Dumb and Dumber Before the Generals and Admirals
Tuesday, hundreds of highly skilled professionals were forced to sit in the room where their inferiors in all but rank staged long, pointless, hateful, ignorant, and undisciplined performances. Such a gathering of all top military leadership is unprecedented in modern times, a major security risk, and a big insult to the generals and admirals who have better things to do than be lectured at by idiots. In the original plan, they would only be hectored by Hegseth, but Trump couldn't resist a captive audience and invited himself.
That Hegseth is stupid and unqualified is confirmed by the fact that he does not seem to know that every general and admiral looking at knows he is stupid and unqualified. Likewise, Trump does not seem to know that his involuntary audiences at the United Nations last week and this military meeting yesterday were undoubtedly aghast at his chaotic, boastful, delusional, and grievance-airing monologues more suited to a therapist's couch than a public audience. I suspect both Trump and Hegseth consider masculinity to be dominance and to force an audience to listen to what it finds disagreeable and even insulting a dominance display (a la the baboons), but their sloppiness is read by most people as weakness and failure.
Eight hundred top military leaders had to listen to Trump explain how Biden fell down the stairs every day, and "Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on" and explained how he does it just right, clearly churning something about his hesitant pedestrianism into an inept attempt to cover it up. He also apparently blurted out a national-security secret to his audience while mashing it up with some racism: "a stupid person that works for him mentioned the word nuclear. I moved a submarine or two, I won’t say about the two, over to the coast of Russia. Just to be careful because we can’t let people throw around that word. I call it the N-word. There are two N-words, and you can’t use either of them. You can’t use either of them." As a former Navy captain told Fox last time Trump did this, "Submarine deployments are unverifiable. That’s what gives them strategic value, but also what makes this announcement clever — if you're aiming for a headline."
More importantly, he made it clear he wants the military used against civilians, against you and me and whoever he wants, advancing his authoritarianism a little: “I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” That's a profound violation of law and custom, and I'm confident everyone in the audience knew it. He also said, "Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room, because it's the enemy from within... No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out.”
The danger is real. So is the stupid, and I've often been grateful for the sheer incompetence of much of Team Trump, when it prevents them from succeeding in their agendas. To be a liar you have to know what the truth is, and I'm not sure that's ever been a criterion for him; he has always been a sociopath salesman who will pitch anything, however untrue or ridiculous, and replace any pitch that no longer serves him with the next one, indifferent to the contradictions. If beliefs are solid things, the contents of his mind are sloshing soup, and it's getting worse. A few days ago he shared and then deleted a deep-fake video for "med-beds," magical curing medical devices that only exist in right-wing conspiracy theories, and he seems to have imagined that Portland was "war-torn" because Fox aired video clips of chaotic demonstrations from years before.
But he's lost in other ways too. In 2017, I wrote of him: "I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures."
The cure for being flattered isn't being cut down: "We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—if we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves. There is a democracy of social discourse." Of course Trump and Hegseth are both beneficiaries of the inequalities of race and gender built into our society, the inequalities those of us who believe in justice, equality, universal human rights, and democracy have sought to dismantle and they seek to perpetuate or restore.
The two are what I think of as homogeneity hires, the opposite of diversity hires, because homogeneity hires are actually extraordinarily common--people tend to trust and identify with others like them and believe "people like me are competent people." Which is a reminder of their attack on DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, in favor of homogeneity, inequality, and exclusion (HIE), aka a return to the old system that privileged white men like them regardless of their individual qualifications. One thing that is stunningly clear about both Trump and Hegseth is that a woman or a person of color with their slovenly records would never rise to the positions they currently hold.
Imagine a Black man with Hegseth's fairly low rank in the Minnesota Army National Guard, allegations of domestic abuse and rape, and history of being such an alcoholic while employed by a right-wing veterans' organization that coworkers reported outrageous behavior. They said “I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times" and needing to be carried to his room because “he was so intoxicated.” One told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, that after taking his coworkers to a strip club he drunkenly tried to get onstage with the dancers.
Likewise, Trump's many bankruptcies and business failures, stiffing of workers, criminal associations, sexual assaults and sleaziness, political ignorance and inexperience, shameless boasts and meandering monologues of self-praise would be found unacceptable in anyone but a white man who started out with the huge advantage of his daddy's wealth. Both are oblivious to their own mediocrity, while also anxious to make competence a category to which they and white men inherently belong rather than have to achieve (the women who succeed and get appointments in this world are those who defer to this system). The members of Trump's incompetent and amoral cabinet seem to have been chosen to normalize his own failings and to carry out the most lawless parts of his agenda (as one of the more competent members, Marco Rubio, seems only too willing to do).
In the lecture to the generals, Hegseth made it clear his "warrior ethos" was his top priority and that his sense of what makes a warrior and thereby a strong military was a fantasy of extreme fitness and extreme violence. In his juvenile imagination soldiers are all there to do battle in ways that apparently, in his pickled brain, resembles action movies with ripped protagonists doing hand-to-hand combat. He had nasty things to say about people (other than Donald J. Trump) who are fat, saying in one of the three times he brought up the word: "Jesus said, 'Do unto others that what you would have done unto yourself.' It’s the ultimate simplifying test of truth. The new War Department golden rule is this, “Do unto your unit as you would have done unto your own child’s unit.” Would you want him serving with fat or unfit or under-trained troops...."
He used the words lethal/lethality seven times, hard nine times, warrior thirteen times, and combat 29 times in his diatribe. He went on at length about how warriors must be very fit, and women must now meet men's standards for strength, because Hegseth is part of the manosphere that considers buffness and gym workouts the very acme of masculinity, and masculinity the very pinnacle of competence and merit and virtue. And because he hates women and wants to push them out of combat roles and has pushed some out of top leadership roles.
Of course the US is not currently active in any major conflicts now, and as veteran helicopter pilot and US Senator Tammy Duckworth pointed out to NPR, "He's trying to erase the valor shown by women, people of color and many others who've served in uniform, and it makes a mockery of our veterans, you know? He can do all the PT [physical training] in the world, but he couldn't fly a helicopter." The military and its activities in peace and in war involve complex maneuvers with aircraft, drones, other remote weapons, involve providing logistical support, transportation, medical care, intelligence operations, equipment handling and repair, translation services and a whole lot of other things you do not do with your deltoids or become competent at via push-ups. (In fact the main thing you become competent at via push-ups is push-ups.)
Hegseth, known for his large white-supremacist-associated Christian tattoos, also had a lot to say against beards (because for some Black men, shaving is painful and causes abrasions, so they've been allowed to be bearded; his complaints were pretty clearly aimed at them). He also raged,"Anonymous, online, or keyboard complaining is not worthy of a warrior," which if implemented as a rule means almost no one will ever file a rape or sexual harassment complaint again, and it will be a field day for gender violence. Again. But the military is only 50% white, and some of those white people are women. Dissuading everyone who's not straight, white, and male from joining or staying would weaken it considerably.
Watching a man who doesn't understand the institution he heads talk down to the experts who do was a grotesque ordeal. It says a lot about who he is that he thinks he admires the belligerent, brutal General Patton but really seems to admire the actor George C. Scott playing Patton in the 1970 movie, a famous scene of which he reenacted with his macho performance in front of a gigantic American flag. Somewhere in his slosh of a speech he said, "the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign."
I suspect that most of the hearts in the room were doing something fiercer than sinking, and that they won't resign in an attempt to protect their troops and this country from this cartoon figure. A lot of military people don't have the same principles I do, but they have principles and adhere to them fiercely, and I suspect that this has outraged their principles with the content of what 47 and Hegseth said, and also violates their oaths with encouragement to commit illicit acts, especially attacking civilians domestically. I went to Reddit to see what military people were saying on a military subReddit and was struck by the furious scorn for Hegseth. Not one praised him.
I've protested the military a lot of my life, and like a lot of you never knew I'd end up protesting in favor of the rule of law and defending the military as it exists, un-Hegsethed. But all those years I supported people committing civil disobedience to defend and expand human rights and protection of the environment, not breaking the law to, say, blow up boats with Venezuelans in them far from our shores or to brutalize any brown person the ICE goons want to, citizens, children, pregnant women, legal residents, legal refugees, etc.
I'm hoping the nationwide No Kings demonstrations, on Saturday, October 18th, will be the biggest and fiercest yet. And that when Arizona's new Congresswoman Grijalva is sworn in she joins the vote to release the Epstein files.
And speaking of resistance, one excellent piece of news broke this morning. The redoubtable Jane Fonda, in her prime in her eighties as a climate organizer and political activist, has revived the Committee for the First Amendment that her father was part of, pushing back against Cold War and McCarthyist repression.
Link here: https://www.committeeforthefirstamendment.com
And story here. https://www.thewrap.com/jane-fonda-dad-henry-fonda-committee-for-the-first-amendment/
