SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2025
We lack a way to discuss it: It's a famous formulation from a Woody Guthrie anthem.
The famous song is called Pretty Boy Floyd. The passage goes like this:
Pretty Boy Floyd
[...]
As through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men.
Some rob you with a six-gun,
Some with a fountain pen.
Set aside Guthrie's apparent beliefs about Charles Arthur Floyd, a bank robber. The highlighted lyrics capture the different ways in which human conquest—overthrow—has been accomplished down through the years.
The overthrow of sacred Troy was a conquest of the Bronze Age. The overthrow was accomplished with the weapons of that era.
As we've noted many times, Professor Knox described that conquest—that "night assault"—way back in 1990. We've posted the passage many times. Today, we post it again:
Professor Knox: Introduction to the Iliad, Robert Fagles translation
[...]
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.
There were no guns, but there were swords and there were spears and there was also fire. There was sexual assault and sexual slavery. There were babies thrown to their deaths.
The night assault which occasioned the death of sacred Troy down was accomplished by means of those Late Bronze Age technologies. Today, an overthrow of the Information Age is underway.
It involves the manifest craziness of a manifest public nutcase. Something is baldly wrong with Elon Musk, but the American discourse largely lacks an established way to discuss or describe this problem.
Is something wrong with Elon Musk? Plainly, the answer is yes. Is it a moral problem, or could it be a matter of "mental disorder" (more colloquially, a matter of mental illness)?
Is he a liar or is he a nutcase? That's a difficult matter to cipher—but by tradition, our journalism lacks a way to discuss that important question.
In part for that reason, the current overthrow—this conquest of the Information Age—continues apace, driven by the endless array of crazy statements made by this crazy man.
He may be more Trump than Donald J. Trump! Over at the Washington Post, Oremus and Harwell struggle to keep up with all the crazy statements—but in truth, it can't be done:
Musk accused Reuters of ‘social deception.’ The deception was his.
The actor and director Ron Howard posted Wednesday on X an article by the news agency Reuters headlined, “Musk’s DOGE cuts based more on political ideology than real cost savings so far.”
An hour later, Elon Musk posted a reply: “I wonder how much money Reuters is getting from the government? Let’s find out.” Before the night’s end, the billionaire leading the Trump administration’s radical cost-cutting campaign was touting what he portrayed as a smoking gun: a screenshot of a U.S. government webpage showing a contract between the Defense Department and Thomson Reuters Special Services for “Active Social Engineering Defense” and “Large Scale Social Deception.”
“Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception,’” Musk proclaimed in an X post that has racked up more than 76,000 shares and 35 million views. “They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
Inevitably, this assessment by Musk turned out to be clownishly wrong.
"The contract was real, but the Orwellian phrase Musk seized on to suggest a shadowy conspiracy wasn’t what it seems." That's the way Oremus and Hartwell start their attempt to explain what Musk managed—once again—to get clownishly wrong.
That's the way the Post report begins. As they continue, the reporters attempt to correct a wide array of crazy claims which have been driving the current, ongoing conquest of our own sacred Troy.
That said, a problem exists:
By tradition, our journalism lacks a language for describing blinding stupidity. Also, it lacks a language with which to discuss possibilities of mental illness among political figures.
(By way of contrast, journalists are allowed to speak freely about "mental illness" in discussions of various types of "street crime.")
This lack of language means that our journalism lacks a way to discuss the relentless conduct of Elon Musk. Also, our "highly educated" mainstream journalists aren't always especially sharp as a group, nor do they always distinguish themselves with respect to their moral horizons.
We still owe you a look at what was said on the February 7 Gutfeld! program—more specifically, at what was said by the program's four panelists. The panelists spoke after the program's extremely peculiar host had made a set of remarkable claims about the work of USAID—allegations about the agency's work overseas but also here at home
By the rules of the game, every player was required to agree with every word the program's host had said. Or at least, they were required to find a way to avoid contradicting or questioning the stunning accusations he'd lodged, perhaps by mouthing preapproved talking points on some other preapproved theme.
The Gutfeld! program is a form of Information Age overthrow / conquest. On this prime time "cable news" program, a rotating set of corporate employees take turns undermining the conceptual foundations of the modern American nation.
They do so for better or worse. But they plainly do so.
Tomorrow, we're going to show you the transcript of the crazy things Dagen McDowell said that night, as the palace burned. We'll even direct you to the place where this extremely strange person struggled like a modern Strangelove to keep herself from emitting a furious F-word.
(McDowell never isn't amazingly strange when she appears on this program.)
We're offering this service for the ages—for people "ages and ages hence." If they want to know how our own Troy died, our efforts will be there to serve them.
By the time of that ancient "night assault," it was too late to save sacred Troy. The same may well be true of us today, as our own towering walls—walls of the Information Age—are being overrun by the clownishly ridiculous Musk and by others much like him.
Tradition limits the ways we can fight. Plus, those of us in Blue America have worked hard to earn our way out. In these relentless ways, we Blues have "lost the power to meet [Information Age] force with equal or superior force."
We're being robbed with a fountain pen—rather, by an assortment of crazy claims aimed directly at the heart of our own hapless behaviors.
