Conservative party-crasher

On the surface, David Brooks' "The Class War Before Palin" op-ed makes me want to cheer. But barely scratch the highlighting powder of Mr. Brooks' self-conscious makeover--one eye to the mirror and the other to a photo of George F. Will--and he bleeds nervousness. Someone's little bubble has been burst, methinks, and mewonders also how long it will be before that someone presumes to outrage on the same grounds.

Tell me, Mr. Brooks: How does it feel to sit in the decidedly un-Enlightened salon of Madame Guillotine? Did you perchance think that the lady in the front was knitting you a sweater? You and your ilk for too long provided the pseudo-intellectual rationalizations for the political mob-mentality of the last decade and more. How can you claim surprise when the self-same mob howls for the missing "one" promised to them when the Red Team proclaimed that two plus two equals five (and FSM help anyone who insisted that the answer was actually four--why do they hate numbers?)? When housing prices climb as all other indicators plunge, it's not the American Dream--it's a real estate bubble. The Iraq War is not paying for itself in oil revenue. National Security measures at airports are pure voodoo--you can board a plane packing (inert) grenades, but not nipple jewlery. The NSA doesn't have time to eavesdrop on Osama's pizza-delivery calls because they're too busy jacking off to other peoples' phone sex.

In short, the Emperor is butt-naked, somebody's got some 'splainin' to do, and you're one of those somebodies, jack.

Why? Because we find ourselves three-quarters through 2008, beggared of several Constitutional birthrights, our children steadily dumbed down by NCLB and left to pipe-dreams of winning the lottery as rap artists or ball-players or supermodels rather than spending their adulthood usefully or meaningfully. It's lucky for you that math is so fatally uncool to U.S.-born students. Otherwise they might be able to count high enough to appreciate how bankrupted they've been made by your ideologies. For anyone who adds any value to the economy, however, two plus two does after all equal four.

But, ever so regretably, awakening to sober reality does not undo the damage of fantasy. When you disparage education and rational thinking, you damage far more than the educational system itself. You also undermine the social compact that we should be making with those who are raised in this country: Pay attention in class, work smart, live smart, and you won't have to sell your soul to be financially safe. Even if you don't want to work for The Man, you have to be well-rounded enough to be The Man.

The baiting of the educated "elite" didn't start in the past week, Mr. Brooks, and it is, at best, disingenuous to admit it on the cusp of a potential Palin Vice-Presidency. The time for that was 2000, if not before. Nor are the educated the sole targets of the GOP's putrid us-vs-them tactics. The definition of "them" (sometimes) excepted, the Republican brand of populism is indistinguishable from a Klan rally. The "them"s are the rainbow that intrudes on your tribe's black-and-white(-bread) weltanschauung: Gays. Liberals. Immigrants. Muslims. Atheists/Agnostics. Wiccans/Pagans. Judges whose rulings they dislike. People who tell them to stay the @#$% out of their reproductive choices. Wealthy, connected Jews (But in the latter case only sotto vocce, because they wouldn't want to sound, you know, racist.)

And, too, the "educated." For the statistics speak, and in full throated chorus: U.S. social mobility is ossifying into a caste system. Thus, a devil's-bargain (a.k.a. "debt for degree") must be made by middle- and lower-income undergraduates to an extent not seen during my undergraduate epoch a mere two decades ago. Then, after incurring thousands of dollars of debt and jumping through hoops for four more years--wondering all the while how offshore-proof their career will actually be--these folks step off the commencement stage to be vilified for their wager of effort and expense. That's just gotta make it all worthwhile, dunnit?

Feh. I'd say "Welcome to my world, Mr. Brooks," except you're emphatically not. Not without significantly more self-reflection and a penitent appreciation of your own complicity. You were in no way obliged to attach yourself to the preening cheerleaders and jocks to the exclusion of the dweebs who do their own homework. On test day, your team chose a Champagne Brigade flyboy over someone who was actually used for target practice by dudes in black 'jammies. And, in case it escaped your notice, your team is now backing the privileged son and grandson of Navy brass who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. Against a guy who beat the odds of being dark-skinned and raised in a single-parent family to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard.

Is it any wonder that the GOP acts as high-handedly as it has these past several years? To them, getting ahead is couched in terms of playground pecking-order, and not in any way a meritocracy. The last eight years have been the political equivalent of "Lord of the Flies." And now the whole island is ablaze, thank you very little. Puppeteering and power-grabbing only carry so far, even in politics. Reality has a nasty way of defying dogma of any kind. The next few years will take political smarts, but more still of the academic kind, if there is any hope for pulling this country back from the banana republic brink.

While that's underway, I would appreciate it if you would do us a big favor, Mr. Brooks, and take your own words to heart. Pretty-please stay the hell out from underfoot while the "educated" folks try to put America back together. And I'd be doubly obliged if you would actually help the effort by nudging your party--and hopefully the nation at large--back to some sort of intellectual respectability.