<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" During the first half of the 1990s, I lived in Brussels and wrote about the European Union, among other subjects, for The Wall Street Journal.  So begins the latest from David Brooks, the New York Times&amp;#039;s man in the national easy chair, sitting in front of the national fireplace, smoking the national pipe, wearing the national bedslippers, and scratching behind the ears of the national Irish setter, which he has named &amp;quot;Moral Consensus,&amp;quot; which is why the dog pees in the national bedslippers when Brooks isn&amp;#039;t watching. That&amp;#039;s a grabber of a lead sentence, isn&amp;#039;t it? Makes you hunger to read on because you know what&amp;#039;s coming: a yummy grab-bag of sententious platitudes that will make the late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen sound like Hunter Thompson. And, relighting the national pipe and putting the national volume of Dickens down on the settee next to him, Brooks rarely disappoints. Today&amp;#039;s topic, for those of you who may have been rendered insensate by the first twenty-odd words of this opus and are only now regaining consciousness, is Europe and Those Arrogant Europeans \u2014 Why Do They Live There Anyway? The problem, apparently, is that Europe is a place governed by human beings called Europeans and that these human beings called Europeans who govern Europe work in things called &amp;quot;governments&amp;quot; which tend to screw things up a lot. Then there was the elitism. Off the record, Europe&amp;#039;s technocrats would say the most blatantly condescending things: History had taught them that Europe&amp;#039;s peoples were not to be trusted and government should be run from the top by people like themselves.  Excuse me for a moment. I have to pick my jaw up off the floor and reattach it to the lower part of my face. Then there was the elitism. David Fking Brooks wrote that sentence? The man who&amp;#039;s spent a lifetime arguing \u2014 and, occasionally, making shit up \u2014 about how Americans were essentially consumerist yahoos, albeit ones with solid moral values? The man who looks at iPads as the Eucharist? The man who looks at Applebee&amp;#039;s and sees a salad bar? The man who has constructed his own private America by fundamentally misapprehending Americans? Then there was the elitism? Oh my sweet Jesus on a quarter-horse, if I thought he were capable of it, I&amp;#039;d say that Brooks went down to Wal-mart and bought himself a sense of humor. You will note throughout that Brooks&amp;#039;s basic thesis is that the European Union is imperiled by just about everything except for the fact that it allied itself to the international financial elite that wrecked the economies of a dozen or so European countries at the same time it was looting the economy over here. (This is quite clear to the people in the streets of Athens.) Instead, and you knew this was coming, the problem with the EU is, apparently... sin. At this moment of crisis, it is obvious how little moral solidarity undergirds the European pseudostate. Americans in Oregon are barely aware when their tax dollars go to Americans in Arizona. We are one people with one shared destiny. West Germans were willing to pay enormous subsidies to build the former East Germany. They, too, are one people.  There are not enough magic mushrooms in the world for this argument to make any kind of sense. The essential moral problem with the EU is that a whole bunch of bankers abandoned en masse the Eighth Commandment. At its best, the free-market economics that have given David Brooks a good living and the rest of us a great pain in the ass are utterly amoral. That&amp;#039;s the best we can expect. At their worst, which they were during the run up to the calamities in the autumn of 2008, they are shockingly immoral. What&amp;#039;s going on in Europe has nothing to do with the fact that Germans speak German, or that the Habsburgs never ran Greece. It has to do with morality only in the sense that the whole thing happened because a whole lot of people stole a whole lot of other people&amp;#039;s money, and now people got no money, people got no jobs. The EU was merely the getaway car. Don&amp;#039;t let the fact that David Brooks would have blamed the Brinks Job on the fact that the guards at the vault didn&amp;#039;t go to Mass that Sunday distract you from what comes next, which is further evidence that Brooks writes his columns from the moons of Neptune.  Americans in Oregon are barely aware when their tax dollars go to Americans in Arizona. If we accepted this as being true, then the country would have been infinitely better off over the past 30 years. There would have been no tax revolt in California. There would have been no Reagan presidency. (Remember the welfare queen with her Cadillac? The &amp;quot;young bucks&amp;quot; buying steaks with their welfare checks? I would say that some Americans in Oregon were concerned about where their tax dollars were going.) Hell, if you take away the phrase, &amp;quot;Do you think your tax dollars should be paying for...&amp;quot;, at least 200 Republican political consultants and ad-men would have to go find honest work somewhere. Michele Bachmann would be howling at the moon from her government-subsidized barn in Minnesota. Of course, if we accepted this as true, we would also be morons. And the national Irish setter, pretending to be asleep, eyes the national bedslippers again, and smiles. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11699/david-brooks-technocratic-nightmare-6589997/>