Over ... Rated.

David Brooks runs out of gas, a bit shy of crossing the finish line. Where does he go wrong, in this well-meaning column that challenges the common columnist crutch, "It's all about race" ?

Well Dave, (may I call ya Dave?) it's not that the "uneducated" look down (up?) their noses at the more credentialed...

It's that ... your credentials are meaning less and less these days. Losing value in the real world. See, it's not a snobbery, or a jealousy. It's that, as we cross more and more class (and other) boundaries once considered traditional, we come to see others (or "the other") through clearer eyes. Thus, we see things like:

1) not all immigrants, and people who work with their hands and bodies, have nothing going on upstairs. Some perhaps, just haven't the necessary credentials from formal educations, and have needs today that direct them into the labor force. Don't think they turn their brains off just because they are paid for work done by the sweat of their brow...

2) not all gays are like those clowns parading half-ass naked in the June pride parades. Plenty are just as conservative as you and yours, and are wondering how long you can justify the special privileges afforded to heterosexual couplings based on the very thinnest of rational basis to society reasons ...

3) it's getting harder and harder to justify stereotypes based on skin tone, gender and ethnicity, as we intermingle, come from a variety of places, and are exposed to more and more in society as a whole. Black kid can't swim? Farm boy can't dance? Asian girl excels in math and rejects "dippy" girlie trends to focus on studies? Jewish boy has an internal moral compass that will guide him where formal religious laws can't? Jewish girl cares only about shopping and landing herself a husband to breed the babies she will devote her life to? Irish kid is a partying drunk?

Sorry, but what perhaps once passed as shorthand identifiers when we all kept mostly to our own ethnic enclaves and were perhaps more possessive about our own traditions and cultural milestones is losing currency.

As is this notion that the credentialed classes are wiser and will somehow lead us out of the mess caused by the well-meaning, in more flush times when it seemed we had more to go around than we, as Americans, really did.

Brooks clings to this idea. You see it when he touts the suburban education of the diverse high schools out East. Their test scores. Their parents' push. Their foreign travels, summer internships at the big corporate firms. Their language camps and orchestra instructions. And don't get me started on the specialized athletic training that has Johnny declaring his sport by age 7 for the travelling teams, lest it be too late.

In short, these kids have been given it all: every opportunity, bred to succeed.

Yet here we are today in America. With all these credentials at the top, all these beliefs that the "merit" system as a whole is doing a good job of determining "winners" and "losers."

It reminds me really, of another generation that was truly blessed with "it all". The Boomers, to which David Brooks -- and so many of his NYT columnist colleagues -- belong.

Yet come on. Any reader with half a brain in her head can see how miserably that paper is failing to sniff out where America is at today: without blogs and criticisms, I suspect they would just pick a monthly topic (say, Sarah Palin's family; or Joe Wilson's verbal outburst) and have each one write their own personal thoughts on that -- some with a Dave Barry-wannabe humor touch; some with that "insider" Washington bit that calls on their own family and networked connections.

Yet still, day after day, they miss the big picture.

Ditto so many of our corporate business leaders, who may have scored well on their standardized tests once upon a time, or pledged the right frat or sorority and charmed older business partners who could "help" their careers.

Again, match that up with where America is at competitively right now. Devalued currency. Devalued credentials. Who You Are is eventually giving way to What You Do.

As we keep on watching, we see a lot of overpaid, overvalued people collecting, but not producing very much. Doing the bare minimum, and even scoffing at those who put passion into their work.

The true road ahead for our country lies not in protecting these people, systematically making it continue to work via the "go along to get along" principles, but calling them on the large gap behind what their words promise and what their actions actually produce.

Anybody can parrot good thoughts, afterall. A theory is never so promising as when it's written on paper, untested by the realities of life that are necessary to operate under.

And plenty of today's leaders have all the solutions when standing on the sidelines, not getting their hands dirty. It's amazing how when you're actually thrown into the game -- eating what you kill, some call it -- that some realize just how overrated their talents and skills really are, absent the subsidies that help cushion the fall, that let's some pretend that they really were contributors all along.

But "We the People" are not paying for your excesses, and your "mistakes", ad infinitum.

Less regulations. Less protections. Less government-guaranteed charity to those who fail.

If you want true competition, the rise of the fittest, the most meritorious to rise despite those who believe they are protected by their pedigrees and credentials, then you first need to cut through a lot of this nonsense that has folks in trailer parks buying lunches for professionals' children, and then you need to slay the system that ever allows such things to happen. Not build it up further, convinced of the righteousness of your good intentions ...

I wonder if Dave Brooks keeps his glasses on when he runs. He's been around for awhile, and seems to play it safe in his national columns.

Nothing like the comfort of the status quo, I guess, and falling back on the crutch of poor eyesight to keep you in the game, running for another day as the operable parts slowly grind down...

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Have a great weekend, readers. Harvest time lets us reap what we've sowed, so after taking a few days, we'll see you back here next week.