David Brooks needs a break. A long one, preferably.

If Brooks is going to churn out columns like this one on the princes and the grinds, and he gets paid for it, I suppose we are all living proof that there's a sucker is born every minute!

There is nothing new or substantive there.  I stand corrected: it has a whole bunch of metaphors, all in one column enough to claim the title of the master manipulator of metaphors from another NY Times columnist.  Let us list the metaphors in this Brooks column, shall we?

• Prince
• Grind
• Conversational ping pong
• Cockroach up his arm
• Social butterflies
• Social polish
• Sitting on mountains of cash

And the winning one is the final sentence all by itself:

the real issue is how we are going to light a fire under the country’s loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders.

WTF!  seriously, they get lengthy profiles for writing stuff like this?  Hey, George Orwell, can you stage a miracle of sorts and straighten these people out?

The best one though is this comment (#112) in response to Brooks' column:

Mr. Brooks, you are continuing your argument for the benefits of a liberal arts education founded in the classics. Your grinds are merely technicians, trained to do one thing very well. The princes you describe, on the other hand, use their more well-rounded education to charm legislators and siphon money out of taxpayers when the grand temples to their Odyssean egos come crashing down. Remember Odysseus killed all of his wife's maids even though they were powerless to stop the suitors. Those maids were really grinds. So much for the ethical justifications for reading in the classics. It is not what we read that matters, but how critically we read anything.