51 Votes For... What?
Cabinet Picks, Masculinity, and Entrenched Institutions
Dear Friends,
I hope you’ve had a nice and relaxing post-election week. The buzz on the right seems to be buzzing right along, and the hangover on the left hasn’t worn off.
President-Elect Trump is getting right to work nominating cabinet positions and until about fifteen minutes ago (as of this writing) it was looking … not too bad. No Tucker Carlson for Secretary of State or anything like that. Instead, it’s mostly been competent grownups with a clunker like Kristi Noem heading up Homeland Security.
Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense definitely raised some eyebrows. Fox News commentator-to-SecDef is not a very traditional career path. But, in fact, Hegseth has a pretty decent pedigree for the job: 20-year veteran, combat decorated, Harvard master’s degree. He has also said publicly that he’d like to do what I’ve been saying I’d like to do for at least a decade: fire the Joint Chiefs and clean house in the General Officer corps. Get rid of anyone and everyone who had anything to do with the Afghanistan debacle and, more pressingly, had anything to do with the intrusion of DEI into the war-fighting workspace. Then—I’m not sure he’s said this, exactly, but—I’d look up every full-bird colonel who got passed over for General and I’d promote them—because you and I both know why they got passed up (Psst: they weren’t “PC” enough). Hegseth also would like to get women out of combat roles, something I wholeheartedly support.
The problem is that he has said all of this out loud and therefore is very iffy for Senate confirmation. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, et al are not likely to be too enthused.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami have been sent off to develop a new Federal agency (I know, I know: just what we need!) to provide accountability and to cut waste in the government bureaucracy. I wish them well, but as someone whose read Jim Geraghty’s The Weed Agency, I am far from confident that even Elon Musk can succeed in pruning a Federal agency.
And, oh yes. Fifteen minutes ago Trump announced his pick for Attorney General: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
This is, quite simply, the single most ridiculous nomination since George W. Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. No, it’s way worse than Harriet Miers—you could make a somewhat reasonable case for her. Gaetz is, among many other things, the most outlandish camera-addicted clown in the entire U.S. House of Representatives. He put the country through a ridiculous ordeal when he and his cronies booted Kevin McCarthy for no discernible reason whatsoever. Oh, and he’s also completely unqualified for the job and will have less than ZERO credibility with anyone in the U.S. Justice Department, not least because many of those people think Matt Gaetz should be going to prison for cocaine and a predilection for underage females, for which he is under formal investigation. There is no way you can get 51 Senators to vote for Matt Gaetz for anything at all, except removal from Congress. That would actually get something very slightly short of 100 in the Senate.
Your new Attorney General? Nice try. He will not be confirmed, and I can only assume this is a “distraction” nominee to slip in somebody effective elsewhere while the leftists are busy tearing him apart.
And Tulsi Gabbard has been tapped for Director of National Intelligence. I’m not at all a fan of a person who was at one time a propagandist for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad heading up the U.S. Intel apparatus, but maybe that’s just me. I think she’s awfully iffy for confirmation, too.
There’s a lot of enthusiasm in MAGA world about these “4-dimensional chess moves” by the incoming President. Me? I just think the proof will be in the pudding and we can all just relax and wait and see.
If you are at all cognizant of the rising interest in “masculinity” that is gripping many conservative Christian communities—that is, if that “movement” is affecting you or any of your loved ones, this is the single-most important essay for you to read right now. Kudos to Joe Boot and the Ezra Institute for publishing it. The reaction online from the right-wing “theobros” has been exactly what you’d expect. Spittle-flecked rage and degrading insults toward its author and publisher. Maybe you don’t actually need the deep dive into the pagan roots of neo-masculinity to know that there isn’t anything Christian about it. You just need to see how its adherents behave themselves. That tells you all you need to know.
I have been thinking a lot about music and songwriting these days, as The Bailey Band progresses on putting the final touches on our forthcoming debut album—it’s officially on to mixing and mastering!
I started watching a documentary called It All Begins With a Song. It’s a celebratory film about Nashville songwriters, and the lineup of successful songwriters who make appearances is very impressive. I have mixed feelings about all of it. I think I might save this for a longer essay—maybe Friday—but I will just make one observation.
The first “section” of the film is all about how great Nashville is for songwriters. This is the place to be! This is where everything happens! Garth Brooks, in his earnest fashion, says something like, “Move here. Bring your family. Make yourself a citizen of this town.” Nashville will welcome songwriters with open arms, we are told. Open Mic night at The Bluebird Cafe will make your career!
The next “section” of the film shows us numerous songwriters who tell us all about what it’s like to be a songwriter in Nashville. Years and years and years of knocking of every single door, being told “No,” “You’re not ready,” “Nobody is going to record that song.” They all take odd jobs waiting tables and making lattes while trying to live their dream. To the point of total despair. Until a “break” just magically happens. We are left to wonder about the thousands of others who never had that “break” so celebrated by the film.
Is it just me, or do these two “movements” of the film sit in tension with each other? It is even more confounded when we are told that every single waiter, every barista, every service worker you encounter in Nashville, happens to be a world-class musician. I have zero doubt that is true. I’m wondering why an industry that loves to celebrate itself as “the place” is so insular that thousands of exceptional artists are incapable of succeeding at what they are gifted to do? It is almost like Nashville—or what I like to call the “Music Industrial Complex”—thinks there is an upper limit on how much great music can be made. They are gatekeepers of an ancient regime. And it is unfathomably stupid. There is no upper limit, no “zero sum” game for art. There is literally no “competition.” People have more room in their ears for favorite musicians than just one or two or a handful.
And then, to add insult to injury, if you “make it” out of the Nashville salt mines, you get to write songs that sound exactly like every other popular song currently getting airplay.
I’ll have more to say on that soon—about legacy institutions and changing times and new ways of thinking about things. But I need to hit “send” on this thing now! I’ve got a meeting with the band to get to.
Thanks for reading The Quarter Inch! Have a great rest of your week.
Well, if Gaetz can't be confirmed, maybe we'll get Ken Paxton. 🙄
I've been pleasantly surprised at how much good music can be found outside the confines of "the complex". Hard working folks who just enjoy what they do and don't seem to pine for great popularity. With a little business and marketing savvy, one doesn't have to be doomed by the complex or by Spotify.
(1) Mixing and mastering! Some of my favorite parts. Still can’t wait for the album!
(2) Re: music culture, Nashville, etc. Some thoughts for your Friday piece. There is no upper limit on good music that can be created. But I think there is an upper limit on music (good or not) capable of capturing a wide audience and selling millions of records. Not every artist can be Taylor Swift, because the world can’t support 100 million (probably more musical artists out there) Taylor Swifts. Which leads to a thought I have long contemplated: what is the proper role of music? Go back before the phonograph, and there are very few musical celebrities. The few that existed really only entertained the exceptionally wealthy and privileged (i.e., the common man in 1815 hadn’t heard a whole lot of Beethoven). But man is a musical creature. We sing, we dance, we make instruments sing. For most of human history, that meant church music or (presumably—it isn’t well documented to the best of my knowledge) work songs and drinking songs. The Taylor Swifts of the 100s, 1100s, and 1800s were still making music; they just made it for their localized communities. Perhaps part of the issue with Nashville is that so many of those aspiring artists want to record in million dollar studios and release songs that will be global hits when they would do far better playing a bar in their hometown.
The proliferation of music as performance art rather than communal engagement seems to gut human artistic creativity by making it the domain of those skilled enough or sexy enough or with the right connections or whatever to gain a billion followers online. We, culturally, have ceded it to the musical elites when music rightly belongs to all of us in the context of our small worlds.
To continue rambling, when I visited Hawaii, I went to a bar. There was a karaoke machine there, largely unused. A man stood up at one point and sang a song (I wish I could remember which one off the top). It was atrocious. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. And I loved it. Because you don’t have to have Adele’s voice or John Mayer’s guitar skills or Paul Simon’s songwriting to make music. You can just sing. The world would be a better place if more of us sang more often, just because we are human, not because we’re the next American Idol.