Neglected Body Partisanship

Selected excerpts from David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column, with commentary by David Brooks’s penis

It’s best to get to the events an hour early and treat the waiting crowd like a cocktail party.

And they call me a weenie.

First, you ask people about the local economy. Then you ask them about their lives (about which they are always interesting).

Dude, they’re not reading this, you don’t have to lie parenthetically. But go on, sorry to interrupt while you’re wanking, the metaphorical kind of wanking that doesn’t involve me but hey that’s cool it’s not like I have needs or anything.

This past weekend in South Carolina I met, among many others, a soldier leaving for Afghanistan who quoted the Book of Revelation from his iPhone, a Vietnam veteran who movingly described the death of his first wife, a textile factory middle manager whose job got sent to El Salvador and a pawnshop manager who supports Ron Paul and said he has clients who buy a new gun every time the government does something they don’t like.

Gotta love that local color! What? Only half of those afford a telling glimpse into our society’s dark undercurrent of violence!

I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.

You sometimes wonder this. I bet you also sometimes wonder if bears—roaming wild and free, far from the amenities of modern living such as indoor plumbing—relieve themselves right there in their natural environs.

The other pleasure of covering campaigns is getting to play American Idol judge, evaluating the political performances.

Good thing urethras can’t vocalize, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to read that line without screaming “Death to America!” Wait, what am I saying, “good thing?” TSA patdowns’re the only action I get.

But Romney’s awkwardness seems to endear him to audiences, because he’s trying so hard.

Even Romney’s supporters don’t find him endearing. But if junior high A/V clubs have taught us one thing, it’s that socially-stunted white guys who aren’t comfortable in their own skin are good at projecting.

Rick Perry ran a poor campaign but seems like the guy you’d most want to have a beer with.

Only if you’re a self-loathing milquetoast so ashamed of himself that he eagerly craves the approval of cretinous alpha males. The rest of us can see Perry for what he is, a brazenly ignorant asshole. That’s his appeal. Oh, and it helps to be completely unaware that the “have a beer with” metric hasn’t been used unironically for the better part of a decade, but mostly the self-loathing milquetoast thing.