Two Facts

1. David Brooks has written yet another garbage column for the New York Times, who is still paying him exorbitant amounts of money for his peerless garbage column-writing services.

2. This column is THE WORST, even by Brooks' own garbage standards.

Seriously, what is he talking about?

America's brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.

It would be embarrassing or at least countercultural for an Ivy League grad to go to Akron and work for a small manufacturing company. By contrast, in 2007, 58 percent of male Harvard graduates and 43 percent of female graduates went into finance and consulting.

By contrast to what? To "Things That Are Embarrassing or at Least Countercultural"? David Brooks, what the everloving fuck are you talking about?

The shift away from commercial values has been expressed well by Michelle Obama in a series of speeches. "Don't go into corporate America," she told a group of women in Ohio. "You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. ... Make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry." As talented people adopt those priorities, America may become more humane, but it will be less prosperous.

Wait, huh? America will be less prosperous if people don't go into money-making industries, but literally two paragraphs earlier it signaled America's economic doom that people are going into "prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism" instead of pursuing "industry and technical enterprise."

Apparently, David Brooks imagines that there are tons o' lucrative jobs at small manufacturing companies in towns like Akron, Ohio, waiting to be filled by well-educated snobs who just can't be bothered to work there.

For someone who purports to be an expert on the American Heartland, he sure is mistaken on, well, pretty much everything about the American Heartland.

Then there's the middle class. The emergence of a service economy created a large population of junior and midlevel office workers. These white-collar workers absorbed their lifestyle standards from the Huxtable family of "The Cosby Show," not the Kramden family of "The Honeymooners."

WHUT. Here, Brooks engages in one of the most annoying habits of elite conservatives: Pretending that everyone in between the wretchedly poor and independently wealthy are one, big, monolithic middle class.

Nope. The Huxtables were a well-to-do, upper-middle-class family living off the dual incomes of two highly educated and successful professionals. The Kramdens were a working-class family living off the single income of a working schlub. It is not to say that one is inherently superior to the other to note that they are fundamentally different.

And it is not to demean the Kramdens of this country to say that it's understandable they are not aspirational figures for midlevel office workers. Many midlevel office workers are the daughters and sons of Kramdens, who wanted their children to be Huxtables.

You are a mess of mind-boggling incoherence, David Brooks. Go lie down and be very, very still for awhile.