Exercises in Futility

Against my better judgment, I clicked through to David Brooks' latest, entitled "Wal-Mart Hippies." You know Brooks is just dying to come up with something that will measure up to the pithy standards set by his "Bourgeois Bohemians." Reading the article, which was a piece of sheer wankery, as usual, I contemplated the erotic jolt of self-satisfaction that Brooks must have felt when he came up with the idea of Wal-Mart Hippies. How clever, how counterintuitive, why, it's practically even countercultural [chortle chortle].

But arguing against someone who honestly thinks that hippies, even at their most self-indulgent, are just like Tea Baggers holding up signs that say "The Zoo has an African Lion, and America has a Lyin' African" is just...it's hard to come up with a metaphor here...like clearing the brush on G.W.'s ranch. Darned if it doesn't keep growing back.

So I was pleased when I blog I've been enjoying recently--Bats Left/Throws Right--did a nice little takedown. To Brooks' trenchant observation that "One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart" DogHouse Riley appends, "One wore Tea Shades; the other carries Tea Bags. One failed Drug Tests; the other passes Purity Tests. One "grooved" on "Free Love"; the other is a collection of knuckle-walking Troglodytes with handguns in place of penises." And he has the wit and perception to have the same response to Brooks' use of a Rousseau quote* as I did, namely, "I didn't know Bartlett's had a book of Easy Political Quotations for Out-of-Context Uses."

Anyway, Brooks' "point" seemed to be that Tea Baggers and Hippies are all anti-establishment, man, you know, they just want everyone to be free from The Man and Authority and The System but bullshit because the Tea Baggers would have no problems if The Man was Dick Cheney and The System was segregation and they all got something for nothing and to piss on a Mexican on holidays, to boot.

As I said, an exercise in futility. But read D.H.Riley's whole post. It's funnier than mine.

*Guess which one? Go on, you know it. Is has to be this one, right?: "The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
Sadly, no. It is: "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains." Ten bucks says Brooks had to double check that that wasn't a quote from Marx. And Brooks is always throwing in these little "intellectual" references, like the ones in this article, which I assume he thinks will get him into the Cool Kids Clubhouse of New York Times readers, but which actually will just annoy anyone who has actually read Rousseau beyond the first fucking sentence of the Social Contract.