Effete Nation

Or: How To Succeed In Punditing Without Really Trying                

by David Brooks

I long ago discovered a very simple truth: The way to succeed is to barely lift a finger.  A carefully reasoned argument is about as useful to your typical bipedal primate with trigger fingers as a pillow-case full of canned Diet Coke is to a Siberian Tiger: Useless.  Neither one would know what to do with it, and frankly neither would I. 

What I learned to do is pretty straightforward—toss out a theory that makes a mild amount of sense as long as you know nothing about history or science.  In other words, most of the country.

So here’s this week’s idea Which Explains It All: Nothing of historical merit happened till 1800.

So…10,000 BC...nothing happens…invention of agriculture…nothing happens…ancient Greece…still nothing…Roman Empire…still nothing…Islamic Caliphate, Mayan Empire, The Incas…still nothing…Renaissance…still nothing…nothing happening…printing press…still nothing…then boom! Eighteen-fucking-hundred!

Some of you are probably going to say, “better nutrition”,  “fossil fuels”, or “the steam engine,” or perhaps even “copper tubing” or “academic journals”.  Wrong wrong wrong!

No, it was--wait for it--culture.  (You did not see that coming, did you?)  Because culture is not just in the out there, in museums and prancing ballerinas in tights, but also in the mind--in your mind, and even more terrifying, in your mind.  Quick! Look! There it runs into a corner!  And as any normal person would know (well, any normal person who lived in, say, ancient Babylonia), it is thererfore logical to assume that it is not only in the mind  but in the head as well (because when we sleep at night, that is where the mind hides out until we wake up).

Otherwise, the culture demons might get it.  As if that weren't obvious enough.

(Some say that the mind is in the brain but I do not feel that at this time the preponderance of evidence is, is that it's too early to tell.)

But I digress.  It was around this time of the year 1800 that technicians applied technical knowledge—now known as ‘technicalities’—and before you can say, “Yes, Minister,” England is ruling the world.  (Yes there were some wars that were fought on and off for a few centuries but let's not complicate a good hypothesis with "facts".)

Technicians could now make stuff.  This is very important to remember.  Then they made more stuff,  and then in turn more more stuff.  And that’s how we got the transistor, the sword cane, the self-unfolding umbrella, thalidomide and radioactive waste and the foreboding possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction that could wipe out all life on the planet.

However, this story has a downside: As the scholar Correllis Mandolin chronicled, the great-great-grandchildren of the empire builders withdrew from commerce.  Like Icarus, they  tried to rise above practical knowledge and became effete bastards gadding about like a load of silly fops.

Hence, the British race died out and is now utterly extinct (although a small remnant is believed to be living on in a remote isle known as Hobbiton).  The rest are gone now, leaving us with the agonizing question, “What is ‘Marmite’?”  I suppose we shall never know.  However, it now seems evident that the change was again inside of the head.  Not outside the head.  This is crucial.
 

Sadly, Americans these days too have given in to an unholy impulse to exchange hammers for computers, power quills for ink quills, mining fossilized carbon for creativity—in short, to become soft, lazy, undisciplined, independent and disobedient.  Like the British.

Like Icarus these heretics are poking God in the eyeball and just asking for to have their wings melted or worse.  Is it any wonder my sinuses are acting up this year? Surely His wrath is the cause of our unusually noxious allergy season.

Do as our founders like Madison and Franklin did: Don’t read a book—burn one. Don’t buy a dog—buy a slave. (Or become one!)  Don’t listen to the rock or the roll—Yankee Doodle Dandy is in the public domain!  

These things are sadly, poorly understood by most people, but as noted before, America is fortunate to have me to inform you.  Certainly, things may seem bad, the clouds may have darkened the sky…but I am here to write this and let you know that by not imitating me, you can make things better.

And please remember that no one ever helped anyone by trying to help people—only by trying to make more stuff.  And the way to make more stuff is to spend money on educating more of them to make more stuff.  Just because American companies need skilled laborers does not mean that they should have to spend a single pfennig of their profits in training—not their job.  Nor is their job to raise taxes.  Their job is lower their expenses by asking for more specialized credentials that private colleges can offer at inflated rates such that desperate people will go incur massive debts in the vain hope that they can keep their family afloat and perhaps get ahead until their job is shipped overseas anyway and they have a student loan that they will never be able to pay off ever.

Finally, there’s the lower class (and I definitely do not mean black people) (but mostly they're black people).
The problem here is social breakdown. Something like a quarter to a third of American children are living with one or no parents.  Sometimes the children are their own parents.  Other times the parents are being raised by their own children.  It's getting confusing out there!

And as these people are no longer willing to work as slaves, we have to import them from other nations. And do they leave when they’re no longer wanted? No!  Not realizing that the party is over and it’s time to leave is just rude. Come on, people.

Up and down society, forwards and backwards, people are moving away from commercial, productive activities and toward pleasant, enlightened but less productive ones—sometimes even sinking so low as to cobble together opinion pieces for the New York Times.

The real issue, therefore, is not the stimulus (no matter how pleasant it may be).  The real issue is this: Will American society wake up, slap itself in the face, pour a bucket of ice-cold water over it’s head, have 2 slices of toast and some black coffee and go back to work, hammer and tongs? Or will it sink into some deep, dark, dank hole of effete-elitism (the worst kind), sipping on over-priced foreign beverages, and tapping unpleasant comments at the nytimes.com?  Or worse, take my job—and then who would listen to me?

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