- Michelle Goldberg on the garish spectacle at the White House;
- Will Leitch about its absurdity;
- Conservatives are trolls;
- US science is also in decline;
- Paul Krugman’s theory of the vulgar class;
- And music: Hans Zimmer’s “Chevaliers De Sangreal”, a great piece of conceptual breakthrough music, from The Da Vince Code.
NY Times, opinion by Michelle Goldberg, yesterday: A Garish Spectacle of American Decline
Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way.
Think of it: On the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, America’s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena while capitulating to Iran. Mike Judge came close to imagining some elements of our debasement in his 2006 satire “Idiocracy,” which depicts a United States led by a professional wrestler whose middle name is Mountain Dew. But if “Idiocracy” captured something of the vibe of Donald Trump’s reign, it was both too early and too lighthearted to nail the sordid specifics, which on Sunday included the fighter Josh Hokit, standing in an octagonal cage wrapped in crypto ads, calling the former first lady Michelle Obama a man.
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Even the participants had their qualms.
NY Times, guest essay by Will Leitch, yesterday: Trump’s Fight Night Was as Absurd as Promised
If you found it bizarre, surreal and downright flabbergasting to witness the spectacle of the Ultimate Fighting Championship holding a massive event on the White House lawn, with sweaty men being escorted from the Oval Office to a glowing octagon to go punch each other as the president and his war cabinet cheered them on, you were not alone. You should know that the fighters and many people in the U.F.C. appeared to feel the same way. Maybe even more so.
“I have seen some surreal things in my life — this is the most surreal. It doesn’t seem real. None of it seems real. It’s so crazy,” said Joe Rogan, the color analyst on the broadcast, almost hyperventilating, as President Trump walked out at the beginning of the event, alongside the U.F.C. chief executive, Dana White. The former U.F.C. champion Daniel Cormier said: “I just can’t believe that we’re at the White House, watching U.F.C. fights. Dude, I’m so filled with, like, testosterone, I want to kick someone in the chest, it’s crazy.”
The essay ends,
“This is the next chapter in America’s fighting spirit story,” the U.F.C. broadcaster Brendan Fitzgerald said with a big goofy smile that implied he knew something we didn’t. Perhaps he could see the future, and that future looks a lot like this. It was so crazy. It made you want to kick someone in the chest.
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Conservatives have no principles. They’re just trolls.
JMG, today: Fox Host Celebrates UFC Fighter’s Attack On Michelle Obama: “We Enjoy It” When Liberals Are Upset
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More decline.
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Scientific American, Adam Rogers, today: U.S. science is in chaos, subtitled “How did we get here?”
Last June the budget hawks in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pushed NASA into offering a broad package of buyouts, paid leave and early retirement. Over the next few weeks nearly 4,000 NASA employees—about a fifth of the workforce—took the deal. Reynolds’s AXIS team lost 20 people. The engineer designing the heaters to keep the x-ray mirror at a constant temperature: gone. The lead project manager: gone. William Zhang, the astrophysicist who invented the telescope’s mirror technology: gone. “We were literally left with their PowerPoints, trying to figure out what they’d done and where we were with aspects of the design,” Reynolds says.
Around the same time President Donald Trump’s budget proposal came out—with massive cuts to science funding. In the U.S., private money funds vast amounts of scientific development research, and philanthropy contributes a bit, but something like 40 percent of all the funding for basic, blue-sky, exploratory research comes from the federal government. The program that would have funded AXIS was zeroed out entirely.
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And Paul Krugman.
Paul Krugman, today: The Theory of the Vulgar Class, subtitled “Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger”
On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday with a cage match on the White House lawn. The match and the events that surrounded it — especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — were a desecration of America’s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues. The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar.
That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms. As I argued yesterday, these norms historically played a key role in mitigating abuses of power and privilege during the Gilded Age, the last time America suffered from extreme income and wealth inequality (though not nearly as extreme as what we have now).
He goes on to compare our situation to an 1899 book by Thorstein Veblen called The Theory of the Leisure Class.
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Music. Revisiting Hans Zimmer’s The Da Vince Code, which, never mind the historical nonsense of the film’s plot, has beautiful music and one of the great pieces of conceptual breakthrough music of all time. You feel the world opening up.
The sound level here is very low; you have to turn up your computer’s volume.
