Their Master Brooks

You would think that if you were a thoughtful presidential candidate, addressing voters in an economically complicated state like Pennsylvania, you would want to describe how these pervasive forces are shaping the lives of voters and how government should respond. But, then again, you are not ________________ .

This Big Management Party señorito's idea of pervasive shape-forcin’ -- or possibly I mean pervasive force-shapin’ -- is ... well, by the numbers added, Mr. Bones, here we go on a quick tour of the baloney factory:

A string of [1] technological revolutions have made American workers much more productive. Over the past 30 years, steel producers have reduced the number of hours it takes to produce a ton of steel by up to 90 percent. A [2] social revolution has radically increased the number of women in the work force and pushed down the wages of men. A [3] medical revolution has led to enhanced diagnosis and treatment but also rapid health care inflation that burdens American employers and eats into workers’ weekly paychecks. An [4] information revolution has increased the economic rewards of education and punished those who lack it. A [5] pedagogical revolution has led to ferocious competition to get into the top universities but a decline in quality at the primary and secondary levels. For the first time in the nation’s history, workers retiring from the labor force are better educated than the ones coming in.

"You would think if you was thoughtful," babbles Brooksie, though mere sanity should suffice to reveal that an electoral oration along those lines might not be too well received in Milltown of the Rust Belt. It’s a wonder that customers of the New York Times Company seem to want to listen to señorito-level [1] social scientizin’. It presses its luck very hard by supposin’ that "voters in an economically complicated state like Pennsylvania" crave that sort of fodder as well.

Considered as a sample of AEI-GOP tank-grown thought dating from the year of religionism 1429/2008, the babblin’ is of mild interest. "Aha!," thinks little orphan Annie to herself, "So that is the revolutionary new softsoap that Daddy Warbucks wants to wash my brain with! Let’s see how far he gets with it, Sandy!" [2]

The señorito’s fiesta of revolutions is a little arbitrary at certain points. Why on Gore’s green earth should medical technology have been revolutionated separately from technology in general? [3] Its fearsome sounding Paedagogical Revolution™ may have been invented on the spur of the moment merely because it happened to be thinkin’ ’bout doin’ an oblique hatchet job on a certain former editor of the Harvard Law Review. The Big Party neocomrades’ wombscholarship and Niederdümmung neither presuppose nor exhibit any peculiarities of technique, revolutionary or reactionary or any kind in between. Wombschoolin’ is only a question of which subject-matters the junior trainees are to be trained in and which they are to be tenderly sheltered from, lest they grow up to be Marcionites. (Or even Democrats, may Father Zeus forbid it!)

It is very señoritoly indeed, is Brooksie. It refuses to run off with the mainstream mob of Party base and vile to some virtual high-tech lynchin’, it prefers to say the same things against BHO that all the other neocomrades say

If you think your listeners aren’t sophisticated enough to grasp them ["forces"] , it’s much easier to blame those perfidious foreigners for all economic woes. (...) American voters aren’t so stupid as to think their problems are caused by foreigners and malevolent lobbyists.

but offer entirely different grounds for sayin’ them. The trouble with B. Hussein has nothin’ to do with clinging [4], thinks this specimen, and indeed, according to it, BHO is the clinger, not the Rust Belt folk. President-Presumptive J. Sidney McCain may have informed the ranch and the world that BHO is ‘elitist’, but what does he know compared to Master David?

Now if thee was a thoughtful pol in PA, Mr. Bones, wouldn’t thee spend most of every election event pointing out the beauties of Lady Nafta?

Me neither.

____
[1] I.e., amateurish and self-servicin’.


[2] Dr. Cartoonoclastes would be happy to learn I had to google up the doggie’s name.


[3] Not too hard a question, if approached by stealth from the cartoon side: real technology (computers and entertainment electronics, that is) keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, whereas quack technology leads only to "rapid health care inflation that burdens American employers and eats into workers’ weekly paychecks."

Brooksie outseñoritos itself by puttin’ those heavy-laden employers of his first. Since its purpose in scribblin’ all that guff was merely exempli gratia, to show what thoughtful people think when they think thoughtfully along the Big Management Party line, it lets the mask slip a little, as it were. If it was floggin’ the snake oil directly, it would have been more circumspect.

That is a fun reflection, Mr. Bones, when the real occasion of the scribble was an inadvertance on the part of B. Hussain Obáma. Though eternally young, señoritos are not often cute the way Brooksie is here.


[4] “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,”