Column 2005-4-17 Commentary

Amazingly, Brooks has come out with another eminently reasonable column: this one has the thesis that 50 Cent rapping about blow jobs does not mean that the youth of America are engaged in a vast orgy. He even makes the point that this exact same thing (no, not 50 Cent rapping about blow jobs, people talking about the degeneracy and general no-goodness of the younger generation) has been happening for years and years, and yet somehow we manage to make it to the next generation without the apocalyptic collapse of American culture. While the column is not all good, I'm too busy right now to go into its minor idiocies, so I'll leave their extraction as an exercise for the reader (max five pages, please. This will count for 25% of your final grade.)

So over the past two months, Brooks has been averaging one good column a month. In other words, he's on a hot streak. I just wonder if he'll repudiate the thesis of this column in a couple of weeks, the same way he repudiated his corruption column. It's less likely, since this column is unlikely to interfere with his partisan hack duties, but if Tom DeLay proposes the Get That Smut off the Airwaves Bill (and at this point DeLay will do anything to keep attention off of his corruption scandals), all bets are off.