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Columns > Deconstruction Zone > Richard Brookhiser 
Rush Limbaugh Deconstruction ZoneRabid and Rascally Creatures: Richard Brookhiser’s “Happy Darkies”[28 August 2009] Familial or political, conservatives in America actually have no moral boundaries whatsoever.
By Rodger Jacobs“Pain is like water,” journalist and historian Richard Brookhiser writes in his new memoir, “it finds every crack in your character and makes it wider.” The rapidly-rising waters encircling the sinking ship of the conservative movement in the American body politic is revealing cracks and fissures so vast and wide as to elude hyperbolic description. A political and social movement willing to embrace a monosyllabic, moose-killing, Barbie Doll hockey mom as a viable candidate for the office of Vice-President of the United States (okay, maybe it doesn’t defy hyperbole) falls far short of the “the circular pattern of six WASP traits”, as defined by Brookhiser, that form the bedrock of conservatism: “conscience, industry, success, civic-mindedness, use, anti-sensuality.”  Richard BrookhiserRight Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement in America(Basic; US: Jun 2009)As a book about the often contentious relationship between a mentor – conservative columnist, publisher, and television host William F. Buckley Jr. – and his star pupil, Richard Brookhiser’s narrative is hit and miss. The reader doesn’t come away from Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement with a sense that they really know the author and his elitist, Ritalin-popping idol. In some regards, this is a good thing. A short section of the book, for instance, details Brookhiser’s battle with testicular cancer, a detour that the Yale English major keeps mercifully short because heaven knows that the market is saturated with self-congratulatory cancer survivor memoirs destined for a second life as weepy, feel-good melodramas for the Lifetime television network. Books ponder the order and structure of events. Putting the weaknesses in Brookhiser’s memoir aside (even the author notes that “memoirs are a dubious genre”), what emerges in the fast-moving pages of this first-person account of over 40 years of moral, social, and political change is the answer to a question that has been haunting pundits for some time now: What has happened to the Republican party and the conservative movement in America? The answer is as simple as following the Peter Principle of upward failure: Conservatives launched careers in Washington to affect social change rather than selling the force of their ideas through cultural means. All in the Family It’s important that we understand these values-driven people, because the recent hemorrhaging of unregulated free-market economics and the blood of unjust wars and failed banana republic revolutions stains their hands and would most likely plague their conscience—if only they believed in something as quaint and abstract as a human conscience—but their rabidly anti-intellectual stance does not afford them that luxury. Consider the following from page 88 of Brookhiser’s memoir regarding his marriage to psychiatrist Jeanne Safer:
Sadly, Brookhiser’s portrait is a dead-on accurate assessment of many conservative American families. When one of the family members steps out of line – as the author’s mother does with her apparent anti-Semitism – the other clan elders remain deaf, dumb, and blind because the offending party is family. This is why, after calling Democratic President Jimmy Carter “the worst ex-President in history… (and) a very bad President: small-minded, moralizing, and incompetent”, Brookhiser, on page 167 of his tome, writes: “Because Reagan was family, we forgave him many sideslips.” The apple never falls too far from the tree, Rick. My mother, who passed away at age 65 one year ago this month, was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with family roots burrowed deeply in the rural farm country of Indiana and Virginia. She was also an anti-Semite, but it would probably be more fair and accurate to say that she was against any thought or action that failed to advance the superior White Anglo-Saxon Protestant cause of middle-class America. She adored, in no particular order, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and John McCain. Like many conservatives, my mother believed in forcing morality down people’s throats, but her own morality was oddly flexible. She had prior convictions for grand larceny and drunk driving. In the early ‘80s, at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution that she so wholeheartedly endorsed (for conservatives, Brookhiser recalls wistfully, the Reagan presidency was “like getting the keys to the kingdom”), my mother was a significant narcotics dealer in the working class West Los Angeles community of Mar Vista. She sold rock cocaine when she was the manager of a 365-unit apartment building; she had a built-in community of users within the complex, back in the heady days of disco when everybody was snorting or smoking something; eventually she began skimming cash from the rent collections to cover her drug-buying expenses as her network of buyers grew larger. Her larceny was caught by the management company (the apartment complex was owned by Carol Burnett and her husband Joe Hamilton), she was fired, threatened with prosecution, but a PI hired to investigate her revealed that she had neither a pot to piss in or a window to toss it out of so they dropped prosecution because they were seeking recovery of the money my mom stole, not putting her behind bars. Thus, my mother was aiding and abetting the cocaine-smuggling Latin American revolutionaries that Reagan was actively trying to thwart in his battle against communism through overt and covert counter-revolutionary operations that would ultimately lead to the disgraceful Iran-Contra scandal. All of this while Ronald Reagan was beefing up DEA coffers in an attempt to eradicate marijuana cultivation in Central and Northern California. Familial or political, conservatives in America actually have no moral boundaries whatsoever. 
 Deconstruction Zone
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Hal Ashby: Hollywood RebelBy Rodger Jacobs25.Sep.09 Films and books strive toward a common goal: telling a story. And very few modern filmmakers are as good at spinning a yarn as the late Hal Ashby was. |
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Comments
hmm… all conservatives and republicans are evil. a pretty original idea in this day and age. but thankfully individuals like this author have the world figured out and will one day fix all of its problems.
it’s disappointing to read this kind of screed disguised as a book review in a website that typically stays a ‘politics free’ zone - there are so few left.
like him or not, william f. buckley was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. reducing him to a sinister caricature is an embarrassment, and not exactly indicative of much range of intellect.
it’s clear the author has had his fair share of negative interactions with conservatives (who strangely enough, aren’t perfect). let this be another.
sincerely,
a regular reader of pop matters
Comment by Doug from nyc — August 28, 2009 @ 10:49 am
Doug, I don’t believe that I reduced Mr. Buckley to a sinister caricature—which is precisely what Brookhiser did in his assessment of liberals as quoted verbatim in my piece; in point of fact, I uttered less than two sentences about Buckley in my column. The story is about Richard Brookhiser, the conservative movement in America, and the author’s overview of the rise and fall of said political force. Furthermore, as the title of my column should amply suggest, I do not “review” books here, I deconstruct them.
Thanks for reading.
Comment by Rodger Jacobs from Las Vegas, NV — August 28, 2009 @ 11:59 am
I’m going to second the first commenter here… I am certainly no fan of William F. Buckley or National Review, and there are many criticisms that can rightfully be made of conservatives and conservatism, but this piece is mean-spirited and hyperbolic.
You talk about conservatives “forcing morality down people’s throats,” but which party has spent nearly the last century fighting to impose a Washington-centered one-size-fits-all federal social agenda on the rest of the country? Conservatives acted despicably in trying to label Americans like myself who opposed the Iraq war as “Un-American,” but no worse than many on the left have done in labelling those opposed to Obama’s health reform proposals as swastika-waving corporate stooges.
In using such a broad brush to smear the intelligence and good intentions of many good people who honestly disagree with you, you’ve lowered yourself to the level of a Karl Rove or Ann Coulter, and provided an excellent example of how bullying rhetorical extremes from right AND left poison the discourse the rest of us try to use for the public good. Better luck next time.
Comment by reason — August 28, 2009 @ 2:15 pm
A nice article, Rodger. For being a protege of Buckley, Brookhiser is an appallingly bad writer and a muddled thinker.
Comment by Shawn from southern europe — August 28, 2009 @ 2:47 pm
Reason, you missed the boat at the dock where this installment of my column is concerned, I’m afraid; what you perceive as mean-spirited hyperbole is a direct reflection of the tone of Mr. Brookheiser’s memoir. The fact that I was mocking his stance and rhetoric should have been apparent by my use of first-person voice in the piece and by dragging some of my own unpleasant conservative family history into the framework just as Rick does in his book. One might even go so far as to call it parody.
~~~~~~
Shawn, thank you for reading and commenting; any criticism I may have of Brookheiser’s writing is found in the front-end of the piece. The rest is simply a deconstruction of his logic and politics.
Comment by Rodger Jacobs from Las Vegas, NV — August 28, 2009 @ 4:07 pm
As a PM contributor and reader, I don’t see how this piece really strays from the general all-inclusive nature of the web magazine.
Jacobs decontructs Brookhiser’s work, end of story. The point-of-view here is helpful in my understanding of Jacobs’ background, which is instrumental in his efforts (which are, ok, sometimes prone to generalizations that I happen to agree with) to present the crux of Brookhiser’s “accurate assessment of many conservative American families.”
Send along an email to me when the so-called liberal media discontinues deifying necon hatemongers (NYT Mag’s Limbaugh cover story, New Yorker’s oblivious portrait of Michael Savage) and the White House press corps (as well as Obama and Rahm Emanuel) gives up on its relentless endeavors to portray Bush-enabled torture as “ancient history.” Perhaps then I’ll be more likely to think that mocking lobbyist-backed racists at supposed “town hall forums” is somehow equal to conservatives painting those opposed to a baseless, morally bankrupt war and peripheral crimes as “Un-American.” Good piece, Rodger.
Comment by Dominic from Brooklyn, NY — August 29, 2009 @ 8:28 am
“Familial or political, conservatives in America actually have no moral boundaries whatsoever.”
While you’re description your alcoholic, racist, anti-semitic, drug-dealing mother stealing money from Carol Burnett was entertaining, I have a hard time believing that she is an accurate representation of conservative America.
Comment by Mr. Happy from Chicago — August 29, 2009 @ 10:11 am
Thank you, Dominic.
~~~~~~
Mr. Happy, if you do not believe that my mother’s actions as a narcotics dealer are an “accurate representation of conservative behavior”, then clearly you must have scanned the third graph in that section of the narrative (bottom of page one); her actions were directly analogous to what her beloved president was doing:
“Thus, my mother was aiding and abetting the cocaine-smuggling Latin American revolutionaries that Reagan was actively trying to thwart in his battle against communism through overt and covert counter-revolutionary operations that would ultimately lead to the disgraceful Iran-Contra scandal. All of this while Ronald Reagan was beefing up DEA coffers in an attempt to eradicate marijuana cultivation in Central and Northern California. Familial or political, conservatives in America actually have no moral boundaries whatsoever.”
It’s called hypocricy, Mr. Happy, and while I am not suggesting that conservatives have a corner on that market, they can certainly be brazen in exercising it. My mom avidly supported Reagan and his policies but at the same time she was selling narcotics. One of Reagan’s policies was the so-called War on Drugs and he spent billions on Operation CAMP (Campaign to Eradicate Marijuna Cultivation) in Northern California, including the aerial spraying of marijuana fields with the toxic chemical paraquat.
And yet, when the contra rebels in Nicaragua needed arms to wage their war against the Sandanistas (a Communist threat, the biggest of all conservative boogeymen)a complex plot was hatched, led by Oliver North and sanctioned by the White House, to provide the rebels with guns and drugs.
The ends justified the means in Reagan’s worldview: We were busting pot smoking and pot-growing Americans on the domestic front but globaly, it was perfectly justified for the C.I.A. to engage in a covert action to smuggle opium and guns to Nicaraguan rebels because they were fighting the red menace.
Comment by Rodger Jacobs from Las Vegas, NV — August 29, 2009 @ 12:33 pm
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One more point, Mr. Happy: Nowhere in the article do I state that my mother was an alcoholic; in fact, as I wrote in the piece, she died one year ago this month from “non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver.”
Why do I get the feeling that many of the detractors here merely scanned my column before rushing to comment?
I enjoy criticism but only carefully-considered criticism: Doug erroneously thinks I smeared William F. Buckley; “Reason” injects a straw man topic with health care reform, and you, my happy friend, suggest that my mom was an alcoholic when a careful reading of the text implies quite the opposite.
Comment by Rodger Jacobs from Las Vegas, NV — August 29, 2009 @ 12:49 pm