Men on the verge of a total breakdown

Shorter David Brooks, "Men on the Threshold", New York Times, July 17, 2013:

Men are brave, loyal, caring, and honest, but also vengeful, hateful, dangerous, and tainted by racism. It's what made America great. But now it's made them unemployable. Pity, that.

Sometimes I wonder whether Brooks sees himself, actually, as a man. Not, I mean, that he identifies as a woman (he knows less about them than he does about men, as if he's seen rather more movies about the latter, in particular John Ford's The Searchers). He's more like one of the interminably pedagogical Ancients from Back to Methuselah:

I danced when I was a child like you.
Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life. It would
be painful to me to go back from that rhythm to your babyish gambols: in
fact I could not do it if I tried. But at your age it is pleasant: and I
am sorry I disturbed you.

But he isn't, you know, very brave, loyal, caring, or honest, while he is somewhat vengeful and tainted by racism, and he actually has quite a good job himself. I wrote a little story about somebody like that last year.

Image by Tengrain.