39. Hey, You Wanna Smash Some Fruit?
The schoolhouse is not far from what is happening with DOGE...
The highest-profile young adult staffers of Elon Musk’s DOGE outfit are probably the most evolved versions of the kids who, upon graduation from high school, claim that they learned nothing.
I can make this assertion because I teach high school English, and it’s not an uncommon perspective voiced by the semi-sharp and impatient. Refereed by seemingly arbitrary grades and blaring bells and the infantilizing management of bodies in motion via hall passes and permission slips, the academic work of school can admittedly feel disconnected from the careers and existential imperatives that students believe await outside the classroom walls. I have heard students argue that reading novels adds no value to their lives because there’s no perceptible link between powers of literary interpretation and profits. I have read students’ assertions that school success hinges, not on the quality of one’s work, but purely on the degree to which one is able to flatter or otherwise manipulate a soft-minded teacher.
One might doubt the acumen of a student willing to put such a claim down in writing for a teacher to read before the end of a school year, but it’s a definite ethos, one common to relatively affluent boys who plan on majoring in business or working in tech. High school and even college are impediments to the most efficient path to a theoretical six-figure coding job. It’s normally not so boldly invoked. The guy who most memorably made this observation (again, in April of his final semester, with one of those soft-minded teachers still in command of a gradebook) got into an Ivy League college. He might be bright and also an utter idiot. He was wrong too—he received his eventual A- on the inarguable quality of his class writing, reading, and speaking, not a B because he’d annoyed me and deserved a spiteful grade reduction. Being so fragile would not ever occur to me.
Of course, if you look at how the young DOGE staffers—hacker-adjacent, histories of racism and Hustlers University subscriptions—are faring as they conduct an ear-splitting sideshow in the vast complex chambers of the Federal government, endeavoring to smash, splinter, scrap, starve, and swipe, you might wish they’d paid a little more attention to something other than coding. That is, if we even entertain the idea that going Gallagher-on-a-melon with foreign aid, veterans’ services, programs for disabled kids, and cancer research isn’t actually the point more than any money saved. Once, in a high school, very early in the morning on a park wander, a drunk friend—Buddy, let’s say, in honor of the Golden State Warriors’ least thoughtful decision-maker—threw a park bench over a highway overpass. I sometimes reference this incident in my unit on The Stranger. After we, terrified and dumbfounded, watched the bench shatter on the blessedly empty four-lane highway below, we asked Buddy why he’d suddenly committed this act of potentially catastrophic destruction. He shrugged. “I wanted to see what would happen,” he managed. What’s happening in the federal government only makes marginally more sense.
Expertise in artificial intelligence or the capacity to quickly understand a programming language doesn’t eliminate the utility of a law degree, decades of knowledge and savvy from operating within an institution, common sense, or empathy. But—and again, I speak from my decades of experience—young people who have achieved even a modestly high level of ability in a specific arena regrettably often imagine, with hubris and ignorance, that being good at one thing means you are good at anything. They do not just have faith in their ability to adapt and learn. They somehow believe that, through sheer I.Q. and privilege-stoked will, they simply already have. As I’ve written before, many of the A.I.-sourced writing submissions I receive come from reasonably successful students who have taught themselves to believe that work they fake might as well be theirs because of the talent they’re convinced they inherently possess.
A February 19 NPR story included a telling quote from a retired federal senior contracting officer: "There's no doubt that these young people [Musk] has working for him are very intelligent coders, genius coders, but they're limited. They don't understand the processes, they don't understand how things work, they don't understand contracts, they don't understand grants.”
I’m just a simple English teacher, but I’m pretty sure that translates to: they might be bright and also utter idiots.
Attendant to this stance is a matter of the heart.
Not to get all soft on you, but even in the middle of the first Trump administration I couldn’t quite imagine the official White House account giddily releasing an ASMR video of “illegal aliens” being chained and led onto a plane for deportation. Yes, ”the cruelty is the point,” we know, it’s always been that—many people have been saying, as Trump would say. But the video advances audiences further down the road to the utter dehumanization of scapegoated enemies of the state. It’s straight out of Children of Men, and yet delivered with a typically unfunny Muskian chortle, the 4-Chan meme gone from obscure to influential to, now, supreme authority itself. The silliness is the point. The absurdity is the point. It’s cruel and despicable but it’s supposed to be weird and funny, not absorbed grimly, like the deaths of noble adversaries in war or something.
From DOGE’s faux-cutesy dog logo to Elon’s posts about feeding agencies to a “wood chipper” to his chainsaw-wielding (and transparently drugged) appearance at CPAC, the mood is gleeful, goofy, like stripping institutions to the studs for a corporate bust-out scheme is an oddball lark to achieve legendary status, even if the goal is a decentralized white nationalist state with a powerful military but zero credibility abroad in which a rapacious private sector gets to (when and how it wishes) fill in craters left by the demolition of 2025.
The arbitrary nature of the onslaught is also the point. We’re presented with an anti-human vision of government. Charged with extracting wealth from tax-paying citizens and delivering little in return, institutions get strip-mined for sensitive data and warped for favorable business deals. Beyond the racism and retrograde intent, the aim is to arrive at certain pleasing numbers—like billions of dollars saved or thousands of jobs eliminated—without consideration for what those dollars and jobs do for all people, regardless of party affiliation. They’re hurting things that people rely upon to improve their lives. From healthcare, to airplane safety, to education, they’re hurting the stories of people’s lives.
I am concerned because I am a stakeholder in the country. But I’m also an English teacher, a stories person, someone who values learning about people and experiences through art. I teach because I want to invest in people, who are the stewards of the American project. On some level, a literary education, part of a liberal arts education, the desire and ability to approach challenges and dynamics from multiple lenses, is a bulwark against a blithe numbers-focused reaper-of-jobs-and-programs mindset. It opposes the anti-human vision.
This raises the stakes of the work.
The schoolhouse is not far from what is happening. At a department meeting, a colleague wondered if Roger from Lord of the Flies was running America. Some clever poster on the website formerly known as Twitter joked in early February that the new American order was “roughly equivalent to the yearbook committee and theater kids getting rocked by a football team and chess club alliance.”
Take the casual violence of the verb “rocked,” what it brings to mind, which is the physical bullying of perceived weaker links in a clearly preordained food chain. I see a sucker punch. The knockout game but for purple-haired nonbinary freaks and know-it-all “leaders”—annoyingly organized studious girls, most likely, who roll their eyes when forced to suffer the misogyny and apathy of their male peers. Take the fantasy: a sweeping purge of undesirables, a pushing of these irritants to imperceptible margins. Take the other fantasy: socially stunted insecure vulnerable bright guys who are so often overlooked and misunderstood finally getting to bond with their attractive, muscled, confident fellow bros (I guess, the brawny Proud Boy types?) in the subjugation process. This reveals the saddest part, in my mind. Even with world-beating wealth, a Musk is still lonely and chronically online and not seeing his kids and lying about video game prowess and eager to impress a (likely imagined) cafeteria table of stereotypically semi-verbal offensive linemen.
“Bullseye,” added Musk on the website formerly known as Twitter, quoting the original post.
At school, I see why awkward dorks (and I don’t mean that meanly) with some palpable vulnerabilities are deeply drawn to an awkward dork who appears to have defeated all opponents despite or perhaps even because of his. Plus, racism is cool now, according to J.D. Vance and Musk. Guys in their early 20s are to be treated like, at worst, slightly lost but promising boys in need of maturation but also given immense latitude in extra-legal work within government agencies sans vetting or oversight. For the boy who does pretty well in school but feels bewildered by social expectations and frustrated by the real but hardly ubiquitous scourge of cancel culture, such a future tantalizes.
A few days after the election, a boy walked into class wearing one of Elon Musk’s “dark MAGA” shirts. I feel fairly tender towards this kid—let’s call him Frank. Why? Because he has some challenging mental health issues, and he usually does the reading, and he writes insightful and far-from-reactionary meditations on what we read. He’s small, quiet, easily alarmed, skinny, almost always in shorts. Maybe he’s just expertly calibrated his work to sway the good graces of a soft-minded teacher, but I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s all that opinionated. I think he’s a reachable creature, someone who, regardless of what he studies in college, genuinely wants to understand things. But the dark MAGA shirt announced his power. It affiliated Frank with a movement enjoying growing strength, one that, with its color scheme and design aesthetic, departs from Trumpian MAGA and, most certainly, that of the United States. It was a hardcore band shirt, essentially. Back in Louisville, in the mid-late 90s—where I grew up, when I came of “age”—wearing a Kinghorse, Crain, or Endpoint shirt announced one’s identification with a movement as well as a band, something noisy and fierce. Frank felt a little tougher in his dark MAGA shirt, a member of a street team for an awe-inspiring outfit.
Once, another student mischievously told Frank that, while absent, he’d missed an important class event. “What?” Frank gasped, and I could see the panic rising in his eyes.
“David,” I hissed theatrically at the culprit, keeping the mood light. “Stop stressing out my guy.” With the class chuckling, I told Frank that David was a serial fabulist and never to be trusted. Everyone agreed. He’s done this to many people, I assured Frank—who could wear a dark MAGA shirt every single day and still be a mark for this sort of game.
Given Frank’s sensitivity, I don’t think he could ever be suckered entirely by an anti-human agenda. I don’t think a personal connection is the only way he could feel for a victim of a DOGE purge or some ugly new escalation in immigration enforcement.
This, though, is the current common threshold. You have Jesse Watters, a sort of second-tier Fox News ghoul, pleading on the air (as if beseeching an emperor) for one of his buddies, a veteran, to be spared the scythe. As if there weren’t many others no less deserving, people of conviction and knowledge who’d elected to serve their country in one way or another when, often, more money might be earned in a private sector position. I congratulate myself on having more imagination, of being able to guess the impact of mowing through employees without envisioning one of my friends at the VA or GSA being purged. I know that people besides my friends have families, rent, and mental health needs. I can empathize with people I’ll never meet. I don’t know if I’d call this a “power” exactly, but the incredulity of Watters and his ilk, the will to advocate only for those in their immediate orbit, well, it’s kind of a little bit anti-human. When I assess my humanity or look to see its evidence in others, care and empathy are the first metrics.
I worry that male students too often only see power as entrepreneurial, the ability to create as the logical domain of business, in which one takes bold risks, taps into profound confidence, and imposes one’s will on the market, getting people to want a product, making good on investment, doing the ol’ American Dream thing at its most rudimentary level. Code can be beautiful, I’m sure, but the people in charge right now are not artists. They are not providing a model for cool-headed, precise, considered management—no less a feature of successful entrepreneurs, I’d imagine. Listening to experts, employing a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer, sculpting something—that all takes time and patience, a desire to nurture—and these register, I expect, as feminine traits. Disruption and destruction, while histrionic, feel masculine. Like “rocking” someone you don’t like! Building and renovation are harder than demolition (throwing the bench off the overpass). Governance is delicate and precarious. It has to be maintained. Yearbook committee shit! But one can’t scrap this project. It’s not an app that doesn't take off or a start-up to be swallowed by a bigger fish. If the acolytes are reachable, this could be the best imaginable lesson in civics. Memes are fun but policies are real. People are impacted. Government does a lot of essential but boring shit imperfectly. Life without it is less livable.
A great fantasy of many reticent novel readers? To challenge a teacher, to pose a public question the teacher will somehow be incapable of answering. Few actually do this, but it endures. What’s the point of this novel? Why are we learning about this? In this vision, the teacher stammers and always ends up on the losing end, unable to explain the value of their frivolous life’s work.
Might strike you as obvious, reader that you are, but my (imagined) response has to be, in part, that a lot of my liberal arts education was realizing I knew very little but had and could nurture the skills that would allow me to amass more knowledge. Remaining curious and honest about what I didn’t know would serve me well, I realized. The business-minded boys are frequently suspicious of deliberately acquired and deep and/or broad knowledge disconnected from the pursuit of wealth. So, back to the DOGE youth, their most evolved incarnation: there’s likely immense delight in telling someone who has spent 20 years studying water treatment or something that they are useless. You don't have to understand their work to break it, to say you’ve assessed and dismissed their worth.
DOGE figure Luke Farritor is a former intern at Musk's SpaceX who is now listed as an "executive engineer" in the office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. As of early February, he was given access to the U.S. Agency for International Development systems and requested access to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services systems. He apparently has had (highly controversial) access to Energy and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau systems. He is 23, folks. He majored in computer science but dropped out of University of Nebraska before he could graduate and received a Thiel Fellowship.
His major (and very, very impressive) achievement as an undergrad was, according to a Nebraska Today story, “developing and training a machine-learning model that could detect ultra-faint differences in the texture of the carbonized scrolls, which are now too delicate to unroll.” The model could identify inked letters in 2,000-year-old Mount Vesuvius-blackened papyrus. He won $40,000 from the organizers of the Vesuvius Challenge, an initiative dedicated to decoding these burnt scrolls, and later, as part of a team, a $700,000 grand prize for deciphering four lengthy passages of text. Apparently, the text has been unread since 79 A.D., and, while it’s still being transcribed and translated, the scroll appears to be a “philosophical treatise on pleasure,” according to Nebraska Today. The tweets of yore!
The philosopher-author responsible for this post from the past was apparently a guy named Philodemus. One of the translated lines goes as follows: As too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant. Philodemus is, I think, vibing on whether or not we enjoy rare luxuries more than readily accessible ones. The ripe peach that any number of market stands can provide on a daily basis in summer offers as much joy as uni or wagyu. This is the sentiment of a seeker of good times, a lover of the arts, an unpretentious uncorker of wines and stories. And now he can go viral!
What is the irony of a person who makes his bones leveraging his technical prowess in the name of awakening the incinerated voice of an ancient sensualist Epicurean now disassembling pieces of government dedicated to keeping people safer, healthier, more educated, and likely happier?
Quibble with the role of government in people’s lives (we’re finding out if we didn’t already know) but I’d say substantial.
A preservationist becomes a wrecking ball. How’s that for a legacy? If you’re a history buff, which Farritor apparently is, you consider these things, especially when you’re talented and endowed with great powers. What is your moment? What will the scrolls say about you? That you helped an oligarch foist scarcity on a country to self-deal and give tax breaks to the richest citizens?
Farritor’s achievement is not just impressive because of how he did what he did. It’s also about the result and its implications, that he has helped provide anyone curious with an opportunity for enlightenment. This is the union of tech and humanities, of the numbers game and what I know.
So, to answer that reticent reader of novels: what’s the point of divining runes through technical skills if you have no ability to meaningfully absorb what you discover? Or the humanity required to imagine a long-vaporized dude enjoying his commonplace meals as I revel in cold leftover pizza and crisp apples? I’ll never forget, for instance, the food in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, a novel in which the unreliable narrator delights in numerous slightly grotesque solitary pantry-sourced meals. Anyone who has ever squirted sriracha on a microwaved tortilla-and-cheese at midnight might feel solidarity with Charles Arrowby and Philodemus alike. We maybe all know what it is like to be alone, a little short on cash or resources, temporarily or indefinitely isolated, finding the pleasure we can in the moments and goods we have before the volcano comes.
That understanding on its own is worth doing the reading. If you can do what Farritor has and you still think you’re doing good in the world, you might be an utter idiot (Jeff Foxworthy voice).
