Helen Keller, Wilderness Guide

There’s a HUGE scandal developing, as some very important journalists and activists have discovered that the American military recently spent money on…food.

It’s ASTRONOMICAL! The entire American military, in a single month, spent TWO MILLION DOLLARS on something. Why do they need steak and crab and doughnuts?!?!?

We have a large group of people who spend their adult lives in the profession of explaining things to people while they don’t understand anything, at all, ever. They have no context for anything. They say words without beginning to guess at the meaning of the things they’re being paid to repeat.

The American military has about 1.3 million uniformed personnel on active duty, currently, with additional civilian support staff and a large force of reservists. If you’re on active duty on an aircraft carrier at sea, say for example, or at a forward operating base in Syria, it’s hard to rely on Uber Eats for your avocado toast. So you eat in one of these:

Because we had something close to a 600-ship US Navy in the 1980s, but are now down below 300 ships, a major conflict with Iran has led to the substantial extension of the amount of time sailors are spending at sea, away from their families. The Navy is covering its tactical needs by sending people to sea for a looooong time, extending tours at sea without prior notice. Headline yesterday:

So you go sea for a six-month tour, but ten months later you’re still out there, and your children begin to forget what you look like. I know some of the people reading this have gone away on deployments for longer than ten months, and so did I, but the cycle of sea duty is a regular fact of life for the squids. You’re gonna come in and go out and come in and go out and come in and go out. A lot of long tours imposes a serious cost on them, and on their families.

One of the ways the military tries to keep up morale in hardship postings, taking care of people so they can keep going, is by feeding them the occasional steak dinner, or the occasional lobster tail. If you’ve had steak dinners on government beef, you know from experience that it’s not like eating at Ruth’s Chris. The cooks fry up 4,000 steaks on surf-and-turf day aboard an aircraft carrier — you’re not getting medium-rare and cooked-to-order. But it’s still an appreciated gesture, and for people who have zero option to eat elsewhere while they’re LITERALLY AT WAR, steak night isn’t really that luxurious.

So, “In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million on ribeye steak.” Math problem for Molly Jong-Fast: If there are 1.3 million servicemembers on active duty, how much per person is $15.1 million? When you find yourself looking at that number, ask yourself if it counts as pricey.

Keep going: $139,224 on doughnuts FOR 1.3 MILLION PEOPLE. Is that a lot?

A person who can write, in a tone of high outrage, that the American military spent $15 million on steak in a single month has absolutely no idea what anything means. We have professional narrative sensemakers who can’t begin to think. They’re just invariably wrong.

Jong-Fast is mindlessly typing up some facts from an article in the New Republic, which used to not be written by complete idiots. From that article: “One of the largest bulk expenditures was just for furniture, for which the Pentagon decided to shell out $225 million.”

Again, you can’t be shocked by this if you have any conception at all of the size of the American military. The Steinway piano in the chief-of-staff’s residence, by the way, is easier to criticize, but also reflects the degree which the homes of very senior military leaders are like the homes of governors and university presidents: a residence, but also an event site where dignitaries are entertained for institutional purposes.

Some of the replies to Jong-Fast point out that it’s not enormously difficult to find evidence of previous administrations also spending money on steak and seafood for military personnel, and of course it’s quite something to watch people say that wait a minute, military personnel were given steak?!?!? WHAT A SCANDAL!

It’s like Molly Jong-Fast is stored in a basement.

Now imagine the value of her discussion when she’s explaining something complicated.