? And he keeps taxing us with tribalism...
#shouldread
