David Brooks' "The View from Room 306"

David Brooks' revisionist history never stops... That he can provide an account of Martin Luther King's engagement in the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike that stresses the disjunction between the economic and identity-radicalism of Black Power and King's work at the time seeks to reinforce the conventional view of King as a liberal, civil rights reformer when, in fact, King himself had joined in the efforts of folks to the left of the moderate civil rights movement and was stressing economic equality in a manner not all that far from late-in-life Malcolm X and many of the Black Panthers (tho, his commitment to peaceful resistance obviously set him apart from the all-but surely justified militarism of the Panthers.

Further stretching history, as a means of supporting his efforts to shore up the positive/moderate conception of MLK, is Brooks' claim that "in the ensuing years [after King's assassination-APR], crime rates skyrocketed, cities decayed and the social fabric was torn. Dreams of economic opportunity and racial integration were swallowed up by the antinomian passions and social disorder." It's simply not possible that Brooks doesn't know or failed to check on the fact that the Watts riots were in 1965, the Detroit, MI, and Newark and Plainfield, NJ, riots were in 1967 and that the rending of the fabric of the urban US was part and parcel of the white, middle class, industrial and tax flight from cities in the twenty years following WWII. Furthermore, the interstate highway system - which facilitated this exodus - then destroyed the social and economic coherence that existed in places like the Oranges in NJ, the Bronx in NYC and a significant portion of Philadelphia, PA, and Oakland, CA. (I'm sure there are parallels across the country, I just don't know their specifics.)

The key to understanding David Brooks and his editorials is to understand that he is not ignorant, just ideologically incapable of bringing contravening examples that what he knows (or could easily find out) to bear on the topics he covers.