By executive order at the beginning of the second administration of President Donald J. Trump (Republican, 2025 – ), the United States’ Department of Defense was reverted to its older name, Department of War. The new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, was an army veteran who had reached the rank of major, a Princeton and Harvard graduate who talked like Ancient Pistol and decorated his skin with mystical tattoos, and a news media personality. In the media, he spoke of the men under his command as “warfighters.” Of the women he spoke little.
But he lived in the midst of the men. To the media he posted videos of himself doing pullups among their young bodies, his own middle-aged muscles taut and his graying hair gelled. On July 16, 2026, a month after his forty-sixth birthday, he proclaimed in the presence of the media that warfighters no longer young will now undergo testosterone titration. The words of a hymn for that ritual might be “Stay big.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/us/politics/hegseth-troops-testosterone.html
But Representative Becca Balint of Vermont, a Democrat with a Harvard M.Ed., proceeded to teach a lesson about them in psychosexual translation.
Her lesson evoked a carbon-based life form male like Secretary Hegseth’s but structurally arranged as graphite, not flesh. Such life forms art do exist, Representative Balint said. They are on record in, for instance, the output history of Tom of Finland. Nom de crayon of an artist named Touko Valio Laaksonen (1920-1991), Tom was a graphiting machine that carried out such procedures as
https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/swanngalleries/26/796726/H0132-L413804779.JPG
Its output was man. Not living man; only man. At man-forming it was solely a work of art. Whether accessed by seeing or by foreseen touch, the forms assumed by its body-molding leathers were never not perfect. Etymologically, perfect means complete. If you read this art bulletin much after July 2026, it’s foreseeable that its first links are now incomplete themselves. They linked to current events, and what makes an event an event is precisely its currency, which etymologically means its fleetingness. When Dr. Faustus cried O lente, lente, currite noctis equi just before the end, he was quoting a Roman metaphor relating time to motion, and in Rome the motion was typically stopped at the end of its course by a stone tomb erected beside a busy road.
But tombs are business-zoned for a traffic of words. Read down, for instance, to the title tombeau in this book published during the significant year 1914. On the historical record, words that are still readable so many years after their inscription must still bear some read meaning, whatever it may be. But even if the term “read meaning” could once have been made to refer to a lexicon of nameable bodies cataloged in an archive bounded at its beginning by a logically conceivable ante quem, that task can’t be performed now. Once all the tombs of 1914 were complete, the language of their archive was post quem inexplicable. Thenceforth it communicated only the sense of its last page: a The End, not a beginning. The The End’s language had translated itself into what Italian calls storia: a term that translates indifferently as, take your pick, either non-fictional history or fictional story. Either way, in the pages written before 1914 that you’re about to read, there is only storia. From it you can’t logically hope to extract anything more: meaning or truth or anything datable before 1914 or, for that matter, since.
https://archive.org/details/officeroprussian00lawrrich
But on the page that lay in your hand a moment ago, you were read by some words that evoked a machine-shaped man. Now that you have read it, hasn’t that shape entered the teaxonomy of your own life? Isn’t it, at least for this moment, a part of your biology?
If it is, it must be continuous with the biology of language extant before now. Unless continuity is broken, a word that has achieved significance will remain significant even after those who spoke it have returned to insignificant earth. Ezra Pound’s epigram about that event, “Literature is news that STAYS news,” isn’t a definition but an anthology of words that have remained visible on their pages through greater or lesser extents of time. There were macassar-oil words for 1914 just as there are hair-gel words for 2026, but on the pages of the anthology most of those are now just stains. Macassar’s trace faded away before healthy Secretary Pete could even be born, but tubercular D. H. Lawrence’s words are still coughing up a lifeblood. For newer words on other pages we’ll have to wait for vital signs, but perhaps we owe our future the thought that hair gel may be gluing us down to mortal physique in ways that words don’t.
