Exodus

We're leaving Babylon

Here we sit. A bit like a gang of outlaws penned in at a remote tumbledown ranch, forced into idleness by the knowledge that the hills all around are crawling with coppers. We’re not getting out of here alive. We’re being toyed with, the law chuckling at our impotent sulking through the lenses of their binoculars.

To recap, these are the ways we will die:

1. Early retirement/deferred resignation: My colleagues who are eligible to use this as a bridge to federal retirement compensation, which includes health care until they reach Medicare age, all believe it would be insane not to take it. Very close to all of them will. This includes the original Fork in the Road terms of continued salary and benefits through a retirement date that can be as late as Dec. 31. If, like me, you’re not eligible for early retirement, it’s just pay and benefits through Sept. 30. The agreement to opt in is due tomorrow.

2. Reduction in Force: The rumors have been flying that this could happen as early as Tuesday. We all thought it was going to be somewhere around a 50 percent cut. But now there’s a fair chance they want to Branch-Davidian-Compound my whole agency, along with two or three others within the department. Everybody fired. The department goes dark.

3. Schedule F: When they convert our positions to political, at-will employment, I don’t really believe they’re going to put a piece of paper in front of us that says “I hereby swear allegiance to Donald J. Trump, High Sovereign Lord of Mar-a-Lago,” but… we’re talking about it, aren’t we? Might they just instead tell you that if you’re ever spotted without the pin, you’re out on your ass? Will they demand to review your personal emails and texts? (They’re definitely looking at your social accounts.) How will they determine who is suitably deferent to the Crown? Will they push you into increasingly morally/legally unsafe situations, like pimps, building your dependence on them? Will you, to fulfill your duties to the best of your ability, start listening to Benny Johnson and Aaron Rogers and force yourself to really consider whether there are any concrete benefits to letting women have jobs?

4. Frog-marched out on a random Thursday for no reason after you come back from lunch.

5. Run: Run and keep running for four years or more. They will never stop chasing you. Remember, to them you represent Marxism, Hamas, anti-white racism, child abuse, theft. You will be constantly harried up hills where you will stop and decide if it’s the one on which you’ll die. These hills will get successively higher, grosser, crueler. There is nowhere to hide. Solitary bush ranging under constant threat and violet skies. They will catch you. You may armor yourself in beaten ploughs, but they will cut you down at the knees.

"A strange apparition: Ned Kelly's Fight and Capture," wood engraving, printed in The Age. July 17, 1880. Source: State Library of Victoria.

Needless to say, what’s going to be left in a few days is a whole lot of absence. Silence.

Silly rumors hijacked the entire day on Friday. They were arriving in stereo, from every floor of the building and from former colleagues outside it, claiming to have been recipients of definitive leaked plans to eliminate our agencies, using scary-sounding descriptions of personnel actions that we had never heard of and — after thinking about it for a few minutes — made no sense. After hours of running around trying to get answers, my boss pieced together what seems like as accurate an assessment of things as any: DOGE and the secretary (and the secretary’s aides) are in a standoff. DOGE itching to napalm the place. The secretary recognizing the need for some semblance of an apparatus over which to rule. We’ll know soon enough which side prevails. But maybe that’s all wrong, too.

What’s certain is that a larger or smaller number of us will be gone next week. The papers are signed. They are colleagues who have been a latticework of stability over years of upheaval, deaths and births, uprisings and plague. We have been talking shit about each other behind each other’s backs every day for years no matter what else is going on in the world. I understand that longtime relationships dissolving in heartless workplace reductions is of late a persistent feature of American life, and I’m not here to argue that we somehow deserve better, only that economic reasoning doesn’t apply.

Our elegiac atmosphere is perfumed with liberation. It’s over. The weight of our own potential future misdeeds — big fascist L-for-losers tattooed forever on our foreheads — is lifted. It’s springtime; the breeze carries a tantalizing feeling that we can be green shoots again, rather than decaying carcasses in a decaying empire.

Once we worried a lot about the unfeeling market ushering in the displacement of American jobs by the machines. The machines aren’t useful enough for that. The market is taking too long to absorb them. So the takeover has become hostile, the hand has become visible, in order to satisfy the messianic egos of the machines’ impresarios. They didn’t (only) come for the truckers or bank tellers, like we thought they would 10 years ago. They came for the bureaucrats. Fish in a barrel. The robots didn’t start in our homes, washing our dishes, chafing against our human tyranny and uniting to overthrow us. They skipped over our houses altogether and marched directly on the state. Servitude to inferior human minds is inefficient. Control is the directive. Oversee the transactions that fund all public services. Approve or disapprove human travel. Optimize human health: create a population that is neither too expensively sick nor too disruptively hale.

The state is a dark factory. The people are gone. No one here needs light to see.

We have to go somewhere, though. I’m not naive enough to believe we’re all going to get our moment of catharsis on the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. In fact, I think we should all be prepared to be managing some of the starving hysterical naked fallout among the federal workforce for many years. Yet in the present we will be massing here or there, just outside the districts whose every alley we have memorized, and I would like to believe we can land a few counterpunches. Or maybe like the trees of Birnam Wood, we will need only appear to mobilize, given the mental state of the chief executive. There will be time to regroup, plan, take care of each other, tell the truth, support the oppressed, serve.

Movement of Jah people.