The Very Smart People

This will be quick. The Guardian, today:

Pete Hegseth has a sudden and entirely new “fixation” on short hair and shaving. In the military. Nothing like this has ever happened before, because the military has always just been a place where you can do whatever you want, so they’ve never had any appearance and grooming standards before, and the sudden new thing about getting a haircut and a shave is because of fascism:

“The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticisation of political life,” Walter Benjamin wrote in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. You can argue over the F-word all you like but from the red-and-white Maga hats to the new White House ballroom to the identical Mar-a-Lago faces, Trump has turned politics into a highly branded spectacle. And unqualified deputies such as Hegseth, more at home in TV studios than situation rooms, are following in his footsteps. Hegseth may be too incompetent to end the Iran war, but nobody is going to stop his crusade against stubble.

I want to send Arwa a sergeant major, but I doubt they speak compatible versions of English that would allow them to communicate.