My mind is not right.
The Washington Post interviewed more than 275 federal employees over the holiday weekend for its story on the purge of probationary employees. That’s so many. Waves of abrupt, intruding emergencies crashing down on each one of them. And in my mind, those emergencies have become shrieking phalanxes of ghouls hanging from my rafters, rattling my windowpanes, singing drunken discordant barcarolles in my ears.
I’ve become convinced that my wife and my child and I are going to die in a retributive Hesgethian blitzkrieg over the remaining pockets of non-compliance.
It’s the Fall of Saigon out there.
A kindergartener took a nothing plastic toy from one of my children (remember, I’m including some misidentifying head-fakes) at pick-up, and I’m ready to press an aggressive case against her at whatever court is left standing. If the brazen theft and deceit of the adults is inexorable, then godfuckingdamnit, at least this kid is going to pay.
I can’t focus on anything. I’m overeating. Dumping spoonfuls of sugar on already-sugar-spiked cereal for the first time since I was ten years old. I haven’t scheduled the physical that was due at the end of last year. My 8:30 a.m. Wednesday meditation class is no longer viable, with the return to the office every day. Zouzou keeps a handful of dried branches in a vase on top of our dresser. Eucalyptus, I think. They’re directly beneath the heat vent. As I fall asleep each night, the air from the vent rattles and whooshes through them. If the current was a bit slower, you could mistake the sound it makes for a nice cozy fire in the library. Instead, it’s a roar from somewhere more infernal, horrific. The whipping, popping static of zero percent containment.
Elon Musk’s dreadful face is the last thing I see in my mind after I close my eyes at night and the first one I see before I open them in the morning.
I can’t go on like this.
The truth, though, is that I remain employed. The mortgage will be paid next week. I haven’t yet been compelled to set my back to the gears that are crushing thousands of helpless people (including the ones who voted for this). I’m being left largely alone. I haven’t deleted a website or winked while explaining that of course the sound you’re hearing from the attic is only mice, Hauptscharführer. While I am in no way organized enough to have written down my red lines in advance, nobody has asked me to cross one. (Yes, I would be more certain of that if I had, um, written them down.)
The probationary employee I wrote about last week still hasn’t been fired. Why? What’s going on? What dirty drug deal is keeping the scalp hunters away from this particular settlement? [These sentences were written Thursday, Feb. 20. Close to that same time, late in the evening like rats, they fired her. I had also written a paragraph positing that there must have been some skilled maneuvering by individual lawyers and administrators behind the delay here of the purges occurring elsewhere. So much for that. It must be said as plainly as possible: they are lawbreakers and wrongdoers. If nothing protects us from them, nothing protects you. You will be commanded to perform more and more elaborate acts of fealty, like a circus bear, to prove that you possess the one thing that might save you: your partisanship. What will Little League games in the suburbs look like later this spring? When the families who have been stolen from are thrown together in heated competition with the families of the highwaymen? When the bats are all laid out in neat rows?]
Where is DOGE? Everyone is asking me that. I have nothing to tell them. Sand through our fingers.1 Is this South Asian kid in the Taco Bell line with the uncanny tailoring and ostentatious eyeglasses, perfumed with San Jose sagebrush, one of them? Phantoms. Malware. In what systems are they lurking? I don’t know.
The people who should be most offended by DOGE are the lawyers, journalists and dogged citizen whistleblowers who have spent decades watching for government waste on your behalf. The hyper-capitalists are doing it purely for themselves, to remove all barriers to their own acquisition of every last square inch of our commons. Does the illegal hotel guy really think he can out-investigate Jason Leopold? If he doesn’t have to follow any rules, sure, maybe he can — if no limits exist to the privilege over our private information that he’s been granted by virtue of his wealth and obliviousness to the concept of humility. And why should he think he has to follow rules? He is, after all, the illegal hotel guy.
Smart people keep saying “I imagine they will also uncover a fair amount of actual bloat and corruption.” Will they? Why are you so sure of that? Is it because your 7th grade history teacher read you a list of dumb overpriced shit the government bought once? Are we going a-hunting for people who are ripping off the government?2 Let’s do that, then. If I were a Member of Congress, I especially would think long and hard before saying things like this and joining the DOGE Caucus, considering that oversight of federal spending is my job. Not the unelected monkey torturer’s. Mine. One of the first things you learn about public policy is that you have to listen to people who are wrong. An AI democracy where every decision is the correct decision is not a democracy. Correct for whom? Incorrect people are also part of a democracy. Just look at Nov. 5. This is one very significant reason why responsible public administration is fundamentally at odds with a techno-utopian messianism convinced based on one ayahuasca ceremony that it is the sole possessor of some immaculate set of gnostic social insights. This remains true even when you are in fact blessed with political leaders of rare insight and intelligence. Elon Musk is… not that.
Meanwhile, we are bereft of the orienting landmarks that might rein in some of the mind’s more feverish umoorings. Yes, the Democratic Party is one of them. Also, the White House Correspondents’ Association. A shameful roster of universities. New York City. These are some of the satellites whose gravity might have calmed our quaking limbs. Zouzou thinks I’m being too harsh with them. But I’m really not saying this to spit poison in their eyes. Just that without any discernible agenda from these quarters, overwhelming dislocation and disorder is what floods one’s spatial awareness, like what happens when you step on a last stair that isn’t really there.
No, none of this is strictly sane.
What’s happening is all truly devastating stuff for families and their neighborhood businesses and the cities where they live — something that’s especially hard to take after spending most of my adult life tolerating appalling inaction about the single biggest problem humanity has ever faced in the name of minority political rights — but at least the arrests and disappearances haven’t started. [Puts finger to earpiece.] Ah, I see, ok… I’m being told Kash Patel has been confirmed to lead the FBI.
The old rag and bone shop is alive with monsters. The silence is punctured by little skittering feet. I ask myself how to be a parent or a partner in the midst of it all. And have no answers. I sit in the office and try to counsel my employees about the professional advantages of detachment while jumping at the sound of my own boot tapping the plastic base of my chair. “Don’t let their anxieties become your anxieties,” I caution them, referring to the crazed program managers who once took me in and taught me and who are now dancing on the precipice of ruin.
The desperation is spreading. I feel like all I can do is ride it toward whatever outlet it will find, without any sense of grounding, without any faith in any moderating organs of social cohesion, ducking from the flames, hoping I don’t completely lose it before it does.
This is another thing that might have be in the process of changing by the minute. Surely the long delay then sudden firebombing of our probationary employees is not coincidental to DOGE’s hooded presence.
When I was ranting at my boss about this, huffing about how sick I am of the assumption that there is any legitimate basis for DOGE, he responded: “we did get rid of the Politico subscriptions.” Air out of the balloon. Ok, we did get rid of the Politico subscriptions. First, that wasn’t DOGE. That was a White House high on revenge. But here’s Politico’s scam: high- and mid-level officials really want to see their names in the paper. Basic human vanity. Realizing this, Politico publishes a number of newsletters where they print a lot of high- and mid-level officials’ names. Not beatific by any means, but there are worse symbioses in the animal kingdom. The real problem with it is that Politico charges government agencies $2,000 PER USER for one (1) annual subscription to a newsletter. That’s why career officials like my boss who harbor no deep resentments against the press generally or Politico in particular will say something like “we did get rid of the Politico subscriptions.” Because they got greedy. They were ripping us off. But that’s not exactly government inefficiency. That’s a usurious private firm. So, again, is that whom we’re hunting?
I don't know what to say to this post. In many ways, I feel what you're feeling; I'm terrified by what terrifies you, as well; and I want this all to end. Please hang in there, and I will try to do the same. Thank you again for the work you do.