FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Joe Pass had monster chops, but like all the greats

he knew when to lean on a good melody.

These are rough times, let's let that theme ride.

Same goes for vocalists.

•   It is to laugh:

The Age of Coddling Is Over
Learning what hardship has to teach us.

...by -- get this! -- David Brooks! Yes, he actually typed with his soft, manicured fingers (or maybe someone does that for him now) that "over the past decades, a tide of 'safetyism' has crept over American society," a tide that led to (or was caused by, kinda hard to tell) "a wave of overprotective parenting," and this -- not an economy that grinds up and disposes of an increasing percentage of its young citizens -- is what causes their rising depression diagnosis and suicide rates.

But not everyone's a suicidal sissy! In previous incarnations one would have expected Brooks to nominate as America's Toughest Avatar his laughably poorly-drawn "Flyover Guy," but the times demand a new model why-can't-you-be-more-like object: The American Healthcare Provider!

But there has been one sector of American society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection — medical training. It starts on the undergraduate level. While most academic departments slather students with A’s, science departments insist on mastery of the materials. According to one study, the average English class G.P.A. is above 3.3 and the average chemistry class G.P.A. is 2.78.

While most academic departments have become more forgiving, science departments remain rigorous (to a fault). As much as 60 percent of pre-meds never make it through their major.

While you liberal-arts pussies are going bankrupt paying loans on your postwar feminist bullshit, these students are getting their asses toughened up by drill-sergeant grading curves! And that's why they're staying at work now even though they can't get proper protective equipment and are dying at alarming rates -- because they're macho enough to cover for our inept government! Look at them, not the idiots who put them in harm's way! Ain't it heroic?

But have a care -- the limp-wristed ways of the West threaten tough-guy med-school culture:

Med schools are struggling to become more humane and less macho, more relationship-centered and less body-centered. But when you look at what’s happening across the country right now, you see the benefits of their tough training...

I’m hoping this moment launches a change in the way we raise and train all our young, at all ages. I’m hoping it exorcises the tide of “safetyism,” which has gone overboard. 

You gotta get your kids to man up if you want great things from them. Take it from Brooks, who built his intellectual muscles forging sociological insights in the smithies of the University of Chicago and The Weekly Standard; can you imagine Bobos in Paradise and The Third Mountain, with all their tensile strength, emerging from some Oberlin pink-tea? The moral is, if you want heroes, you have to grade tough, so the weak drop out, which means they deserve their banishment into debt slavery, and the winners can take their place on the front lines of medicine and everything else, to be mowed down by whatever gets unleashed on them by the inspired leadership of such statesman as Brooks endorses. Don't change the system, harden the proles!