Faery Tales

There are people whose main job it is to catapult the propaganda, but some memes are decidedly more destructive than others.

Case in point.



David Brooks is such an utter moron I don't bother reading his columns. It's because almost every premise the man has is deeply flawed. Apparently his column this week was a particular trip into never-land, asking for a return to the midieval days of Knights Errant and Crusades and all that Arthurian sense of wonder.

It was called the Dark Ages for a reason, Bobo.

I'll let the letters to the Editor for Pravda do the heavy lifting:

...It is preposterous to view the Middle Ages with such nostalgia. The “spiritual powers” that led to such great events as the Inquisition and other mass killings of Jews and the Crusades were most certainly influenced by the false interpretation of celestial configurations and misuse of religious and secular power.

To yearn for such a “faith”-based Arthurian time is naïve. Is this the fantasy world to which conservatives would like to return? Before we wax poetic about the Black Death, we should realize that medieval Europe was a miserable, intolerant place where human life was cheap.

I can certainly think of many other civilizations to wax poetic about, but medieval Europe with its astrological-religious culture is not one of them. The faith-based life of that time serves as a demonstration of how faith can be twisted by those in power or, as we see in the present, those trying to win elections.

Jerry Becker
Albuquerque, April 22, 2008

...We have been “populated with creatures, symbols and tales” for the past seven years. They’ve occupied the White House...

Robert H. Feuerstein
Upper Saddle River, N.J., April 22, 2008

...First, crusading could not have worked any better in our world than it did in the past. The failure of medieval crusades was well known in 2001, for few historical subjects have been so well studied.

Second, just when Europe was full of unfettered violent bullies, some resourceful people invented government to serve the public interest, together with the taxes required to support it. They rightly thought government to be a “good thing...”

Thomas N. Bisson
Cambridge, Mass., April 22, 2008

...The current state of affairs in the Middle East is way too medieval for me.

Jean-ellen McSharry
Stony Creek, Conn., April 22, 2008

...the modern Western world is no less enchanted than the medieval one — it may be more so. Fantasy and science fiction are among the most pervasive forms of contemporary culture. Many people live virtual lives on the Internet.

Rather than fostering a deficit of the imagination, modernity permits people to inhabit multiple worlds of the imagination and to create provisional narratives that impart meaning to daily existence.

This free, rational and ironic use of the imagination — a disenchanted form of enchantment — provides the possibility for greater diversity, tolerance and change than ever existed in the medieval period.

Michael Saler
Davis, Calif., April 22, 2008

...David Brooks is nostalgic for a bygone age when people had a different mentality than today.

In those days, with “childlike emotional intensity” we may have imagined the heavens as “a magical place,” “a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols.” If only nature could inspire as rich a human imagination in us as it did in them.

That happens continually to us modern scientists. Doing science, whose essence is to understand nature, inspires awe. As a geologist, I plant one foot (metaphorically) in the present day and the other foot in Deep Time.

Yonder sandstone cliff was once the bed of a great flowing river. Imagine that! I wasn’t there then, but the evidence says it literally was so.

Real science is more bizarre, more full of possibilities than medieval people could have imagined. We scientists are just as passionate, romantic and as awe-filled as they were.

Leon E. Long
Austin, Tex., April 23, 2008

David Brooks, like William Kristol, is a propagandist hired by edict of the Carlyle Group controlled Board of Directors of The New York Pravda.

But sometimes he comes out with things that are decidedly unprofitable for many in the Company. This was certainly one of them: the Editors saw no reason to support it even faintly, and likely the Directors didn't like it either. He is, thankfully, not posting today.