DOG E and and the Movers and Shakers
We already have ingested the horror film analogy of the monster descending on the city and running amuck. Adolescent coders dismantle USAID, USIP, VOA, EPA, NIH alphabet soup, as Musk repeated his Twitter house cleaning scenario. Never mind the result or the collateral damage. Diversity has been excised from the bureaucratic vocabulary. Cost saving and efficiency are incidental.
The projected $3 trillion savings has shrunk to a billion or so. And hundreds of thousands will die or suffer from climate disaster. Viewed with perspective, the whole episode seems mindless. No question that trimming the bureaucratic excesses was meritorious. When Boeing can charge the government $70 for a “four cent metal pin” there is room for improvement. But the World’s richest rich man who spends all his spare time playing video games may not be the right choice to lead the charge.
On a related subject Emily Anhalt, a classical language teacher at Sarah Lawrence College decries the state of illiteracy of college students in the American Scholar (Summer 2025). She sums up what many observers are saying. The use of the discredited “three cueing system” to teach reading has resulted in “functional illiteracy”. College students have limited vocabularies and “struggle to assemble meaning from a text.”
They don’t read and would rather play computer games. The screen has contributed to the vacuity of society, and ineffectual primary education has compounded the problem. “The Last of Us” a video game/TV series in which a fungus turns humans in to mindless zombies is an unfortunate metaphor.
Shift to a related subject, the Trump BIG Beautiful Budget Bill and you find a similar lack of intellectual context. It won’t stimulate the economy. 0.1 percent of taxpayers will get a tax saving of $120,000 which they don’t need. On the other side of the scale eleven million Americans will lose their heath insurance. (NYT 06262025).
Need I say More?