Beauty is not an attribute of objects per se, but of objects as they are mediating social relations. Social relations, in turn, are relations between agents who are anticipating and planning for future possible outcomes.
“The spiritual decay of the earth is so advanced that peoples risk exhausting even that reserve of spiritual force which enables them simply to see and take stock of this decay (in respect to the destiny of Being). This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism: for in every corner of the world the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the massification of man, the contemptuous suspicion of everything which is creative and free, have reached such proportions that such childlike expressions as “pessimism” and “optimism” have long become laughable.”
Once you start noticing how the incapacity to handle discomfort affects how people live their lives it's actually pretty shocking how it ruins pretty much every conceivable aspect of existence. Interpersonal relationships, romantic and platonic. Career and education opportunities. Your politics Your willingness to go anywhere. The kind of food you eat. The kind of art you expose yourself to and your ability to read it. It's never just one thing, it touches everything, and once you notice it it's like suddenly being able to see germs or something. Just this horrific catastrophe people look at you askance for screaming about. As I grow older and see what became of my friends and peers who could not learn to handle discomfort, the more I'm like. This is a genuine societal issue
As a writer, I haven’t spent very much time working for what we now call the mainstream media.
Whatever happened to expertise?
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Apr 20, 2026
As a writer, I haven’t spent very much time working for what we now call the mainstream media. Having started at the Village Voice and moved on to magazine writing and from there to writing novels and screenplays, the only time I interacted as an employee with the mainstream media was during the thirty-plus years I wrote semi-regularly for the op-ed page of the New York Times.
Even then, a lot of what I wrote for the Times could be categorized as either personal or offbeat. I wrote a piece on the introduction of fake bugles that played a recording of “Taps” during military funerals. When Hunter Thompson died by suicide, I wrote a piece on knowing him before he was famous – I was a lieutenant in the Army, and he was a freelance writer who hadn’t had an assignment in some time – and we didn’t have enough money between us to pay for pizza and a beer in Aspen.
But I loved it when I wrote on a subject that was in the news, and having turned in the piece, I would get a call from an editor on the op-ed page and receive a gentle suggestion that the piece could benefit from a call to a professor at the University of Akron or some other college, soliciting a comment from an expert. Talking with someone who had spent a career studying economics or drug policy or another subject was – there is no other word for it – thrilling. A college professor in the Midwest would be flattered by a call from a writer for the New York Times, of course – even from a freelancer writing for the op-ed page.
I’d ask them a question, and there would be a pause as they considered what they wanted to say, and inevitably they would begin talking about the subject by going back through its history. My question usually didn’t seek background on the subject, but man, was it helpful. I would end up rewriting the piece to include the context that had influenced the professor’s comment on the subject at hand, not only because it was relevant but because it was so fascinating.
The professor might not be current on the subject as a political or cultural issue, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted knowledge that wasn’t in the clips I had gone through. I wanted stuff that came from the stacks of libraries and years of study. I wanted expertise.
The Trump administration began its rule in Washington with the stated objective of getting rid of experts and what they brought to government. Remember DOGE, the gang of Red Bull swilling twenty-somethings who changed the locks at USAID and sicced security officers on entire floors of employees? We heard a lot about the loss of “institutional memory,” which was another way of talking about expertise. Trump brought in people like Linda McMahon, who came from the world of professional wrestling, to run the Department of Education, as if teaching difficult subjects like algebra and calculus and geography to children was something you could pick up the way a wrestler learns to absorb a body-drop.
It wasn’t just institutional memory that was lost when Trump and his people went on their firing spree. It was decades of wisdom that had been gained by experience in the various trenches that are represented by departments of our government. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired whole sections of the Department of Health and Human Services and canceled tens if not hundreds of millions of research grants for studies that were doing stuff like developing a pill that could be taken to control certain kinds of breast cancer. Kennedy proceeded to replace experts in areas of medicine like vaccines with podcasters and hacks who had written academic papers that had had to be recalled when their research was proven to be either falsified or exaggerated.
Looking back at the last year of Trump, it’s become clear that we are in an age of anti-expertise. Know-nothing-ism is now an actual job requirement. I don’t know if you’ve spent time watching the Senate confirmation hearings for any of Trump’s nominees. I have ground my teeth through a few, and I can tell you that I have never heard the answer, Senator, I’ll have to get back to you on that, uttered by so many people so many times. It used to be when nominees for positions that needed confirmation did not have the answer to a question immediately at hand, they would turn to an aide seated behind them and would be handed a study or a paper highlighted to show the relevant facts or positions. When Pam Bondi attended her last questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was handed prepared folders filled with gotcha-quotes from senators’ previous statements that she could use to try to embarrass them, all of them Democrats, of course. If she was asked how many fraud cases the DOJ had prosecuted over the last year, she would have to get back to you on that, Senator.
Nowhere has know-nothing-ism been more ascendant than in Pete “Jello-shot” Hegseth’s Pentagon. He recently showed how interested he is in the war he allegedly oversees by firing the Chief of Staff of the Army in the middle of that war with an announcement that his firing would take effect “immediately.” The next day, it was reported that General Randy George had been heavily involved in the logistical planning that is the backbone of resupplying the Naval, Air Force, Marines, and Army forces in the Middle East that have been part of the war effort. Weeks later, it was reported that the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and other Navy vessels were running out of food, and sailors and airmen and women had been put on part-rations. A photograph was published of a food tray that contained a small section of shredded beef and two flour tortillas and nothing else – no vegetable, no roll, no dessert, not even a cup of canned fruit.
Hegseth continues to hold prayer meetings at the Pentagon as the war grinds on. During one of his prayers, Hegseth mistook dialogue from “Pulp Fiction” for a Bible verse, proving, as if any proof were needed, that lack of expertise in his Pentagon extends even to theology. Consulting the Bible won’t be of much help to him. To my knowledge, which is admittedly limited, there are no chapters in the Bible about logistics, unless you include the Gospels that describe Jesus turning water into wine and feeding 5,000 people using two loaves of bread and two fishes.
And we haven’t even gotten into Kash “Cocktails jets and girlfriends” Patel who recently fired a dozen agents in the FBI counterintelligence unit who were experts in Iran’s support for terrorist groups. It seems that Patel was retaliating against agents who had been involved in the investigation of Trump’s theft of classified documents, some of which had national security connections to counterterrorism.
With everyone in Trump’s administration taking example from the biggest no-nothing of them all, it isn’t just know-nothing-ism that’s on the march. It’s gin-soaked-know-nothing-ism, and Trump himself doesn’t even have alcohol abuse as an excuse.
Democrats should begin right now -- today, not after the midterm elections -- assembling what we might call “expertise in exile,” groups of experts in various subjects who can hit the ground running when a Democrat wins the White House in 2028. They can begin to re-staff departments of government that have been stripped bare of people who have devoted their careers to serving our country with knowledge they spent lifetimes accumulating.
Ignorance has become a national security issue that if left untreated will infect the health of this country for decades after Trump is gone.
Queens of the Stone Age (2002) The Sky Is Fallin', on "Songs for the Dead"
… The sky is falling
Human race that we run
Has left me crawling
Staring straight at the sun
Oh, in a moment I notice
Every dog has his day
I paid attention
Cost me so much to hate
… For so long
I saw only wrong
But now to remind
It's a waste of time
… Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
… I wanted something
Nothing blank I don't know
It's all deflecting
Stones are easy to throw
Oh, in a moment I've noticed
Hours, days left behind
Of wasted, useless
Selfless, none of a kind
… For so long
I saw only wrong
But now to remind
Not to go back to the low
… That has drained my life so low
That has drained my life so low
That has drained my life so low
That has drained my
… Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
… Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
Close your eyes and see the skies are falling
… Krdl, KRDL 109
We spoil music for everyone
Shut up, you little brat
Krdl, the KRDL
Elastic Ass with ya here in Chino Hills, the last frontier
That's where we're at
… Uh, word, KOOL
You know what it spells and you know how we do
Live and direct coming at you from the middle of nowhere
The centre of everywhere
Ya gotta check this band, Queens Of The Stone Age
If you not knowin' them, here I'm letting ya know
Giving it my stamp of approval, you know what I'm saying?
So pick this up
… And we're gonna spoil the music for ya
This is, um Millionare
Queens of the Stone Age
Um, a song about something they'll never be
… All death metal, all the time (all the time)
besides the detached banality of their casual approach to cruelty, what comes out in the epstein emails is how profoundly stupid the elites all are. epstein, summers, thiel, bannon, businessmen and hedge fund managers are deeply, deeply stupid people, sending each other NYT op-ed articles to understand current events or a "hey check this out!!!" link to a wikipedia article, grasping at russia's moves after the crimea annexation with the profound thought of "europe's borders... have always changed," obsessed with IQ and scientific racism. the most sophisticated understanding comes from bloomberg subscriptions or junior analysts in some firm, not any of them. everyone in power is an evil clown fuelled by a lifestyle of zero consequences and zero accountability
Well I'm honored. Thank you Rick Perlstein!
"And, you know, there's a wonderful writer named Rebecca Solnit. She said, you know, Donald Trump only has one power, and that's the power to make commands. But we also have only one power, which is to refuse those commands. And if we refuse those commands, Donald Trump or Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot or anyone doesn't have any power. You know, so why do we follow the commands?"
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
2087
germansingergirl
areudirty
dededos
