David Brooks Wants a Revolution but Can't Bring Himself to Say It

“Musicians, if they choose to, can drive a tonal wedge through the noisome pestilence; the stench that often accompanies our contemporary societal lifestyles,” [Junie Morrison] said. “I wanted to conceptualize an escape from the tensions and atmospheric pollution, even if it’s only a temporary psycho-acoustical one.”

The last paragraph in Jon Pareles' obit, "Junie Morrison, a Funk Mastermind, Dies at 62," the Ohio Players, Funkadelic, Parliament, P-Funk All-Stars and solo creative powerhouse.

Yesterday's New York Times op-ed page was a wonder.

David Brooks, who has been shuckin' and jivin' in his column since the dark days of the Lehman meltdown (in other words, almost a decade of bullshit), has really hit his stride with the rise of Trump. Now his ruminations are as dark and baleful as a college town coffeehouse anarchist.

Yesterday's "This Century is Broken" really must be read to be believed. Basically Brooks gets it right.

Most of us came of age in the last half of the 20th century and had our perceptions of “normal” formed in that era. It was, all things considered, an unusually happy period. No world wars, no Great Depressions, fewer civil wars, fewer plagues.

It’s looking like we’re not going to get to enjoy one of those times again. The 21st century is looking much nastier and bumpier: rising ethnic nationalism, falling faith in democracy, a dissolving world order.

At the bottom of all this, perhaps, is declining economic growth. As Nicholas Eberstadt points out in his powerful essay “Our Miserable 21st Century,” in the current issue of Commentary, between 1948 and 2000 the U.S. economy grew at a per-capita rate of about 2.3 percent a year.

But then around 2000, something shifted. In this century, per-capita growth has been less than 1 percent a year on average, and even since 2009 it’s been only 1.1 percent a year. If the U.S. had been able to maintain postwar 20th-century growth rates into this century, U.S. per-capita G.D.P. would be over 20 percent higher than it is today.

Slow growth strains everything else — meaning less opportunity, less optimism and more of the sort of zero-sum, grab-what-you-can thinking that Donald Trump specializes in. The slowdown has devastated American workers. Between 1985 and 2000, the total hours of paid work in America increased by 35 percent. Over the next 15 years, they increased by only 4 percent.

For every one American man aged 25 to 55 looking for work, there are three who have dropped out of the labor force. If Americans were working at the same rates they were when this century started, over 10 million more people would have jobs. As Eberstadt puts it, “The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.”

That means there’s an army of Americans semi-attached to their communities, who struggle to contribute, to realize their capacities and find their dignity. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use studies, these labor force dropouts spend on average 2,000 hours a year watching some screen. That’s about the number of hours that usually go to a full-time job.

Fifty-seven percent of white males who have dropped out get by on some form of government disability check. About half of the men who have dropped out take pain medication on a daily basis. A survey in Ohio found that over one three-month period, 11 percent of Ohioans were prescribed opiates. One in eight American men now has a felony conviction on his record.

This is no way for our fellow citizens to live. The Eberstadt piece confirms one thought: The central task for many of us now is not to resist Donald Trump. He’ll seal his own fate. It’s to figure out how to replace him — how to respond to the slow growth and social disaffection that gave rise to him with some radically different policy mix.

What Brooks does next is textbook Brooks. He dodges the obvious, logical conclusion -- namely, that the source of all this domestic woe and disintegration is late stage financialized monopoly capitalism, a.k.a., neoliberalism -- by tossing sand in the reader's eyes by providing an ersatz sociological explanation instead, which invariably ends up blaming the victim. To wit --

The hard part is that America has to become more dynamic and more protective — both at the same time. In the past, American reformers could at least count on the fact that they were working with a dynamic society that was always generating the energy required to solve the nation’s woes. But as Tyler Cowen demonstrates in his compelling new book, “The Complacent Class,” contemporary Americans have lost their mojo.

Cowen shows that in sphere after sphere, Americans have become less adventurous and more static. For example, Americans used to move a lot to seize opportunities and transform their lives. But the rate of Americans who are migrating across state lines has plummeted by 51 percent from the levels of the 1950s and 1960s.

Americans used to be entrepreneurial, but there has been a decline in start-ups as a share of all business activity over the last generation. Millennials may be the least entrepreneurial generation in American history. The share of Americans under 30 who own a business has fallen 65 percent since the 1980s.

Americans tell themselves the old job-for-life model is over. But in fact Americans are switching jobs less than a generation ago, not more. The job reallocation rate — which measures employment turnover — is down by more than a quarter since 1990.

There are signs that America is less innovative. Accounting for population growth, Americans create 25 percent fewer major international patents than in 1999. There’s even less hunger to hit the open road. In 1983, 69 percent of 17-year-olds had driver’s licenses. Now only half of Americans get a license by age 18.

In different ways Eberstadt and Cowen are describing a country that is decelerating, detaching, losing hope, getting sadder. Economic slowdown, social disaffection and risk aversion reinforce one another.

Of course nothing is foreordained. But where is the social movement that is thinking about the fundamentals of this century’s bad start and envisions an alternate path? Who has a compelling plan to boost economic growth? If Trump is not the answer, what is?

What Brooks describes is monopoly capitalism and economic inequality run amok. It is obvious to anyone growing up playing Monopoly. When the other players own all the property and have built hotels on it, rolling the dice and moving around the board is painful if not deadly.

Brooks has been doing this -- putting sociological effects ahead of political-economic causes -- since global capitalism tanked in 2008. At the time I thought, "Well, he's got to do something. He's The Times' house conservative." And while he brings yesterday's column back around to the necessity of bolstering economic growth, he nowhere states the obvious: The super-rich love this low growth economy because they keep vacuuming up a greater share of the total wealth, which means even greater power and prestige.

What Brooks is really arguing for is a revolution. But he is a prophet in the employ of bankers, and he wants to keep his job at "the newspaper of record." So he'll keep confusing effects for causes.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Grateful Dead (1967)

I cast about at the beginning of the week for an album for this Friday's Hippies vs. Punks. At first, having recently finished Ed Sanders' The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, my intention was to focus on Sanders' Truckstop (1969). But quickly I confronted the difficulty of immersing myself for an entire work week in Sanders' Country-&-Western send-up of Hippies vs. Squares.

As I was coming to grips with this realization I was in line at a Starbucks getting my morning coffee. Piped in over the PA was a song from Bob Dylan's Self Portrait (1970). I just happened to have The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971) loaded on my iPod. So I decided that would be the album for this week.

But then I thought, "How can I ignore the 'Fare Thee Well' concerts of the the Grateful Dead?" The ultimate Hippie band officially reforming 20 years after Jerry Garcia's death in order to officially call it quits. The final football stadium shows in Santa Clara and Chicago received an ample amount of ink. Besides Jon Pareles' bloodless review, stories seemed to focus on the exorbitant ticket prices.

In any event, never a Deadhead, I decided to take another listen to the band's debut album, The Grateful Dead (1967). Recorded in Los Angeles for the Warner Bros. label during the month of January 1967, the most illuminating takeaway for me is how dated the record sounds. This is no American Beauty (1970) or Workingman's Dead (1970). A majority of the tracks are governed by a Go-Go dancer's beat, proving, like Moby Grape's debut, that the San Francisco Sound in 1967 was evolving out of a L.A.-dominated Sunset Strip Freak Scene. In the run-up to Monterey Pop and the Summer of Love, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow (1967) is a far more innovative, defining record than The Grateful Dead.

Nonetheless "Viola Lee Blues" is certainly a statement of great things to come:

The Colt 45 Chronicle #82

The Gray Lady did a curtsy to The Replacements this past September in the form of a loving review ("Indie-Rock Antiheroes Get a Stadium Singing Along: The Replacements Play at Forest Hills Stadium") by longtime rock critic Jon Pareles; a bit of synchronicity because a month earlier this page had recited a brief prayer to The Replacements.

The letter below, written to my friend and musical mentor Oliver over 25 years ago, was a regretful sniffing-the-coffee-grounds assessment of Paul Westerberg's growing corporate soullessness.

It is hard for those who did not live as young adults through the 1980s heavily influenced by their liberal university education to understand just how enormous an influence The Replacements were. They were the sonic, existential bedrock of the generation. 

Early synthesizers of Punk and Classic Rock that the record labels would later cash in with during the early 1990s heyday of Grunge, The Replacements were never a huge commercial success. They personified the Bukowski ethos that dominated the vanguard during my young-man youth: Don't try -- the vanguard as the rearguard; the artist as day laborer and malt-liquor drinker; the hipster not as Hippie or Punk -- no, sir; zero ostentation, please -- but as a woeful, drunken, puking plebeian.

The letter provides some interesting, honest testimony of when I saw The Replacements in their prime, 1985. It ends with some young-man thoughts about the passing of time.

Spring 1989

Shit, I know; it's a Yuppie concern. But I keep getting older every year, and every year I move a digit away from what I had hoped would be a wonderfully productive and fulfilling year. Yeah, you're right, that Replacements album is pretty damn frightening. Ben called me this last Tuesday and we ended up going for a long Manhattan walk, and along the way he told me that you didn't really like DON'T TELL A SOUL. When I talked to Ben I told him that I kind of liked it, side two excepted. But after listening to side one a couple times this evening, I think you're darn-tooting correct. The only song I continue to look forward to is "Talent Show." Everything else is a soulless haze. And that's exactly what's so fucking scary. The songs are fully and totally and completely soulless (except for "Talent Show" and, partially, one or two others). I say scary because what The Replacements always did have was Westerberg's disfigured honest alcoholic soul. Ben caught it pretty damn perfect once a long time ago when he said something to the effect that what made Westerberg Westerberg was how he sung those silly sappy corny songs so serious straight and strong. I can proudly measure my young adult life by those songs:

1) "Customer"; "I Hate Music"; "I'm In Trouble"

2) "Color Me Impressed"; "You Lose"; "Treatment Bound"

3) "Kids Don't Follow"; "Go"

4) "I Will Dare"; "We're Comin' Out"; "Unsatisfied"

5) "Hold of My Life"; "Left Of The Dial"; "Here Comes a           Regular"

6) "A1ex Chilton"

PLEASE TO MEET ME was easy listening, but it dropped off faster than any of the other albums. I stopped playing it after three weeks. The only song I really fell for was "Alex Chilton." So I guess the handwriting was on the wall. It took me a long time before I shelled out the new one. I had read an article in SPIN on The Replacements, and it really rekindled my old love and appreciation for Westerberg, mainly because the writer, who you could tell was a young guy. Or at least that's what I imagined, that's what my imagination was telling me on one sunny March Saturday afternoon while I flipped the pages in bed -- I had bought the magazine the day before at the supermarket. The writer talked about driving up to Houston from Austin in 1985 to see the Replacements; he talked about eating SpaghettiOs cold out of the can and swigging Jack Daniels, about showing up at the show a  little dizzy and seeing Tommy Stinson splashing in one of those inflatable kiddie pools while he gulped from a bottle of bourbon, about grabbing the fifth from one of his buddies and taking several prodigious mouthfuls and then promptly jetting a gash of puke right out in front of the stage, about how this was greeted with jubilation and sincere approbation, like, and these are his words (in effect), "Like someone spitting fire at a Kiss concert."

Remember, we -- you, me and Colin and Lyn -- also saw The Replacements in 1985. That was a show at the Berkeley Square, a show where Tommy Stinson kept peeking into the ladies restroom from his elevated position on stage. The band would be right in the middle of a tune, and he'd turn his head, walk over to the west side of the stage and take a long bucking cherubic giggle and stare. This was also the show, or one of the shows during that period, where Westerberg couldn't finish a single song and kept calling for a vodka on the rocks. This was also the show where I saw Bob Stinson drinking a beer before the show; he was pulling his head back to catch a Mitch Easter video that was on the monitor above the bar, and he was doing it in obvious disrespect for a slightly overweight  nightclub hipster harlot who was trying her damnedest to curry the tiniest bit of his favor. And this was also the show were I wondered aloud to myself, ""Wow! Westerberg is really fucking ugly." He looked very, very bad: skinny yet bloated; stringy and piggish; anemic and seasick.

This guy, this writer, also printed a few lines from some of Westerberg's old songs; and, boy, did they sound fine. I can't remember the ones he quoted, but a few flutter in the old head right here and now, like "Pretty girl keep growing up/Playing makeup wearing guitar"; and "Yesterday's trash too bored to thrash"; and "Well, a person can work up a mean mean thirst after a hard day of nothing much at all"; and "I hate my father/Someday I won't." Man, they all register down underneath someplace beneath the pillow I sleep my head on at night, a feeling so unintentionally felt that I don't know if I'll ever be able to sort out the oomph and girth of it.

I wish I still had that article, but I lent it to the newlywed couple I've spoken of before. I lent it to them because the groom is from Minnesota and likes, mildly, The Replacements. The bride tossed it in the trash.

So after reading€ the SPIN article  I was convinced, even though in my mind's eye I knew otherwise, that I should trundle down to the Village and pick myself up a copy. Anyway, getting back to the original point, it took me until just the other week to buy the sucker. And when I played it for the first time I really liked it (side one that is; I never got into side two). But you know after only a few listens it started to wear thin. And all I can attribute this to is a loss of soul which is probably more a sign of why they gave up on alcohol than why their stuff sounds so lifeless after they sobered up. They started taking a little time off, started giving themselves a little space to breathe, started respecting their ideas, started thinking of themselves as bigger than the greatness that made them great in the first place. The Replacements became what's cool, not the tunes -- just like the fucking turd-burgling Stipe boys. Poor Bob Stinson. How could he have been any more of a fuck-up than Westerberg?

Enough. This is all just so much shit in my pants because the past is gone.

That's what's truly sad. The past is gone. Flipping through my albums, fingers getting smeared with dust, a few homemade screwdrivers lighting my brow, I was stung by the incredible sadness of the whole thing. My heart began to break. So much life lived now forgotten. Life, dead and dusty, sunburned and domestically captured. The funniest thing about feeling so old among all those The dBs and The Fleshtones and Gang of Four albums is that you don't immediately die and disappear; that you're still young and you go on living.