Even More Random Observations On The Way Down
Any member of the U.S. military, past or present, who is not humiliated by “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth must be even more buffoonishly pathetic than he is. So much of Donald Trump’s second term administration seems to be a grand effort to highlight the existence and effects of wee man syndrome. Have fears of personal inadequacy ever found themselves more overtly exposed on a brighter stage than in the day-to-day actions and speech of Trump, Hegseth, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Marco Rubio (“Little Marco,” as his current boss once dubbed him, apparently knowing him in the way that “it takes one” to do), et al? How many of them have serious substance abuse problems in their past or current life? How many of them express weakness in their every public appearance, whether by huffing and puffing in the manner of Trump and Hegseth, or by living in a He-Man haze of borrowed glory, à la Kennedy, or with the meek hide-behind-the-apron-strings-and-hope-my-boss-is-proud-of-me style of Patel and Rubio.
Hegseth, in his latest high school presentation assignment, told a carefully selected group of military officers that he is going to make sure everyone in the future U.S. military will be a well-shaved gym rat whose only concern in life will be inflicting violent death without remorse on battlefields — even as such battlefields are, as evidenced by current events in Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East, going the way of the dodo.
Speaking of dodos, Hegseth is boasting of a new initiative, a “taskforce” aimed at bringing the U.S. military’s technological warfare capabilities somewhere within a million miles of the levels already being demonstrated in real wartime situations by Ukraine and Iran — and has appointed Elon Musk of all people to a leading position in this taskforce. Yes, the same Elon Musk who assigned a team of computer nerd twenty-somethings — people who couldn’t have gotten a real job in the U.S. federal government prior to Musk giving them the keys to the office — to destroy large portions of the government at the start of this second Trump presidency, effectively reversing decades of successful U.S. “soft power,” ceding huge swaths of global territory to the smothering kindness of Communist China, and probably precipitating mass deaths by summarily cancelling programs that millions of third-world people had been encouraged to count on for years, all because Musk and his gang of gamers lacked the basic human maturity and responsibility found in people who have actually had to live in the real, adult world for a decade or so before being told to walk into an enormous, complex system and “make it cheaper.”
How do you think Musk — a quasi-man without a cell of ordinary humility, let alone nobility, in his being — will do with the task of reshaping “the future of warfare”? And why would he even be considered a plausible candidate for such work, let alone the shoo-in choice? The richest man and oldest teenager in the world, a person whose whole life is one long testament to the power of petty material self-interest and government favouritism — where would Musk be right now, honestly, without the ever-present teat of government largesse which has suckled this avatar of “ending government waste” for his entire career? — is hardly the obvious pick for such a grave, ominous assignment. Or or at least he would not be so were he not being assigned the task by an administration run by the first U.S. president to view the presidency itself as nothing but a sweet deal for himself and his cronies (Russian oligarchs included, of course).
Anyway, another vain, attention-obsessed drug addict on the team! Just what this age’s last bulwark of freedom needed.
