The last time I talked to Eric Greitens was over breakfast in a local hole in the wall diner in Imperial Beach. It was 16 years ago. I’d turned over a Task Unit somewhere to someone who made a bit of a mess of it. And they were thinking of sending Eric out to fix it.
I was out of the Navy at the time. I had transitioned out just weeks after returning from deployment. For my part, the sit down was a pro bono meeting. I wasn’t privy to the details of what was going on. But I knew that particular mission better than anyone. So breakfast it was.
At the time, LTjg Greitens hadn’t made many friends in the Teams. He was a “new guy” who’d never served in a platoon (the standard unit of capability for SEAL teams). It didn’t help that on his one deployment he’d turned in a bunch of SEALs for doing some shady stuff. And there was suspicion that his time in the teams was just a check in the box on the way to the next resume bullet. The brass valued his intellect and perspective though. He was a Rhodes scholar PhD and he’d traveled the world documenting and studying humanitarian crises. That background gave him credibility to punch above his weight in the strategic domain for a brand new officer. But for the rank and file frog men, it’s fair to say that he didn’t really have a great brand with them.
I wasn’t a SEAL though. So none of community politics really mattered to me. I worked with Eric on my last training cycle. And I thought he would be good at the mission I’d just run. It was what we’d call today an Irregular Warfare mission. Back then that wasn’t the sort of thing SEALs really did. Greitens, the over intellectually indexed SEAL, was better than most other alternatives. I thought it then. And I’d be lying if I said differently.
The narrow point that I’m orbiting around here is that circa 2005, I thought highly of Eric Greitens, even if most of the SEALs in the community had an axe to grind against him. The broader point is that I don’t have any idea what happens to people when they enter into the gravitational pull of politics. For me, Eric Greitens is a sort of natural experiment. Because whatever popped up onto the political scene ten years after that sit down was so far outside of what I’d seen first-hand, that it made me question the way the universe works.
It’s crazy. I don’t have a better word for it.
To be clear, I’m not talking about how Greitens’ political opponents talked about him or even the scandal that took him out of office. I’m talking about the undeniable reality that Eric Greitens circa 2005 was an ethical purist, consistently, published in broad daylight for posterity AND in private to me at great personal cost within the community he served. He accused senior SEALs of warcrimes as a Goddamned Ensign on his first deployment. Then he got formally into politics. And then he ended up vigorously campaigning for DT.
It doesn’t matter which one of those Greitens you prefer. The point is that the two are undeniably incompatible with each other. Absurdly so.
I once had an aspiration that I might get involved in politics. I had the background and I thought I could help. The last few years has changed my mind. Because it’s clear that at the center of the modern political universe is a super massive blackhole. And inside that blackhole is a political singularity so uniform and dense that nothing can escape its pull.
It’s not just one party. It’s happened too many times for me to count by now. I served in a war with people who are now famous for having served in that war. These were people I knew; Americans I served with. And I’ve watched them time and time again cross over the political event horizon. And I see them slowly distorted; politically spaghettified until they disappear completely into infinite mass of the political singularity never to be seen again.
I don’t know what’s in the center of that thing. There’s lots of theories. Ezra Klein wrote a good book about it. Caro’s books on LBJ are good fodder for what it once was. It’s not Trump. Trump is just what happens when you throw a black hole of DT media savvy into the black hole of politics to create a super massive black hole. But he’s not the cause. I welcome theories. I welcome more a future where Americans can stay in tact as three dimensional humans once they enter into politics.
Maybe it was always this way.
If you’re young, smart and ambitious and you want to change the world for the better, I’ve got some advice. Get into Bio-tech. Go start an electric car company or build a Goddamned rocket ship. Or go write a book about a school for wizards. Stay the hell away from politics though. Or we’ll never see you and your hopes and dreams again.