More Danes than Antique Romans

Thumb on pretzel, from AOL Lifestyle.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks ("Before Manliness Lost its Virtue") has noticed that a lot of figures in the Trump administration have a thing about being manly in one way or another:

There is the slovenly “I don’t care what you think” manliness of Steve Bannon. There’s the look-at-me-I-can-curse manliness that Anthony Scaramucci learned from “Glengarry Glen Ross.” There is the affirmation-hungry “I long to be the man my father was” parody of manliness performed by Donald Trump. There are all those authentically manly Marine generals Trump hires to supplement his own.

The David Mamet reference is stolen from Kevin D. Williamson's admired National Review piece on the unlamented jerk Scaramucci (it really was pretty well done, though of course the subtext was that the White House's vulgarity proves that it's really a leftwing operation, because conservatives never say "fuck" when ladies are within hearing). I don't know why Brooks uses the hyphen construction in the second sentence instead of the quotation marks of the first and third.

As far as I know Trump only has one two authentically manly Marine generals to work with, John Kelly, who had to vacate Homeland Security so he could be Marine-in-charge in the West Wing (Flynn and McMaster, and Keith Kellogg of the National Security Council are all Army, and it's Admiral Mike Rogers who runs the NSA). The idea of "generals Trump hires to supplement his own" suggests that he also has some secret private generals as well, which is very weird, although it would explain that bizarre episode last week when he claimed that "his" generals had advised him to ban transsexual people from military service, though none of the generals in the administration knew anything about it:

Dinner with David

Pamplemousses Botanical Garden, Mauritius. Photo by RomeoDesign.

Shorter David Brooks, "Where History is Being Made", New York Times, February 7 2017:

James and Deborah Fallows, as I think of them, since I'd like to emphasize that I habitually encounter them together at dinner parties rather than separately in the articles and books that each of them writes, have lived in many interesting places, such as Japan, the District of Columbia, and China, at times when important historical events were taking place in those locations, for instance in the 1980s when the Wall Street Journal dumped me in Brussels, the bastards, which is why everybody thinks Fallows is cooler than me. 

Nowadays they just fly around America in their Cirrus 435SR, because James is a pilot, so that they're frequently absent from dinner parties I go to, allowing me to ask the other guests, as a clever conversational gambit, "Where would you live if you were James and Deborah Fallows?" The beautiful thing about this is it doesn't really matter what they say, because I have so many answers myself.

Original thought

Shorter David Brooks, New York Times, "What Data Can't Do":

Not everything that can be counted counts.
Not everything that counts can be counted.
Not everyone that counts hangs out with Friedman.
Like I know the CEO of a bank with a branch in Italy.

Image via Katherine on MySpace.

Update 2/20:
What is most dangerously wrong in Brooks's column is ably dismissed by Paul Krugman. I'm pretty sure there's something hilariously wrong about the way Brooks reads Naseem Taleb, but I'm far from sure I understand Taleb myself—anybody out there care to help out?