Another glorious week in the Golden Age

Of all the laws this administration is breaking, the one that’s starting to bother me the most is What Goes Around Comes Around. The immunity that both the Supreme Court and some heretofore undiscovered dark arts have granted the president extends like a contagion to everyone in his orbit, all the way to San Salvador and Jerusalem. Conditioned on stories of golden-boy fighter pilots, consumptive gunfighters and teenage physics prodigies who stand for something and not only prevail but humiliate, we wait and wait and wait for some turn of the worm that never comes. I confess now, Father, to once being a boy in America, where the Man Who Shot Liberty Valence was the bravest of them all. Despite our mature awakening to the nation’s closer resemblance to Liberty than Tom Doniphon, the way these stories wired our young brains can never be undone. If they could, it would’ve happened long before Trump II. So instead, this narrative arc just goes on vexing us, twisting us up with fantastical expectations of truth, justice and the American Way long after all that’s been proven hollow.

Meanwhile, we go slowly blind. It seems like my whole office is dealing with one intrusion of time and mortality after another. A blood clot and subsequent amputation. A hip replacement. Old war injuries compounding into new disabilities. It’s like we’re the courtiers and cooks and watchmen asleep and confined for 100 years as the collateral damage of a spell to preserve the life and privilege of one unfortunate, beautiful, precious princess.

We, the civil service, are the painting in the attic.

Friday morning brought more inexplicable good news for these cackling cheaters of fate. I’m not ignoring the vaporization of Wall Street fortunes after the tariff announcement, but I’m referring now to a set of counterbalancing data to which they spent a day pointing for validation and which once again softens the consequences of their own actions. I work closely with this economic data when it’s released every month, and I’ve been through more than a decade of sometimes frantic political narrative creation in response to the cold facts it presents. Everybody spins it. It’s an annoying but generally benign requirement of the president’s balladeers. A good number in this report is a testament to his unblemished magnificence. A bad one is proof of a random, godless universe.

This month’s announcement gave me my first chance to watch the new Cabinet member who runs this place in action. This person is clearly terrible, despite the many rose-colored conjectures over the past few months that this secretary might resemble a normal human being. The whole persona is a passable forgery of the cocksure, aggrieved, dismissive, venal masterpiece of deception that Trump agonied-and-ecstasied into existence decades ago and then parlayed into unfathomable power.

For years now, the right has been lying about this data. The hypocrisy isn’t even notable or interesting anymore. In the years since the pandemic, they’ve honed a few somewhat novel variations on the basic charade that insists it’s all fake. Given our present circumstances — and because they have eyes — they weren’t quite prepared to reclaim the data’s simple veracity on Friday. Everyone thought it would be embarrassing, and then it wasn’t, and then the secretary had to pivot toward spit-shining it and holding it up as another paean to Trump’s genius. The GOP worked hard on those lies, but suddenly they weren’t useful. The lack of sentimentality in the act of gruffly tossing them aside is almost admirable. It matters not one iota that the lies will in all likelihood be useful again in a month. The secretary, like her boss, will simply slip back into them like a winter coat on a frigid April day.

The contrast to the warm, humble, curious, principled conduct of the secretary’s predecessor still grieves me to no end. I should be over it, but I’m not. I’ve worked with half a dozen of these secretaries, and the last one is the first to have me moping around like a dumped teenager all these months after her departure. She knew who she was and what she believed, and she asked for and was granted space to differ with the president and his policy advisors in tacit but important ways, even though she remained intensely loyal to him out of what seemed like genuine love. That loyalty is part of what allowed her to be so much herself. It was elegant politics, without any political guile. She certainly suffered for some of this. Rather importantly, she failed to win over the worst Democrats in the Senate, but the president’s reciprocal loyalty and a lucky quirk of statutory language allowed her to go on serving the communities who relied on her anyway. I’m grateful for that now, in these gloomy days.

The prospect of one more day like Friday, passively accommodating this cabal of liars and degenerates, has me contemplating a renewed offer of deferred resignation that arrived in my inbox late that evening.

I know, good Christ, it’s just so boring, isn’t it? Another round of tedious hand-wringing over should-I-stay-or-should-I-go after another shady shakedown. Same mob terms as before: stop showing up to work now, get paid until Sept. 30, after that you’re out.

This one comes not from the flaming Cybertruck broadcasting from DOGE mission control, but from the legitimate government department where I work. It’s dressed up in legal references and a contract (which also just reinforces how batshit crazy that first offer was), but ask Chemonics about this party’s fidelity to contracts. It’s also targeted. Workers at only a handful of agencies within the department received it. These agencies are, apparently, the genuine enemies of the state. Real dangerous subversives, like the museums and libraries. Still, it shows their cards a bit, tells you a little something about what comes next. I think it means that they won’t be satisfied with the across-the-board percentage they can justify purging via a Reduction in Force.

Beyond that RIF, if you survive, there’s still Schedule F. And with Schedule F, the drone pictures of my kid and me at Saturday’s protest and the receipt for the $47 Harris-Walz yard sign I bought last October are hard evidence of terrorist indoctrination.

And beyond that, there’s actually doing work for these people. An indefinite unspooling of lifeless Fridays, robotically echoing this gaslighting Golden Age nonsense as the global foundations tremble. I take one look at the social media posts we put out now and I want to walk into traffic. Yes, the volume of real work has plummeted, because that work does not exclusively serve corporations. (It absolutely does serve corporations, but because it also serves non-corporations, it must cease and desist.) Absent more than half of my colleagues, though, there will be work. Vile, nauseating, dishonest, isolating, friendless work. The kind of work one enters the public service to escape, at best. Sheriff Jim Clark work at worst. I’m scared to take the offer. I’m scared not to.

So, yeah, I’m wringing my hands again. It’ll be another week of crunching numbers on various severance scenarios, counting weeks until Sept. 30, weighing probabilities. I have until Monday to make a decision. Even a minor triumph like remaining steadfast to one’s vocation after the first Fork in the Road offer is conditional, a moral decision that’s soon invalidated. The tilt-a-whirl spins and spins. I’m sorry for boring you, but none of this was my idea.