You just know you’re in a Charles C. W. Cooke joint when you come across a phrase such as “tribal wittering.” And who else could write, “This is a reflex, a habit, a tic, a chant. It is catechism, not analysis; prayer, not insight; dogma, not science. It is an old memory, stored at the back of a dusty brain that, some time ago, summarily ceased to inquire.” Or, “We fancy ourselves frightfully modern here in 2022.” Or “slogans have replaced expostulation and ideas have been melded into pink noise.” Or (being a bit of a dad here), “The words were just snapped carelessly together, like Freudian Duplo.” Charlie notes, “Chaucer taught us that all good things must come to an end, and so it will be here.” (Wait, Chaucer came up with that? Huh.)
Here’s a 200-proof, Everclear shot of Cooke-ism: “Like Shakespeare’s Thomas Mowbray, progressive America may at long last have run out of gas, leaving its participants to confess in desperation that, ‘The language I have learned these forty years / My native English, now I must forego / And now my tongue’s use is to me no more / Than an unstringed viol or a harp.’”
Wow. Son, you just got Cooke’d.