The perils of maintaining a deep and active correspondence with the past is
that, more often than you'd like, you trip over something that makes you want
to drop your brain in a bleach jacuzzi and maybe not not eat for a month or
so.
This was one such.
But what makes this article a valuable artifact is the context in which is was
written.
By mid-April, 2005, it had become painfully clear that Iraq was
becoming a debacle of biblical proportions. Waterhead Gorgon Tom DeLay
was not just becoming an albatross around the neck of the House GOP, but an albatross
with a chainsaw. And the Republicans had just taken the unprecedented
step of passing a law depriving a single person -- Teri Schiavo's husband --
of his right to end the gruesome charade of keeping his brain-dead wife's body
alive by mechanical means. And the president of the United States,
George W. Bush -- who would not interrupt "brush clearing time" at the ranch for
war, flood or famine -- had interrupted his vacation to fly back to D.C. in the
dead of night to sign that single bill ... to help out his brother, Jeb, who
was the governor of Florida where this drama was taking place, and who was making
big "Party of Life" hay out this ghoulish kabuki.
Of Brooks' column, back in 2005 I asked the musical question "What in the Seven Flaming Bags of Satan's Dog's Poo is the fucking point
if this article?" And in the here-and-now of 2025, we are all too familiar with the
answer: whenever the GOP is running itself off the rails and in danger
of immediate collapse, it is the duty of all Conservative op-ed opinion-havers
to change the subject ASAP and something something Both Sides.
Which is what Brooks was up to 20 years ago. (p.s. As it true of far too many bloggy classics of yore, the Wolcott link is no longer active.)
Once again I'll spare you the introductory paragraphs explaining the reason
I'm running this limited series. If you're interested, the link is here.
So, typos and all, from April 16, 2005...
Shhhh!
Bobo's Talkin'. 
There is something disturbingly "old Mall flasher guy" reading BoBo ramble pantingly about hot young teens in what passes for NYT-lurid font. First Rush and now Brooksie going whanging off the walls on the subject of da’ yute and their blowjobbery. WTF? With Rush, it’s, well, if you’re one of the last nine people who haven’t read Wolcott's wonderful psalm on the subject, go there now. I’ll wait...
But while Rush’s, um, "spontaneous transmissions" have that very linear, dumb-carnivore appetite sense to them, BoBo’s are infinitely creepier. They are, I think, what probably passes for porn at Casa Brooks: wet-lipped, breathless, little-man passion coupled with a kind of neutered Uriah Heep dry/excited hand wringing.
One can be excused if one get's the overall impression of a great, damp, hairless cricket, rubbing its moist hind legs together con way too mucho gusto.
(The extremely handy Online Encyclopedia Britannica explains Brooksie’s means of communication as characteristic of the insect family “Tettigoniidae (about 3,000 species), distinguished from the true cricket (family Gryllidae) by hearing organs located on the front legs, hair-like antennae.” It also mentions that this species is characterized as having “a sword-shaped ovipositor (in females) for laying eggs” which I think more than adequately explains the real purpose of the horrible, pink tie.)
The results of this semi-masturbatory stridulation (look it up;-) from today’s NYT is as follows, interspersed with a few comments by me...
Public Hedonism and Private Restraint
"You see the febrile young teens in their skintight spaghetti strap tank tops with their acres of exposed pelvic skin. You hear 50 Cent's ode to oral sex, "Candy Shop," throbbing from their iPods. You open the college newspapers and see the bawdy sex columns; at William and Mary last week I read a playful discussion of how to fondle testicles and find G spots."
In one paragraph, BoBo verbally fondles “febrile” (which would have sounded less icky and diseased if he has just said “fevered”, but I guess the NYT don’t pay the Big Cake for tossing around little bales of hay like that), pelvic skin, testicles, blowjobs, G-Spots (usually spelled with a hyphen, but I guess if you’ve never traveled to, say, the Philippines, you probably never learn to spell “Bibingka Cassava” correctly either) in a way that is at once completely unnerving and just damned funny.
Shorter: BoBo discovers pee-pee. Film at 11.
"You could get the impression that America's young people are leading lives of Caligulan hedonism. You could give credence to all those parental scare stories about oral sex parties at bar mitzvahs and junior high school dances."
No, but thanks for jacking the Sexual Terror Level up to Baboon-Ass Red in order to scare the exurbans, before laying your reassuring hands on their daughters. How very....Bush Re-election Strategy of you. But, no. Frankly all I ever assumed was that teenagers were having sex and lying about it like they’ve been doing since before we came down out of the trees and starting building single’s bars and bordellos. Like I did. Like my father did. Like his father did, yea unto the hundredth generation.
See, the biological imperative is kind of a family tradition in our species, and teens have been finding a way to answer the call and definitionally dance around the whatever the local custom called “sinful” forever. That’s why the Almighty gave us hands and mouths and nether-regions: God’s Lil’ Virginity Loopholes.
"But it turns out you'd be wrong. The fact is, sex is more explicit everywhere - on "Desperate Housewives," on booty-quaking music videos, on the Internet - except in real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious."
Hehe: Bobo said “booty”. In the Times.
"Teenage pregnancy rates have declined by about a third over the past 15 years. Teenage birth and abortion rates have dropped just as much."
And that’s a good thing. No argument here: lower teen pregnancy rates are a good thing.
"They are also having fewer partners. The number of high schoolers who even report having four or more sexual partners during their lives has declined by about a quarter. Half of all high school boys now say they are virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990."
Well, now, you’ve got me there: There is not now -- and I daresay there has never been -- a more sober and reliable source of unbiased veracity than a teenage boy talking about his sex life or lack thereof. Maybe a [Republican] House Majority Disease Vector talking about Integrity in Government, but it would be a close call.
"Reports of an epidemic of teenage oral sex are also greatly exaggerated. There's very little evidence to suggest it is really happening."
What exactly does “very little” mean. If you mean “rampant” then, yes, you have a fine point there.
"When you actually look at the intimate life of America's youth, you find this heterodoxical pattern: people can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. There are Ivy League sex columnists who don't want anybody to think they are loose. There are foul-mouthed Maxim readers terrified they will someday divorce, like their parents. Eminem hardly seems like a paragon of traditional morality, but what he's really angry about is that he comes from a broken home, and what he longs for is enough suburban bliss to raise his daughter..."
At this point one might ask, "What in the Seven Flaming Bags of Satan's Dog's Poo is the fucking point if this article?" Fair question. And what in the fuck is this sudden, bizarre topical leap from the stupidly specific to the stupidly and not-even-tangentially-related general?
Or are we talking about “The Attack of the Teenaged Ivy-League sex columnists?” Because if so, that is one Roger Corman epic I guess I just missed. And BoBo rappin’ ‘bout the interior life and secret motivation of Eminem? Did Herr Doktor Senator Frist vouchsafe that little gem to you after one of his Remote Diagnostic Seances, or did you and Eminem have a sit-down and work this out face-to-face?
And good one, slinging in “heterodoxical”. I was really on the fence until you pulled that one out.
"What matters is reality. The reality is that we have a generation of kids who have seen the ravages of divorce, who are more likely to respect and listen to their parents and their ministers, who are worried about sexually transmitted diseases and who don't want to mess up their careers."
If “Reality” and the honest discussion thereof is what matters most, man oh man, did you ever sign up with the wrong team. When your Parti stops treating “evolution” like a four-letter-word (and thinking it actually has 4 letters in it) swing back around and we’ll take up the topic of “reality” again
"Second, it's becoming clear that we are seeing the denouement of one of the longest and increasingly boring plays on Broadway, the culture war."
Ahhhh. Finally we learn what all of this badly buttered-bread was supposed to help us swallow! Finally we see the blade (Emphasis added on the following by me)
"Since the 1830's, we've witnessed the same struggle. One camp poses as the party of responsibility, lamenting the decadence of culture and the loss of traditional morality. The other side poses as the army of liberation, lamenting Puritanism, repression and the menace of the religious right.
No doubt some people will continue these stale kabuki battles on into their graves: the 50's against the 60's, the same trumped-up outrage, the same self-congratulatory righteousness, the same fund-raising-friendly arguments again and again.
...
They seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right. You may not like the growing influence of religion in public life, but the lives of young people have improved. "
And there it is: the terms of surrender and occupation served up with hot teen blowjob and G-spot badinage and “can’t we all just get along” banter.
“Why can’t we just split the difference,” BoBo almost pleads. Theocracy-lite. We’re all partially right and partially wrong, right? You take a little from column “A” and a little from column “B” and it’ll all be beautiful! Wow. When did the hated, Liberal shibboleth of "moral relativism" become the new Spring fashion on the Right?
Fuck that, Brooksie. First and right off the top, the Left is frank and wholesome and a lot of other terrific things too, you wheezing toad, and how dare you infer otherwise. Fuck you and your greasing the slow, easy road down to the Pit and trying to sell it as a good deal.
We have played that 50/50 nonsense of “let us sit and reason together” for 20 years now, but each time you move the marker on the Right a little further into the suburbs of Crazyville. This is the terminal logic that brought us One Party rule by a junta stocked to the gunnels with plutocrats, liars, dunces, thieves and held in thrall by the most rabidly, America-hating, Armageddon-loving Theocrats this nation has ever produced.
And you council going full-tilt Pollyanna and it’ll all just work out some how.
This is the chirping sound of the ever-more frightened Moderate Republican offering “compromise” with one hand, while his pals flank around the Constitution though the trees, threaten judges who don’t kiss God’s ass, and well, you know the ever-growing bill of particulars as well as I do. Your Party Is The Problem BoBo! Go mop up the radioactive mess your Shining Path Fundies have made of it and then come back and we'll sit and talk of tales of Brave Ulysses.
Until then, No, Mr. Brooks. No thank you: I think not. We don’t want any today, but leave us your resume and we’ll let you know if we have any openings for “Accommodation” in the future.
End of stomach-churning visit to April 16, 2005.
I Am The Liberal Media.