Idioticus Moronicus Revisited

In Monday's New York Times, David Brooks introduced us to a new category of man, Patio Man. No, it's not a primate species whose skull fragments were dug up in the Olduvai Gorge. Patio Man is alive, sentient, and walks upright among us.

According to Brooks, Patio Man is "the quintessential suburban American, the service economy worker, the guy who wears khakis to work each day, with the security badge on the belt-clip around his waist."

Have you got that? Pay heed, liberal elitists . . .

Patio Man lives in a variety of habitats, but he prefers places like Northern Virginia and the "I-4 corridor near Orlando." He's also been spotted in Columbus, Ohio and the "converging megalopolis between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and in many other places besides."

Patio Man is a parochial creature who dislikes change. He's primarily motivated, plantlike, "by a tropism toward order and stability." But, Mr. Brooks informs us, he is not right wing. He's just kind of conservative in a benign sort of way, like a hobbit. Like a hobbit in khaki dockers with a security badge on his belt-clip. He distrusts unfamiliar things, alien things, "things far away." A firm believer in "convention and respectability," Patio Man has a "strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order."

Apparently Mr. Brooks has never read Babbit. It describes Patio Man pretty accurately. It also describes Mr. Brooks. But to continue.

Typically, the primary threats to Patio Man's Established Order are "foreign enemies and domestic zealotry," which conservatives like Brooks are more than happy to exaggerate in order to get him to vote Republican. But this time around he's not taking the bait. He's voting Democrat in a big way. Patio Man is the Great White failing middle class and he is, by Brook's own account, at the "epicenter of American politics." His vote carries weight, and for the first time since Clinton the Republicans don't have it. This is big trouble for them. David Brooks knows this and it is he, not Patio Man, who's running scared.

Conservative Republicans have had the whip hand for eight years (if not thirty), and their policies have brought Patio Man to ruin. It wasn't liberals. It wasn't socialists. It wasn't fags, dykes, atheists, commies, blacks or Arab terrorists. It was lily white conservatives. He knows it, they know it. The probable result may be a landslide election of historic proportions that might usher in a brand new New Deal and bury Reaganism forever. If Democrats get a mandate for real change, Brooks and his ilk will be out of fashion. He might have to go back to slumming at the The Weekly Standard where the pay isn't as good as at the New York Times and the secretaries aren't as pretty. Those invitations to appear on Meet The Press and The News Hour With Jim Lehrer will start drying up. He might have to wear khakis each day with a security badge on his belt-clip. He might, God forbid, have to start eating at Red Lobster.

There's only one thing to do: deny that the coming Democratic landslide constitutes a mandate for radical change. Just say that Patio Man is non-ideological. He's essentially a timid pragmatist who only craves security. When faced by economic uncertainty, he gravitates towards the party who promises a return to normalcy. In this case, that's the Democrats, but only "socially moderate, pragmatic, managerial" Democrats. Patio Joe ain't a leveller. So any New Deal version 2.0 is out. This is exactly what David Brooks does:

Patio Man wants change. But this is no time for more risk or more debt. Debt in the future is no solution to the debt racked up in the past. This is a back-to-basics moment, a return to safety and the fundamentals.

Which means, a return to the status quo ante George W. Bush.

Funny, when Bush and the Neocons were riding high back in the glory days of '02 to '05, nobody brought these issues up. Brooks and his pals were too busy jerking off over images of GW in his flight suit and prattling on about America's divine "benevolent hegemony" in the Middle East to worry about Patio Man's devotion to stability and order. All they wanted was for Patio Man to shut up, wave the flag and go marching in Georgie's torchlight parades while the Neocons violently overturned every semblance of law and order in the world. They told Patio Man we were under Code Orange. They told him to buy duct tape, keep lots of bottled water in the house, and "watch what you do, watch what you say." Only when faced with a liberal reformation do the conservatives among us become conservative again. Only then do they toss out Leo Strauss and go back to Edmund Burke.

Now that their plans have failed, the country has gone bankrupt, and the butcher's bill is way past due, they ask us if we can just forget about it and go back to the way America was before they fucked it up beyond all recognition. No harm, no foul, right fellas? Can't we just have a mulligan and forget the whole Iraq, Bush, recession thing? After all, Patio Man only wants stability . . . Let's do it for the Gipper!

It's pathetic. Hopefully they don't get it.

Call this post Idioticus Moronicus Revisited. It's all about David Brooks.