Commentators. He recently said something I disagreed with - really, really critical of the DC judge for initially scheduling the federal coup attempt trial for the day before Super Tuesday, which he said just confirms the political nature of the action. Yet, he has no idea about the judge’s docket, and at other times Brooks has been all about nobody being above the law. It isn’t the judiciary’s responsibility to coddle a defendant based on scheduling of his personal ambitions. If that’s true for non-former-presidents, it needs to be true for Trump too.

I just re-skimmed the editorials this Salon guy was hammering. I think he’s guilty of some of what he sees in Brooks. Brooks starts off his Aug 2 editorial with full acknowledgement of the role of nativism and bigotry of all sorts in the rise of Trumpism. He basically just says it takes 2 to tango. And then tries to walk in the shoes of the other side.

Why? As Salon Kirk says, when a couple no longer sees the world through the same lens, they just split up, right? I don’t get Kirk’s point. He thinks a country of well over 300 million can do that just the same? Brooks is saying that’s not possible.

I think Brooks is saying something in between “we can only control our own actions, and they should all be geared towards healing our national wounds” and “you know, it always takes 2 to tango. We can’t control how the other side sees its role in our divisions, but we can think critically about ourselves”.

Salon Kirk rather offhandedly includes student loan forgiveness as an example of the left being in touch with the common man, and the right being reactionary. Brooks talks about the advantages of “elites” in higher education, and I think more tellingly, how the old Jimmy Breslin type of blue collar journalist is now a dinosaur. All journalists, materially speaking, are products of elite universities. Point for Brooks. Kirk is wrong. Most Americans see student loan forgiveness as a money transfer to a relatively small number of folks, and a huge boon to the overpriced university system which, as a result of forgiveness, can continue to raise prices to the stratosphere.

Something neither of these guys are considering, which I’ve seen as a thesis on the NewsHour Brooks does every Friday. The death of local journalism. We look at social media as the major contributor from the internet. But since the ‘90s, we’ve seen indie local journalism die a slow death. The thesis is that’s the biggest culprit. We’ve always been brutally divided on national and cultural issues. But until recently, we were also much more deeply involved in local community issues, which we saw as more impactful on our every day lives, and which cut across partisan lines. Ardent righties and ardent lefties often found themselves aligned in some local zoning or school issue. Nowadays, most of us are no longer plugged into hyper local stuff, and so all we have are our national partisan disagreements.

My answer to Kirk Swearingen is that the nation doesn’t have divorce as an option like a bickering couple. So maybe you don’t like Brooks’ thought experiments about walking in the shoes of the other side. Simply screaming at the other side for their horrible role is not an answer. You have to come up with some other alternative if you don’t like Brooks’ ideas.

If we wind up in a “national divorce”, there is no telling how far the bloodshed might go.


[Post edited by hoolstoptheheels at 09/04/2023 09:18AM]