A Mark 1 Mod 1 Mockery

Pete Hegseth isn’t a leader, but he plays one on TV. He is the Dunning-Kruger character promoted far beyond his level of competency, the one who says things that cause his subordinates to look at each other in disbelief, the one often found primping himself in the men’s room mirror. He is so completely confident in his imagined excellence that he believes himself brilliant for answering questions with empty platitudes like “think outside the box.” He is utterly uncurious about how things actually work and unaware and uncaring of nuance and complexity.

Many of us who have served have encountered guys like Pete who come away from experience with all the wrong lessons. They enter boot camp or officer candidates school with a personality void that gets filled with the gruff demeanor of the drill instructor and the conviction that a parade-posture walk and shiny shoes make them the epitome of a warrior. Many of them stay for a single hitch and then leave, carrying their misbeliefs with them. A common misbelief is that their time in the service has made them an expert on everything that is wrong with the military or with the branch of it in which they served.

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Hegseth is more loaded with misbeliefs than most people inside or outside of the military. He revealed, or re-revealed many of them while talking to military leaders yesterday. For example:

“You might say we’re ending the war on warriors. I heard someone wrote a book about that.”

Pete wrote an entire book about his imaginary “war on warriors,” a war which doubles as a personal grievance, since he obviously includes himself in the category of “warrior,” and believes that warriors like him are suffering some great injustice. From his speech, it is clear that part of that imaginary injustice is the promotion of less qualified women and minorities over guys like me and Pete, whose ancestors hail from Europe. Hegseth would have you believe that we Americans promoted Barack Obama from Senator to President only because we wanted an historic first. What he doesn’t understand is that each historic first was preceded by many others as intentional obstacles were removed and women and minorities gained access to rungs of the ladder one by one.

When the purpose of Hegseth’s gathering of military leaders was still unknown, I commented that when we found out, it would inspire a lot of eye-roll or anger emojis. While there was plenty in Hegseth’s speech to make a listener angry, it is hard to take his schtick seriously enough to get beyond the thought that this is all very stupid and a waste of time. Hegseth is the walking personification of a common belief on the political right that expertise is overrated and that ‘intellectual’ has become, as Captain Beatty tells Montag in Fahrenheit 451, “the swear word it deserved to be.”¹

I am more inclined to agree with Lieutenant General Sir William Butler, who wrote, “The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.” Our military hasn’t drawn that broad line of demarcation, but yesterday’s production in Quantico showcased the ascendance of fools in their civilian leadership. The Commander-in-Chief spoke nonsense:

“But the firemen go up on ladders and you have people shooting at them while they’re up on ladders. I don’t even know if anybody heard that. And actually don’t talk about it much, but I think you have to. Our firemen are incredible. They’re up on one of these ladders that goes way up to the sky rescuing people, and you have animals shooting at them -- shooting bullets at firemen that are way up in death territory.

You fall off that ladder, it’s over, it’s over. They don’t even have to inspect you when you hit the ground. And you have people shooting bullets at them in some of these inner cities. We’re not going to let that happen. So, I always mention the firemen because that’s actually a big problem we have.”

The media, of course, looks for meaningful nuggets to pull out, but then their audience does not get a sense of the heaping pile of dung from which those nuggets were pulled. They don’t hear the discourse on “big, beautiful, firm paper” or the obsession with Biden—he mentioned him eleven times—and the autopen or the even bigger obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize he believes, beyond reason, that he deserves.

By the second time Trump mentioned people coming across the border from “mental institutions,” many in the audience must have felt an urge to check into one. Trump said, “They spit, we hit,” in reference to possible military interactions with civilians in Portland, which he again claimed looks like a war zone. “They spit, we hit” was a very Trumpian caricature of toughness delivered amid the nonsensical ramblings of an addled mind, where punching down on those with less power is the epitome of strength.

The entire event was an embarrassment.

Meanwhile, just north of Quantico, Senate Democrats finally called Republicans’ bluff. House Speaker Mike Johnson, once again anxious to get the House out of town and stop all this talk about releasing the Epstein files, got a continuing resolution (CR) through the House. Then he and the rest of the Republican conference went home, signaling that their CR was a take-it-or-leave-it offer. They thought Democrats, who don’t like to see people hurt by government shutdowns, would fold and take the offer, but they decided to leave it.

What Johnson and other Republicans forgot was that Democrats also want people to have health insurance. They also failed to notice that the Democratic base preferred a shutdown to capitulation, a sentiment only strengthened by Trump’s threat to fire more government employees, which made the entire thing feel even more like a hostage situation.

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Republicans said that they would negotiate after the CR was passed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded with what every rank-and-file Democrat was thinking, “We think when they say ‘later,’ they mean never.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “If House Republicans were serious, they’d be here right now.”

He's right. They are unserious, and that is a serious problem.