And now for David Brooks, Rick Santorum and a logo enhanced lifestyle ...

(Above: the pond just couldn't resist this potentially Godwin's Law breaching photo of German youth in action in 1935, found here. Now that's a collection of drums).

Yesterday the pond predicted - based on the ample evidence provided by Piers 'Akker Dakker' Akerman - that the nattering Mogul nabobs of negativity in Murdoch la la land would be out banging their drums like young Oskar in The Tin Drum, gifted as he was with a piercing shriek and a relentless capacity for pounding away at his favourite toy.

And today, as surely as Humpty Dumpty once sat on a wall, and bleated away about how expensive it was to deploy words, there's Christopher Pearson taking up the chant, like one of the boys terrorising the innocent in Lord of the Flies:
Pearson is best known as being a Latin mass loving luddite of the first water.

Why anyone would pay to read him on climate science or technology is a mystery almost as deep as transubstantiation, but we merely report, and you decide if you want to waste your life and money (or even at this moment in time your email address, which might well turn up who knows where within the giant world of Murdoch).

Enough already. The pond is well aware that Pearson is simply provided as a service for masochists who like to give themselves a good beating when not wearing a cilice.

Provocation is the name of the game, as Miranda the Devine explained in her Xmas farewell to readers, My year on the offensive:

I am happy to report that in the past 12 months, judging by the flak in my Hotmail inbox, I successfully got up the nose of greenies, unionists, potheads, vegetarians, bat fanciers, home birthers, gay wedding planners, Thermomix devotees, Prince Charles loyalists, Kyle Sandilands fans and Tony Abbott haters.

This year? Well the Devine hasn't yet targeted one-legged whale-loving black lesbian nuns ... but she'll soon be back in the offensive fray, ready to alienate, and chant the luddite war cry, so give her time.

Meanwhile, what with the way American politics is currently all the go, why heck, it's time to drop in on David Brooks, scribbling furiously in A New Social Agenda.

First comes the careful distancing from Rick Santorum:

I’m to Rick Santorum’s left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion. I’m also put off by his Manichaean political rhetoric. He seems to imagine America’s problems can best be described as the result of a culture war between the God-fearing conservatives and the narcissistic liberals.

Like most Americans, including most evangelicals under 40, I find this culture war language absurd. If conservative ideas were that much more virtuous than liberal ideas, then the conservative parts of the country would have fewer social pathologies than the liberal parts of the country. They don’t.

Uh huh. Now you might think this intro is the start of a very good bagging of the regressive Santorum. Think again:

...having said all that, I’m delighted that Santorum is making a splash in this presidential campaign. He is far closer to developing a new 21st-century philosophy of government than most leaders out there.

Yep, if Catholic theocracy from the distant past is a new twenty-first century philosophy of government, then Santorum is making a huge splash.

Truly, Brooks is one of those polite, quisling, fellow travelling conservative members of the commentariat you'd be pleased to invite on to the PBS Newshour where he can look suitably smarmy and neat and tidy, and lordy, PBS even supplies him - free of geo limits - on the full to overflowing intertubes on a regular basis:

But back to the column, wherein Brooks drinks the Santorum kool aid:

One of Santorum’s strengths is that he understands that a nation isn’t just an agglomeration of individuals; it’s a fabric of social relationships. In his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” he had chapters on economic capital as well as social capital, moral capital, cultural capital and intellectual capital. He presents an extended argument against radical individualism. “Just as original sin is man’s inclination to try to walk alone without God, individualism is man’s inclination to try to walk alone among his fellows,” he writes.

Uh huh. It takes a Catholic - and David Brooks - to see some meaning in original sin and walking alone without the long absent god, and Brooks proceeds to give Santorum a lesson in all he must do and say - in a Brooksian way - to provide the ideas and values that will in due course be co-opted by Main Street leaders, and see the United States regress to a hard-working Christian nation full of families and Catholic pieties.

Because the world faces a huge problem, and it's all technology related:

Santorum understands that we have to fuse economics talk and values talk. But he hasn’t appreciated that the biggest challenge to stable families, healthy communities and the other seedbeds of virtue is not coastal elites. It’s technological change; it’s globalization; it’s personal mobility and expanded opportunity; it’s an information-age economy built on self-transformation and perpetual rebranding instead of fixed inner character. It is the very forces that give us the dynamism and opportunities in the first place.

Yep, the intertubes and the like give us an icky squishy floaty fluid relationship to the world, when what we really need is a fixed inner character. And if you have a fixed inner character you can become a seedbed of virtue. Why even coastal elites (quite close to inner west urban elites) might discover fixed inner character, in 140 characters or less ...

And so on and so forth. And at this point you realise that if The New York Times can provide this sort of blather for free - for at least the first twenty reads a month - what need to subscribe to The Australian to read Christopher Pearson's thoughts on the NBN?

By column's end, having led Santorum and readers on a fine old moral goose chase, how does Brooks end up?

America is creative because of its moral materialism — when social values and economic ambitions get down in the mosh pit and dance. Santorum is in the fray.

Yep, it doesn't actually matter what Santorum says, does, proposes, believes, or acts upon.

It's enough that he's in the fray, gets down in the mosh pit and dances, and stirs up mindless prejudice against birth control, gays (or man on dog sex if you will), and abortion (even in cases of rape or other criminal action), and mindless prejudice in favour of redefining the relationship between church and state, the theocratic impulses of Christian fundamentalists in the United States, and various other conservative family value stances that would bring back the regressive, repressive ways of the nineteen fifties. So that's the real point of Mad Men!

But what, you might ask, is moral materialism, and there in a nutshell you immediately begin to understand why Brooks is such a confused possum:

As the world gets richer, demand will rise for the sorts of products Americans are great at providing — emotional experiences. Educated Americans grow up in a culture of moral materialism; they have their sensibilities honed by complicated shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Mad Men,” and they go on to create companies like Apple, with identities coated in moral and psychological meaning, which affluent consumers crave.

Dear sweet absent lord, it turns out that corporations are truly people (the current Republican cri de coeur - Mitt Romney doubles down on corporate personhood) and so a company like Apple is coated in moral and psychological meaning. It's called a logo enhanced lifestyle.

As to the deeper moral meanings of short battery time, and workers jumping out of buildings in China, we'll leave others to decide.

Others have tried to decipher some meaning in Brooks' meanderings. Andrew Leonard had a go with David Brooks couldn't be happier! back when Brooks scribbled his original piece Relax, we'll be fine:

I for one, am grateful that a show like “The Wire” was made so well that watching it distracted me from the terrible reality that its actors and writers captured in such rich depth. Whenever I feel down and out, there is always a DVD that can make me feel better! This, then, is what the world has to look forward to — American-made entertainment products so magnificent in evoking how fucked up everything is that we no longer have the time or attention span to worry about anything except whether we’ve programmed our TiVo correctly to capture it all.

Indeed. And Deadwood shows how motherfucker cocksucker Americans got ahead in the world.

... what, precisely, is “moral materialism?” If morality concerns the rightness or wrongness of something and materialism is the doctrine that everything in the world can only be explained in terms of matter — then Brooks must be saying that essence of American culture, perhaps even our salvation, lies in our ability to imbue physical things — consumer products — with a quality of righteousness.

Hummer: bad; iPhone: good. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale: sublime; Miller Lite: wretched. Ford F150: tough, Prius: preachy. (It’s fun — everybody play!)

Indeed.

Mosh pit: good.

David Brooks proving that he and Rick Santorum are down wit it in the mosh pit of life, and the beer and the sweat mingles and hot human flesh presses in close, and piercings mingle, and tatts jostle, and body slammers hit the floor, and there's only ear and gut pounding music, and not a whit or jot of an idea escapes the black hole of the mosh pit ...

When of course the reality is that the sedate, nicely suited Brooks writes twaddle for the New York Times, and Rick Santorum is a fundamentalist Catholic, with no amount of reinvention able to turn his ancient sow's ears ideas into modernist pearls ...

And that's why on another day you can find David Brooks writing Mosh Pit Meets Sandbox:

What I object to is people who make their children ludicrous. Innocent infants should not be compelled to sport “My Mom’s Blog Is Better Than Your Mom’s Blog” infant wear. They should not be turned into deceptive edginess badges by parents who refuse to face that their days of chaotic, unscheduled moshing are over.

But, but, but, they were just getting down in the mosh pit with Rick Santorum, and dancing the night away, because that's getting into the fray, and providing the moral materialism that means Apple will led the world into a bright, shiny future.

Or some such thing. And people think they need to subscribe to Murdoch world to take a trip to la la land ...

(Below: hmm, is it time for the pond to upgrade, purely in the interest of getting into the mosh pit of ideas, and so providing the pond with the moral and psychological meanings we all crave? Is the absent lord sending a message?)