In Defense of Shame

We live in the time of an epidemic of shamelessness. Good people of all stripes who have the capacity for feeling shame watch helplessly horrified as cretins with no sense of humiliation wantonly stomp on the poor, the downtrodden, the differently abled, the people of color, the gender noncomforming, the queer. Really, if you don't fit into a very small box: white, "conservative", "Christian", you're an enemy of the Shameless.

I come here today to praise shame, and to plead for its return to our public discourse.

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, and Lord knows there's been plenty of fodder for it since our most recent long national nightmare descended that gilded escalator. I could've chose any one of dozens of insults the President* has spewed over his time in the political spotlight. Might've talked about Boebert, or Taylor Greene, or the abasement of Rubio, or lying about the size of the inauguration way back in 2017. In hindsight, we should've been louder.

Most of those violations of ethical norms seem quaint now. 

The new proximate cause of my shame about our lack of shame is this week's humiliating display by Pete Hegseth and his boss, with a side of Stephen Miller's dweeby fake toughguy turn.

If you've been living like Luke Skywalker, or been smart enough to spend your time watching sports, listening to music, reading books, and generally avoiding the news, here's the story on the former. Hegseth, who desperately wants you to call him the Secretary of War because he's dumber than a bag of hammers and less nuanced, summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from their posts around the world to an in-person meeting at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, VA.

Given the extremely unusual nature of the meeting and the significant security risk inherent in publicly bringing nearly all of the country's senior flag officers and their key staff together in a single location, initial speculation suggested that the meeting was to be extremely important. Friends, it was not.

Once the plan for the meeting made the news and got some attention, Hegseth's boss wanted some of that sweet, sweet camera time, and glommed onto the occasion. The officers sat together, their ranks thinned of black, brown, and female colleagues by Hegseth, in an auditorium at the Marine Corps Museum, a monument to valor, courage, and honor, and listened to his type of abject nonsense:

The stone silence of the room of military professionals that greeted this intended applause line was among the cringiest moments of a festival of awkward.

Often in his rambling, chest-out, rah-rah harangue, Hegseth praised lethality above "woke", saying things like, "You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct, and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”

That first sentence will be news to the 85% of the leaders in the meeting who are responsible for the boring (to Hegseth) but absolutely vital elements of effective military organization like logistics, healthcare, financial management, procurement, education, communications, information technology, and on and on and on. The second sentence built on Hegseth's guidance to ignore rules of engagement and kill bad guys. Which elides the fact that rules of engagement protect our troops as much as they do enemy combatants. If we have no honor, no guardrails on the battlefield, we have no moral legs to stand on should our enemies decide that if torture, violence against civilians, and wanton murder are good enough for Americans, then they're good enough for them, too.

I won't get into the Commander-in-Chief's remarks, because a) you've heard them all before, and b) I'll be goddamned if I besmirch this here web cottage with that bloated fuck's voice. But I'll let Ronny Chieng make fun of Hegseth for your amusement:

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All of this is to say that it's just gobsmacking to hear a man who's failed at nearly everything he's ever done other than be telegenic proudly lecture a room of professionals any one of which is his intellectual and moral superior and not feel the merest scintilla of shame. Not one ounce. It's incomprehensible.

Equally so the recent ranting of naked mole rat slash sentient penis Stephen Miller, who was heard (I won't make you watch it for the sake of your sanity) to say before an audience of law enforcement officials, "All that bullshit is done, over, it's finished. The gangbangers you deal with - they think they're ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they're tough? They have no idea how tough we are. They think they're hardcore? We are so much more hardcore than they are."

The irony of this ballsack of a coward posing as hard man, this Jiminy Glick playing Jason Momoa is obvious. The root of his pathology a bit harder to divine. But the lack of humility, of the ability to feel shame, that's on full display to all of our great detriment.

Shame on us, brought by men and women who feel none. May the tables turn sooner than later.