This can't be happening (or, Psychoanalytical drive-by: David Brooks)

NO.

Look, this is not about who I may or may not support for President. This is about one of the dumbest "storylines" (scare quotes necessary because fuck the media for making me care about storylines in the process of America choosing its next President) and why I hate the media, basically. You've got a few people who loved Obama, embarrassed themselves by forgetting that they were supposed to be at least a little objective (or at least not slobbering lackeys) and are trying to compensate now because they feel they don't like him as much. But to say "I don't like him as much as I used to" would be an admission of guilt that 1) journalist was not objective; 2) journalist misinterpreted his/her own feelings; 3) journalist came off like a schoolgirl with a lunchroom crush and 4) journalist betrayed the Standards of Journalism in the process and turned journalism into something more akin to a LiveJournal (or stupid Blogger site called "Shrimp Products" for some reason). So instead, they throw up their hands, back off and say "hey, we were just documenting what other people felt. But now people feel like this." Meanwhile, please note that there is not one fact, quote or anecdote in the entirety of this brain-killing nonsense.

Well no, David Brooks. You feel like this. You are the one who changed your mind about how you felt about Obama, and you're too much of a coward to admit it, so with the help of a couple brainless Slate writers and other people too, probably, you invent a national trend of people becoming disillusioned. To express your own disillusionment because you're too much of a spineless weasel to come out and say it outright! Do you see how twisted and cynical and psychologically warped this is?

At first it seemed like a few random cases of lassitude among Mary Chapin Carpenter devotees in Berkeley, Cambridge and Chapel Hill. But then psychotherapists began to realize patients across the country were complaining of the same distress. They were experiencing the first hints of what’s bound to be a national phenomenon: Obama Comedown Syndrome.

BOUND TO BE. BOUND TO BE. If it is, indeed, bound to become a national phenomenon, do you know WHY that is, David Brooks? BECAUSE YOU ARE MAKING IT A NATIONAL PHENOMENON BY COMPLETELY FUCKING MAKING IT UP. You power-hungry scum. If Obama's poll numbers go down, David Brooks will open Real Clear Politics and gaze into the screen and touch himself in unsavory manners.

But they found that as the weeks went on, they needed more and purer hope-injections just to preserve the rush. They wound up craving more hope than even the Hope Pope could provide, and they began experiencing brooding moments of suboptimal hopefulness. Anxious posts began to appear on the Yes We Can! Facebook pages. A sense of ennui began to creep through the nation’s Ian McEwan-centered book clubs.

Ian McEwan? What?

This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker this year, is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two, or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. The first part ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer's day in 1935. Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family, points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the grounds that night; on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a kind of victory. In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. No, she doesn't have Robbie as a patient, but she begins to come to terms with what she has done and offers to make amends to him and Cecilia, now together as lovers. In an ironic epilogue that is yet another coup de the tre, McEwan offers Briony as an elderly novelist today, revisiting her past in fact and fancy and contributing a moving windup to the sustained flight of a deeply novelistic imagination. With each book McEwan ranges wider, and his powers have never been more fully in evidence than here. Author tour. (Mar. 19)Forecast: McEwan's work has been building a strong literary readership, and the brilliantly evoked prewar and wartime scenes here should extend that; expect strong results from handselling to the faithful. The cover photo of a stately English home nicely establishes the novel's atmosphere.

Feel the hope!

Up until now The Chosen One’s speeches had seemed to them less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space. But those in the grips of Obama Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense.

Again, you began to wonder if [h]is stuff actually made sense. The reason being--not that you were unaware of his detailed policies--but that the Clinton campaign saw that his speeches were getting most of the attention and saw the opportunity to insinuate that he had no policies behind them and you (David Brooks) saw this as an opportunity to conveniently jump off the Obama bandwagon, brush yourself off, try to maintain some semblance of journalistic integrity and watch a phony media narrative you created out of dust like God building Adam from clay suddenly take hold and start legitimately affecting how real people really vote.

For example, His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we’ve been here all along?

Because crusty, cynical old full-grown nerds like you propagate the bullshit that turns political races into insubstantial boxing matches that go from "who can best help the country" to "who can score the most points and come up with the best 'narrative' for blah blah blah I hate myself and I am a parasite who feeds off the misery and self-loathing of America."

If he values independent thinking, why is his the most predictable liberal vote in the Senate? A People for the American Way computer program would cast the same votes for cheaper.

It is impossible, I guess, for someone to be both free-thinking and liberal. Way to think outside the box, Brooks you pathetic fuck.

They feel for her. They feel guilty because the entire commentariat now treats her like Richard Nixon.

Here's the most interesting part. David Brooks is the one who feels most powerfully for Hillary Clinton. And the reason is that he is part of the "commentariat" who has been trashing her non-stop for days. He feels bad for something he has done--unfairly slamming one candidate and prematurely deifying another.

One might even say that this op-ed is David Brooks' Atonement for his earlier mistakes. And suddenly that Ian McEwan reference doesn't seem so out-of-left-field anymore.

The problem is, Brooks cannot make himself feel better. He cannot silence the gnawing little doubt in the back of his brain that he is destroying America, somehow. He wants to erase his past narrative-spewing, but narrative-spewing is the only thing he knows, and so he must try to do what is right with another overcompensatory narrative-spew in the other direction. It will not work. Right now, David Brooks feels like he has done his duty by presenting both sides of this Story--that he has moved mountains, felt that God was upset with him and then quickly moved them back. But when he turns off the lights and gets ready to go to sleep tonight, he will hear the blood rushing in his head and his pulse will quicken and he will know that he is still an empty, empty man.

The victims of O.C.S. struggle against Obama-myopia, or the inability to see beyond Election Day. But here’s the fascinating thing: They still like him. They know that most of his hope-mongering is vaporous. They know that he knows it’s vaporous.

But the fact that they can share this dream still means something. After the magic fades and reality sets in, they still know something about his soul, and he knows something about theirs. They figure that any new president is going to face gigantic obstacles. At least this candidate seems likely to want to head in the right direction. Obama’s hype comes from exaggerating his powers and his virtues, not faking them.

Those afflicted with O.C.S. are no longer as moved by his perorations. The fever passes. But some invisible connection seems to persist.