The super-rapid unraveling of Afghanistan has left everyone spinning. I never set foot in that country. The one mission I was slotted for got scrubbed for what are now obvious reasons. So I can’t claim to have the kind of emotional investment many of my friends do, be they Compo 1, Compo 2, or Compo 3. But I am deeply shocked (yet again) at what comes from putting all our American eggs in the expert basket.
You know, experts? People with lots of framed pieces of paper hanging on their office walls. They went to expensive universities most of us could never afford, and got degrees which are often only useful if you are pipelined for the State Department, policy think-tankery, a career as a cable news talking head, or some department at a university somewhere they devote way too much time to worshipping their false idols of theory.
Question them, however, and you tend to get emphatic protestations laced with self-flattery about swanky chairs held and very-important positions occupied in various agencies, bureaus, cabinets, and other bodies of similarly-minded individuals who’ve deliberately stuffed their heads full of ideas which too often prove to have little value in the real world. As experienced by those of us exposed to various sharp and pointy realities in life.
“Muh university degree! Muh scholarship! Muh national blah blah agency blah blah policy blah! Muh friends who all have pedigrees just like mine!”
You know, muhxperts. MUCK-SPURTS. And a room full of muhxperts cannot be wrong, can it?
Muhxperts have been telling us for fifteen years how to fight (or not fight) the Global War on Terror, usually being for a given course of action prior to suddenly (and adamantly) being against it.
Muhxperts told us there would be no Saigon Part Deux (even though there is.)
Muhxperts were also on the front-line with Covid-19. They were against masks before suddenly being for them. They were against distancing before they were suddenly for it. They were against vaccines under Trump but suddenly became for vaccines under Biden.
Muhxperts scream, “Trust the science!” at the same time they insist there are 57 genders and DNA is just a tool of the cisnormative hetero-fascist patriarchy.
Muhxperts told you your church congregation was a “super spreader event” but gave BLM protests a free pass, because BLM marches magically elide the same viral transmission modes which make your rock concert or family picnic dangerous, and therefore in need of being shut down.
Muhxperts told you to mask at all costs and stay indoors, while these same muhxperts routinely got caught eating at swanky four-star restaurants with all their friends — no masks nor any distancing, amazingly.
Muhxperts write Twitter comments about how people who won’t get vaccinated need to be held down at gunpoint and force vaccinated, while at the same time they wear “My body, my choice!” t-shirts at feminist rallies.
The Muhxperts are practically masturbating at the possibility of Delta-variant lockdowns and continued siege-mentality reactions to every little hiccup in the vastly-inflated sickness and death toll.
Muhxperts told you Russians hacked the election of 2016, while also insisting the election of 2020 was the most secure and reliable in national history.
Muhxperts are paid professionals at contradicting themselves every second Tuesday of the month, while paying zero price for their bad guesses, poor judgment, terrible advice, faulty and often harmful commands, and otherwise questionable leadership at a time when knowledge is practically gushing out of their ears — but wisdom is in vanishingly short supply.
So, like, is anybody ever gonna get fired for all this madness? Will any officers of the State Department or the White House or the Pentagon feel the hurt for the colossal debacle going on in Afghanistan right now? Do they ever have to admit they’ve been wrong six ways from Thursday about their Covid-19 commandments? Will they ever get to lose their jobs over the fact millions of work-a-day Americans already lost theirs? Or will the muhxperts merely circle their muhntellectual wagons and continue to pass themselves off as smarter-than-thou, even when the evidence suggests they’re dumber than a box of rocks?
Muhxpertise. Our society is drowning in it. National campaigns rise and fall because of it. Your everyday life has been adversely (and in some cases catastrophically) impacted by it since March of 2020. Or, if you’re in the military, September 11, 2001. Will the real experts please stand up? Please stand up?? Please stand up???
Muhxperts are on the New York Times bestseller list for telling you that it’s not racist to single you out and criminalize you for your ethnicity, at the same time they do in fact single you out and criminalize you for your ethnicity.
Muhxperts make sure to have their blue checks, pronouns, and rainbow flags prominently displayed on social media.
Muhxperts have had it up to here with the Little People of America not listening, or worse yet, talking back.
“Do you know who I am?!?” says the muhxpert while clutching xer’s muhntellectual pearls.
If you’d just stop thinking and trust the muhxperts, everything would get better. Like when you stop struggling because they’ve held the pillow over your face long enough.
And muhxperts are positively confused and incensed that their stock has plummeted these past 20 years. Previously iron-clad reputations and guarantees of superior outcomes ring absolutely hollow in 2021. Few people willingly accept a muhxpert opinion these days. The muhxpertise mystique has been blown apart. The man behind the curtain revealed.
Too much hypocrisy. Too many bad promises. Much too much abused authority.
In other words, the muhxperts have done it to themselves.
Not like there’s a price to pay, though. The world of muhxperts is both self-referencing and self-reinforcing. Billions upon billions of tax and corporate dollars ensure the muhxspert sphere remains happy and healthy. Immune from consequences, as well as criticism. They are muhxperts after all. Not like you and me — the proles who merely keep the whole enchilada from falling down around everyone’s ears.
I mean, kings and emperors used to execute court astrologers who f***ed up.
If Muhxperts had to feel the pain for every mistake and wrong turn, maybe they’d take greater care with what they predict, demand, and promote?
Brad R. Torgersen 
Indeed. My dad told me long ago that experts were people who overspecialized, learning more and more about less and less until they knew everything there was to know about nothing. They cannot see beyond the framed awards and degrees that block their view of the real world they disdain even existing.
The phrase I use is, “The smarter they are, the dumber they get.” And I am forever reminded of the quote from (I think?) Twain, when he said, “It’s not what people don’t know that get’s them into trouble, it’s what they insist they know which simply ‘aint so.” Our so-called Knowledge Class has strayed much too far from the realities which surround each of us every day, and there doesn’t seem to be any corrective mechanism. They can keep making bad policy and/or bad decisions based on bad assumptions, and there’s no penalty. Nobody gets fired. Nobody in the Knowledge Class loses anything when they screw up. We the Little People lose a lot. How many military families lost years and blood to Afghanistan, and for what? How to explain to those parents, widows, and children what it was for? When the muhxperts themselves cannot even explain what it was for, and try to act like the past ten days weren’t the muhxperts’ fault?
there is a corrective mechanism, but the cost of using it is a little high….
Hey Brad,
Hence is the problem, there has been no repercussions for the “experts” screwing the pooch, we have had no generals resigning in disgrace after this debacle, we have had no heads from the intelligence community resigning for screwing up, we have had no policy wonks from foggy bottom resigning or forced to resign for screwing up so bad. They live in a self serving echo chamber and look down on middle America as “rubes” or worse but we are the ones that serve out of an obligation of duty to country. Their sons and daughters do not, they are too good to bear that burden, so we pay the price for their screw up. I am beyond disgusted, what the hell happened to my Army? The same Army that kicked the crap out of Saddam in 1991 we learned the lessons of Vietnam, but apparently the new generation of officers forgot those lessons.
At this point, if some talking head is on TV expounding about this, that, or the other thing, you’re best bet is to do the opposite of what they’re recommending. Much like the education field, they’ve become trapped in a world where theory is the end-all, be-all and to hell with the real world observations.