Our Mr. Brooks
You might recall that David Brooks once wrote that Obama wasn’t the kind of regular guy you’d see at the salad bat at Applebee’s. Which proved that Brooks himself wasn’t the kind of regular guy who’d ever been to Applebee’s and knew it didn’t have a salad bar. And you might have thought that he’d never be able to top that bit of self-revelation. And you’d have been right.
But only for eight years. There’s something about presidential elections that brings out the Thurston Howell the Third in Brooks. Here he is trying to hang with us, man of the people to the people:
Welcome to a world without rules. (I want you to read this paragraph in your super-scary movie trailer voice.) Welcome to a world in which families are mowed down by illegal immigrants, in which cops die in the streets, in which Muslims rampage the innocents and threaten our very way of life, in which the fear of violent death lurks in every human heart.
Seriously, he doesn’t know it’s “In a world”. (I mean, there was a whole movie about it.) He also doesn’t know that the next word is “where”. To Brooks, the voice-over of doom says “in which”, like a prissy grammar nerd who read once that ‘where’ should only be used to indicate location. But then he forced himself to misue “rampage”, to show us that he really is a regular guy, the kind you can go out and have a Campari and Soda with.
I can hardly wait for 2024.
Image by MIKI Yoshihito. (#mikiyoshihito) 
Image by Yuya Tamai
What I don’t get is this: the world we actually live in is scary enough… Why do these people always feel obliged to drag in totally-made-up things – just to destroy their own credibility?
I mean, seriously – out of the six concrete statements he makes, he gets 0.5 right. And even that is only because the recent spate of moron snipers will lead to this year being an uptick (and hopefully, god willing, an outlier) against the monotonic trend of increasing safety among police.Report
That’s actually Brooks’s point — he’s paraphrasing Trump to show that demagoguery and fear-mongering often go hand in hand. But in saying that, he’s displaying an amusingly usual tin ear.Report
That really is a weird use of the word ‘rampage’. I have never heard anyone say ‘rampage other people’.
Rampaging is not a verb that you do to other people, it is a verb that means ‘wild and destructive behavior’. The object of that verb, in the rare cases there is one, is a *location*, like ‘rampaged the streets of Portland’. If you put a group of people there, it sounds almost like it means ‘trample’, like someone had a rampage *on top* of them.
Also, rampage isn’t even the right verb anyway! I admit I didn’t watch most of the RNC, but was it really trying to claim that Muslims were wandering up and down the streets, destroying stuff? I’m pretty certain Muslims are those terrorist guys that lurk in the shadows waiting to blow us up, and it’s black lives matter people that are the roaming violent mobs attacking bystanders and police, right? (I might have watched *some* of it.;) )Report
Could be a typo of “ravage”, maybe.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5L1ZMMk76IReport