Bouillabaise

Oh, let me see...and then there will be Red Sauce!

• Video clip from The Thick Dark Fog, about Native American multigenerational trauma, from Tata at Brilliant at Breakfast.
• Ralph Nader is still writing, and Arthur Silber takes exception.
• One of the things I enjoy about Driftglass is that he can take an artifact of pop culture and use it to illustrate conservatism's essential hollowness of soul.

  So Conservatism is...software. An app, that can be loaded into any platform that features "traditional rules and existing institutions" under assault by headlong revolutionaries.
  
  Fine.
  
  But like so many of Conservatism's dilettante Useful Idiots, Mr. Sullivan cannot bring himself face what happens in the real, non-Beltway world when those abstract, dorm-room ideals are adopted by bad people fighting to preserve despicable institutions.
  
  What happens when those "traditional rules" are the pro-ignorance, anti-science, anti-female, homophobic tenets of Conservative Christian fundamentalism?
  
  What happens when the "existing institution" is white supremacy, girded generation after generation by an ancient, paranoid, rage against those damn Yankee devils and their Evil Gummint in Washington interfering with their traditional, bible sanctioned way of life?
  
  These are the true and terrible realities of what happened to Conservatism in America, which is why Mr. Sullivan instead prefers to jerk off endlessly about what I refer to as (and am probably borrowing from some cleverer person) "Firefly Conservatism". A Conservatism with all the glories and grace notes of the antebellum South -- the nobility of a Great Cause all dressed up in buckskin and clever dialogue about liberty and scrappy underdogs standing up to the Oppressive Buttinski Central Gummint -- shorn completely of the brutal, racist realities out of which that culture grew.

  ETA: Via drifty, Esquire's Charles P. Pierce administers a vivisection of Mr. Brooks, who is attempting to think above his logic.

  This may be the God Particle of moronic right here. Boot camps do not "engage people as they are." They break people down in order to build them into a homogenous model dedicated to a single purpose. I've never been any closer to Parris Island than Brooks has been, but, Jesus Mary, even I know that dedication to "cultural diversity" never has been high on the To-Do list of drill instructors. Haven't conservatives been battling the idea of "cultural diversity" as contrary to "military virtues" in the con[t]ext of female soldiers, and then gay soldiers, for decades? And, not for nothing, I would not want to be the teacher or the principal who puts David Brooks's idea of a well-rounded education into practice on David Brooks's kid. You wouldn't be able to get Brooks off the ceiling with a crowbar.

   The soundtrack suggestion was on the money, too.
  
• Cara at The Curvature has begun a series on Motown's singles!