A little insight into the Tea Party constituency

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 12 Comments

Image courtesy of our platonic friends at moronswithsigns.blogspot.com.

First of all, when is Obama gonna get going with the infanticide already? He’s been in office for fifteen months now, and I haven’t seen even one centurion dash a Christian child against a tall palm. Maybe that’s because I haven’t been looking in Florida, though. The New York Times has conducted what appears to be the first semi-scientific poll to determine Tea Party demographics, and found that “the 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.” That shouldn’t surprise anyone. What is counterintuitive is that Tea Party supporters turn out to be, on average, richer and more likely to hold college degrees than the general public. The majority describe the amount of money they paid in taxes this year as “fair.” They usually or almost always vote Republican, 57% of them hold a favorable opinion of George W. Bush, and a plurality of them believe that Sarah Palin is unqualified to be president. And 25% of them say that the federal government under Barack Obama favors blacks over whites. Sounded almost sane there, for a second, didn’t they?

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Why do babies make us all so angry? Because they remind us of us

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 6 Comments

So I got him this skull-and-crossbones onesie because, you know, he likes that kind of thing. He's always been kind of alternative, kind of positioning himself against society, and of course it's a good memento mori.

Another Brooklyn bar bans babies, and—except for the headline writers at the New York Post, who are thrashing in their isolation tanks with glee at the alliteration—polite society girds itself in anticipation of another bitter argument. Nothing makes us angry like a baby. On Thanksgiving day, you can grab the turkey and make it dance around your friend’s kitchen like a puppet, have it drink a whiskey and tell a series of bone-and-breast jokes to his wife, then throw it back in the oven without even rinsing it off and be lauded as a great wit. But do the same thing with his baby and suddenly you’re a monster. A baby is like a pack-a-day smoking habit, turning friends against friends and making bars, funerals and other usual places of agreement into sites of bitter controversy. Ever since Brooklyn’s Union Hall unsuccessfully tried to ban strollers—and made the New York Times, thereby elevating the whole issue to the status of Real Thing That Is Happening—public drinking in America has fixed on one question: Should babies be the unwanted center of everyone’s lives? Or just their parents’?

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Being cool: People should want to kill you

By Dan Brooks in Being Cool 4 Comments

The second coolest dog ever (Number one: Phife Dawg)

In keeping with its tradition of covering the news not just as it happens, like most papers, but also possibly before it happens, the Style section of the New York Times announced today that bulletproof vests are totally hip. The author of the article, Ruth La Ferla, says the phenomenon was likely spurred by the return of the Fox show 24, in which Jack Bauer often wears a bulletproof vest. I guess that’s possibly true—24 is a show on television now, and people are apparently wearing bulletproof vests for fashion now—in the same sense that eating breakfast makes it get lighter outside. As is usually the case with a style piece, you can’t prove it’s not happening. La Ferla points out that bulletproof vests are worn by counterterrorism operatives and wealthy plutocrats, as well as Hollywood moguls and 50 Cent. “So it may have been only a matter of time,” she writes, “before aspiring hipsters embraced the style — the sartorial equivalent of a safe room — as a badge of cool.” Because as any hipster will tell you, no one is cooler than 50 Cent, unless it’s the guy who runs Wuhan Steel Group.

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Netflix rental patterns: Is taste a luxury good?

By Dan Brooks in consumerism, new york times, populism 6 Comments

Netflix rental frequency of "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" in the New York metropolitan area. Redder areas indicate greater popularity; note the near total absence of "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" from the richest little island in America.

The New York Times issued a compelling argument that web pages are better than newspapers yesterday, when they published this interactive graphic of the most popular Netflix movies in major US cities. Fascinating trends abound, from the predictable—the distribution of Obsessed turns out to be a handy map of where black people live—to the predictable-in-retrospect: the Reneé Zellweger vehicle New In Town, about a big-city girl who moves to Minnesota for some reason, is fantastically popular in Minneapolis and nowhere else. (For those of you who find the slider irritating, as I do, New In Town is just to the right of the second hash mark. Things that are not related by quantitative induction, where each element n cannot be said to have an n+1, should not be arranged on a slider. Leviticus 14:5.) At right, you will see the map for Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a movie that I did not see but which I am going to assume, based on the preview, was not exactly Citizen Kane. Those of you wondering where the line is between upper Manhattan and the South Bronx need look no further than the sharp red-white delineation between highways 9 and 1. Also, if you’re wondering which parts of Brooklyn are nice now, there you go. Hint: not Gravesend.

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Stronger than reason: David Brooks on the Tea Party

By Dan Brooks in counterculture, michael steele, Reactionary Populism, representative democracy, specious trends, Tea Party, widespread dumbening 13 Comments

Dear god, please let there be a punk rock branch of the Tea Party.

He’s been wrong before, but when David Brooks says you’re a nationwide movement, you’re either Soccer Moms in the 2004 general election or a real thing. In Monday’s New York Times, Brooks alleges that the Tea Party movement is the latter. After opening with his usual overview of the prevailing sociopolitical winds for the last thirty to 100 years, he gets to the money shot. “Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year,” he writes. For the moment, Brooks has declined to enumerate which instruments he uses to measure the popularity of ideas, but he at least sounds right. “The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise,” he says. “The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.” Those committed to responsible argument will object to Brooks’s questionable use of the word so, which makes his theory the cause of his evidence, but as and statements his list still draws an unsettling connection. When Brooks points out that the Tea Partiers are defined by what they are against, and that most of what they are against can be grouped under “the concentrated power of the educated class,” he introduces a framework as useful as it is terrifying.

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