I can’t see the clogged toilet pipes of the world’s most expensive and advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, currently stationed in the eastern Mediterranean on a mission to punish Iran into abject surrender, as anything but symbolic.
Late last year, in a single four-day stretch, the ship suffered over 2,000 plumbing breakdowns. Engineering teams worked 19-hour shifts. The pipes, it turns out, are too narrow for a crew of over 4,500, leading to frequent clogs. Clearing them requires acid flushes costing $400,000 each—and these can only be performed when the vessel is docked. Additionally, the crew, typically deployed for six months, had been at sea for eight months already—serving in European waters and the Carribean off Venezuela—and was finally headed home when it was ordered to Iran, and it is suspected that T-shirts and mop heads are being stuffed up the toilet pipes deliberately as a form of protest by demoralised sailors.
Basically it is a sh**-show.
Meanwhile, the world floats on in grand denial of such prosaic, plumbing-related issues. As foundation-model AIs cachet up their acts, the internet steadily loses its collective mind. Punch, a baby macaque (with a little help from Seedance 2), takes on a dozen adult monkeys, slipping and kicking to the beat of ‘Kung Fu Fighting’. Jackie Chan hurls Godzilla off a suspension bridge. Three-month-old babies recite classic film monologues. Street dogs give interviews in immaculate Bhojpuri.
It didn’t take long for the ‘most powerful man on earth’ to join the fun. Using the new tools, he inserted himself into a historic Olympic ice hockey final, scored the winning goal, physically beat up members of the Canadian team and was embraced by Team USA.
This could be pardonable if, after getting his jollies, he had disposed his private dream into his laptop’s trash can. But, instead, in a moment of supreme cringe, he posted it to Truth Social, thus making a win after two whole decades of arduous training, grit and persistence entirely about his pudgy, orange self. (No wonder he is such good friends with our prime minister—a man so eager to celebrate our sporting victories that he has lent his name to our largest stadium, and congratulates athletes large-heartedly with ads in which his image is larger than theirs.)
The point is this: AI has made it seductively easy to go fully delusional. We can use them to bring our wildest, sickest, darkest dreams to life, then spend the rest of our days salivating over them on loop, entirely disconnected from reality.
But reality exists.
Reality is Thermocol drones and Chinese dogs at AI summits. Reality is young women from the northeast being grotesquely abused in Malviya Nagar. Reality is 5,500 faecal coliform bacteria per 100ml of Ganga water—60 times the desired limit. Reality is powerful men’s names surfacing in the Epstein files.
Coming back to the woes of the Gerald Ford: it is the floating, E.coli-infested arena where Trump’s tough talk and mighty posturing hits ground reality with a resounding squelch. A $13.3 billion battleship, brought to its knees by faulty plumbing.
Deepak Chopra, apparently, told Epstein, “God is a construct, cute girls are real.” I am no wellness guru but here’s my take. Delusion is a construct. Poop is real.