Hegseth: The Final Frontier
Whatever happened to Peter Hegseth, it’s now apparent that the results are in: the irrevocable descent of a deeply flawed man. He started out as our Secretary of Defense, but that did not comport with his image of the warrior: bloody, carnal, all pecs and biceps. There was a brief period where he called himself Secretary War, but we are now in a different vocabulary altogether: Minister of Massacre, Secretary of Slaughter. He spends his days (or at least the part we can see) strutting and fretting on his tiny little stage, dreaming of troops who are weight/height appropriate who do credit to fascist standards of performance. There is something Hitlerian about this fantasy of force: goosestepping minions programmed for violence who follow his lead with proud self-surrender. On his own he is a parody of theatrical rage. As our Secretary he is a danger to the American Way.
It would be one thing if this made any sense for our military, if it represented some strategy for war fighting or heroism. Then we could acknowledge that Hegseth is possessed by the Devil, but that’s what it takes to lead troops into battle. The problem is that this is a theatrical delusion. What we have learned from Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz is that fighting a war has more to do with videogames than crazy notions of stamina or muscle strength. Wars will be won or lost in bunkers and warehouses by men and women sitting in comfortable office chairs joysticking drones into enemy territory. It might take an occasional 2,000-pound bomb, but our armaments will generally be small, cheap, and deadly. Hegseth seems to have missed the off-ramp on all of this while he was dreaming of another rally at Nuremberg.
Not only that, but he has turned into our Denigrator-in-Chief. If is not enough to tell us what he wants, but he must browbeat the country with what he cannot abide: “No fatties….no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps.” I did not follow Hegseth’s career at Fox, but this drama of zombification has probably been happening for a while, the effect of a brain worm on man-in-the moon-marigolds. RFK Jr. is not the only one with a parasite, but last week’s spasm—Hegseth’s “State of the Force”—was a kind of turn around the block, the part where he shows off the car to the neighbors. The Secretary has promised that this will be an annual event. I personally don’t think he will last that long. Especially offensive was his explosion against “trannies,” as if transsexual citizens have not suffered sufficiently. But Hegseth, like his colleagues, delights in punching down.
There is, of course, another way to speechify. Shakespeare gave us an example for the ages, the king’s address from the field in Henry V. It is the eve of battle on St. Crispin’s feast day, and Henry is challenged by one of his generals. He waves away the doubts of his subordinates and releases those who have no stomach for the fight, not with contempt, but quiet understanding. His focus is not the gleam of armor, the showy costume of the Renaissance battlefield, but the cause of England and eternal honor. He pushes against the look of warmaking—"Such outward things dwell not in my desires”—but the bravery he expects from himself and from his troops.
Not for nothing has this speech endured. For four centuries and more it has served its purpose as the distillation of leadership for generals and kings. Hegseth will be lucky if he is remembered tomorrow. More likely, he will be footnoted as a grotesque aberration.
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No robots were involved in the writing of this entry.