I’ve always found David Brooks’ act more creepy than entertaining — an upper crust Republican (though admittedly moist and flaky) who presumes to speak for the Appleby patrons of America’s Heartland — his claims to authenticity smack of a sort of White Face minstrelsy, or somebody cutting out eye- and mouth-holes in Grant Wood’s American Gothic and droning on about his topsoil in a bad Percy Kilbride impersonation.
But today’s column is a real headscratcher, because I don’t know whether to be offended by his attempts at comedy, or impressed that he had sufficient self-awareness to plagiarize from somebody who’s actually funny.
My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”
If he’d worked just a little harder he could’ve snuck in a sardonic reference to the Olive Garden too, but I guess he figured he should start slow and warm up in the early grafs, or else he might develop a hairline fracture of the funnybone, and then they’d have to shoot him. But he soon hits his stride, and really begins flying in the second graf:
One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.
Okay, that’s kind of funny, although I enjoyed it more when I first read it in Woody Allen’s Side Effects:
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional.
“Heh, just a little verb tense joke there for the Times Crossword nerds. Where my nerds at? Shout out!”
It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are.
Whereas David loves the present, but in a parallel universe, because on Earth-22 he’s a superhero who can shoot a potent sleeping gas from his nipples and disarm the unconscious criminals instantly, rather than having to wait for them to read his New York Times column first.
We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero.
This passage is funnier if you remember that it’s David Brooks speaking, the David Brooks who can’t imagine that Reagan’s talk of “states rights” at the fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were murdered, was intended to flatter the racial sensibilities of his audience, some of whom may known, helped, or been the murderers. David Brooks who thinks Reagan’s tax cuts, not his tax increases, raised revenues, and who can’t remember who, in Doghouse Riley’s immortal words, “Who th’ fuck bailed out the S&Ls after there was nothing left to loot?” David Brooks, who just turned 47 and doesn’t even remember New Coke, is turning the gimlet eye of satire upon today’s youth, with their effeminate beverages, short attention spans, and historical amnesia.
We must bring together left and right, marinara and carbonara, John and Elizabeth Edwards. On United we stand, on US Airways, there’s a 25-minute delay.
Again, if he’d really been trying, he could have worked in a joke about the peanuts.
Ladies and gentleman, I never expected to be speaking before you today. Like so many of our speakers at this convention, I come from a hard-working, middle-class family. I was leading a miserable little life, but, nevertheless, overcame great odds to live the American Dream. My great-grandfather fought in Patton’s Army, along with Barack Obama’s great-grand uncles’ fourth cousin once removed.
Okay, I admit, this one goes over my head. The joke here is…what? That a guy with close relations scattered all over the globe talks about his family too much? Mentioning the Greatest Generation is now as quaint as talking about your ancestors who fought in the Civil War? Can’t Republicans wait until the tiny and ever-shrinking class of veterans they pretend to respect are actually dead before they start making fun of them?
And today we Democrats meet in Denver, a suburb of Boulder, a city whose motto is, “A Taxi? You Must be Dreaming.”
Ah, so that’s why he’s making with the yuks. Dave’s been cut off from his usual source of material
UPDATE: More here from the Hoosier Sage, with Bonus Anita Ekberg Cleavage!
Pinch needs to take David behind the woodshed and beat the ever living crap out of him.
Then force him to edit Mo Dowd’s next three columns.
Left by actor212 on August 29th, 2008