"You Are Lost and Wrong Forever..."

It must be wonderful to be David Brooks; one day an expert on economics, the next day an expert on philosophy, the day after that an expert on John Ford Westerns. And no matter what the subject, it can be turned into a spit-wad aimed at traditional conservatives.

Take the above-linked editorial, for example, touched on a few days ago by the estimable Stacy McCain in his tribute to that first-rate TV Western series, The Rifleman. In his latest venture into couch potato social commentary, Brooks opines on that great Ford Western, My Darling Clementine. Made in 1946, the film is loosely (very loosely) based on the exploits of Wyatt Earp and his brothers in Tombstone, Arizona; the focus, of course, is on the great showdown with the Clanton family – or at least, that’s what I thought, having seen the movie perhaps half a dozen times. Brooks, however, derives the following object lesson: “[T]he movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.”

Has Brooks actually seen this movie all the way through? True enough, there are decent people who want to build a peaceful place in which to live, and a church for their spiritual needs, and they do hire a school teacher (Doc Holliday’s spurned flame from back east, who ultimately becomes Wyatt’s love interest). And it’s certainly fair to say that Clementine is, at least partially, a paean to order. But it is also a movie about justice, which means that, contra Brooks, Clementine is, indeed, largely “about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man” (I doubt that anybody but Brooks ever came away from the movie marveling over the greater symbolism of the church-social scene). Without the courage of the Earps and their backers, and the annihilation of the Clanton gang, there would have been no justice, and hence, no order. Consider, too, that Wyatt very reluctantly agrees to become town marshal, and only then because the Clantons have stolen the herd of cattle that he and his brothers were driving through Arizona to California, leaving the Earps flat broke. (And incidentally, the only person in town who truly understands and enjoys the Shakespearean speeches delivered by the drunken traveling actor – brilliantly portrayed by Alan Mowbray – is Doc Holliday.)

Up to this point, Brooks has made the unobjectionable, albeit lopsided, observation that Clementine is about law and order. But then he begins to hyperventilate and he winds up blowing a small paper sack of an idea into a Hindenburg of unsubstantiated, fabulist nonsense. “The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community.” The movie definitely deals with the rule of law; but religion? Science? “Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.”

Ah, one of Brooks’ specialties: the phony distinction. Freedom and maximum individual choice vs. community and civic order, as if the two ideas were mutually exclusive, rather than, jointly, the foundation of the just society. By the way, does anyone remember John McCain (or Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee) advocating the kind of anarchical liberty attributed to the Republican Party by Brooks?

“The emphasis on freedom and individual choice may work in the sparsely populated parts of the country. People there naturally want to do whatever they want on their own land. But it doesn’t work in the densely populated parts of the country: the cities and suburbs where Republicans are getting slaughtered. People in these areas understand that their lives are profoundly influenced by other people’s individual choices. People there are used to worrying about the health of the communal order.” Oh, right. People in the cities and suburbs have nothing to fear from a government hell-bent on confiscating their income, rationing their health care and saddling them and their children with a monstrous federal debt. At least, that way, they won’t have to worry about the consequences of their neighbors’ “individual choices” – or their own, for that matter, because there will be precious few opportunities to make any choices at all.

“Democrats have been able to establish themselves as the safe and orderly party. President Obama has made responsibility his core theme and has emerged as a calm, reassuring presence (even as he runs up the debt and intervenes rashly in sector after sector).” Indeed? The White House is undermining the rule of law by ignoring the existing bankruptcy code, demonizing investors who decline to stand by idly while their assets are stolen and handed over to unions, and packing its inner circle with lobbyists, tax cheats, and radicals. How is this the “safe and orderly” path to the “health of the communal order”? Isn’t this business model more akin to, say, that of the Clantons than to that of the Earps?

But Brooks would not have us dwell on the red flags, which is why he confines the devil to the parentheses: “even as he runs up the debt and intervenes rashly in sector after sector.” Why shouldn’t Obama intervene “in sector after sector”? Isn’t that how you quash the danger presented by “untrammeled freedom”?

With editorials such as this, Brooks, and other members of the moderate punditry, continue to accomplish prodigies of useless, tin-eared analysis, achieving the dubious distinction of compressing Homeric levels of stupidity and sophistry into a few hundred words. Let us step back from Brooks’ vision of Wyatt Earp as an early community organizer with a tough-love approach and a health-care program consisting of disarming drunken rowdies, and look at the facts. The Clantons and their hangers-on – cattle rustlers, bullies, murderers, law-breakers, advocates of “untrammeled freedom” (for themselves) – were, along with their ally, Sheriff John Behan, Democrats. Wyatt Earp – lawman, gambler and entrepreneur - was a Republican .

Viewed in this way, Brooks, in his bumbling, unwitting way, may have been right; Wyatt Earp really is worth emulating.

Update: Hey, Brooks, what if Wyatt Earp brought a Nerf bat to the OK Corral?