The Court Performs Exercises While the Nation Watches Stupidity Reach Peak Condition

There is a letter from the philosopher Seneca to his friend Lucilius in which he mocks the muscle-obsessed men of ancient Rome. It is foolish, he wrote nearly 2,000 years ago, to devote all one's strength to making the arms thick and the neck broad. Once that effort has exhausted you, nothing remains for the mind, and that is the only thing that truly matters. One only has to open that letter to understand that the American government of 2026 suffers from a very old disease for which there have been very old diagnoses.

The occasion is a 66-year-old man who oversees the nation's public health insurance programs and thought it would be a good idea to offer professional advice to his 3.3 million followers online. Mehmet Oz, once a television doctor and now the administrator responsible for the health of half a continent, stood in his garden and announced something incredibly simple. It is called a squat, he said. Everyone has heard of it.

Then came the instruction that deserves a place in the history of public demonstrations. You must not lean forward, he explained. Instead, you should sit back as though your rear end were about to touch the toilet seat. That is how you move back, he said, and touch it. It is an image of such dignity that one hardly wishes to repeat it when it comes from the nation's highest guardian of public health.

But the real punchline came not from his words but from gravity. On the way back to standing upright, his center of gravity shifted too far backward, his arms flailed, and with a series of tiny backward steps he barely saved himself from falling. It is the moment when the squat he had called incredibly easy nearly put him on the ground. A second attempt followed immediately, this time more cautiously and not as deep. Keep practicing, he said. It will come naturally.

Pause there for a moment. An ordinary person would have deleted the failed first attempt. Oz chose to post the wobble. Not by accident, but as a lesson. It is the purest form of self-promotion, in which the message - look at me, I am a role model - becomes more important than the small fact that the role model had just nearly fallen over. It did not stop with the legs. He also recommended brisk walking for the heart, and then came anatomy. Arteries are kind of like a big pipe, he said, tapping on a display board. Sometimes they become stiff, and you do not want stiff arteries, you want them flexible. That is what medical education sounds like when a man who has once seen a pipe decides to explain an entire circulatory system. At least he did not fail at the pull-ups on the climbing frame. Back in February he had already been hanging from a tree branch with the Secretary of Defense.

And he is only the latest name on a list that grows longer every month. It has become a custom in this administration to film oneself exercising, which is remarkable for the simple reason that the president himself has distrusted physical exercise throughout his entire life. He genuinely believes the body possesses only a fixed amount of energy that gets used up through movement. A ruler who considers exercise a waste, surrounded by cabinet members who love nothing more than showing themselves exercising. The court performs while the prince conserves.

At the top of the list stands the 45-year-old Secretary of Defense, another man who came from television, who on the eve of the war with Iran in February released a video of himself with soldiers at West Point. A few days earlier he had been bench pressing while his son spotted him. Consider the proportion of things. A country stands on the brink of war, and the man responsible for its defense is concerned with the proper execution of the bench press.

The Secretary of Health, now 72 years old, proudly demonstrates his exercises wearing jeans, which he says he became accustomed to after spending years hiking before going to the gym. Together with the Secretary of Defense he takes part in a fitness challenge in the name of a healthier America. And the Secretary of Transportation, 54 years old, had already joined the parade back in December, when he and the Secretary of Health held a pull-up competition in a cordoned-off section of an airport near the nation's capital, between travelers, right next to the restrooms.

Seneca would have delighted in this government, in the spirit of ridicule. It trains the body in front of the camera while leaving the mind unsupervised. It displays strength and reveals weakness, because anyone who constantly films himself lifting weights no longer has any strength left for thinking, and perhaps that is precisely the purpose of the exercise. The nation's highest health administrator revealed more about the condition of its leadership in a single squat than any speech ever could. He wanted to demonstrate how to stand securely. He demonstrated how to fall.