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Government is Passive-Aggressive and Sadistic

I can’t write about my second civil service job for security reasons. I can, though, thank you for paying me for a few years.

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Carl Kolchak’s typewriter

What I can do is point to locked restrooms in Owego, New York, as a symbol of how the “deep state” of mind-numbingly stupid government operates.

If at any time taxpayers demand fiscal responsibility and leaner government, bureaucrats respond, at best, passively-aggressively, and, at worst, sadistically. Like, for instance, firing the employees who guard and clean our highway rest area bathrooms. And locking the doors to the toilets.

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I used to visit my parents by either taking the slow boat route through Cortland, Ithaca, Spencer, Lockwood, and so on. Lots of speed traps. Lots of absent-minded professors driving Saabs and Volvos. Lots of hay wagons.

Or else I’d take I-81 to Binghamton, then I-17, or whatever it’s called now. That route was longer but faster. It also boasted the benefit of a rest stop near Owego, if I couldn’t hold it until Waverly and the parental toilet.

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no trees

One trip, I was very unpleasantly surprised to find the facilities locked. There was a note on the door which said something equivalent to, “Due to taxpayers demanding fiscal restraint, we hereby ask taxpayers to show bodily restraint.”

This is how the bureaucracy, the civil service, government, politicians, and the not-so-deep state show us their displeasure.

When we demand better government, they close rest areas and lay off maintenance personnel. They stop filling potholes. They stop stocking our trout streams. They close call centers and fire low-level human beings at phone banks and put us on hold.

They make small, nasty, passive-aggressive or even sadistic taxpayer-facing cuts in ways that inconvenience and torment us. The IRS will surely put us on hold. We’ll get our Social Security or Medicare checks, but we’ll have to wait for them.

As Basil Fawlty would say, you’ll get your cold veal when he’s good and ready.

What you won’t get is a better hotel. Or better government.

And our government is Basil Fawlty writ large.

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Open rest area, happy wife. Owego, NY.

I Had Two Federal Jobs. My Take on DOGE.

I graduated with honors in Government from St. Lawrence University in 1979. My head filled with theory, I entered government service that September, and met Practice.

Practice won. Theory was squashed dead.

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Idealism died as a Contract Specialist at the United States Department of Energy.

With no training whatsoever, I was expected to okay contracts and send out federal funds to happy recipients. On day one, I was led to a small fire hazard of a room with thousands of different forms, not unlike the room below.

“These are contracts,” I was told. “When you need contracts, this is where contracts are located.”

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The contract room. Watch your step.

That very first day, I sent $25,000 – a lot of money in 1979 – to a guy in Colorado who wanted federal funding to find better, smarter, and faster ways to turn chicken manure into some kind of gas. Remember that those were the days of Jimmy Carter and energy shortages. Feeding chicken shit into your Buick seemed like a swell idea to Jimmy Carter.

I had to call the guy – a chicken farmer, I presume, or an impending one – to give him the good news.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“No sir.”

“Who are you really? Did Jake put you up to this?” he asked.

He got his money.

The next day, the supervisor called us all into his tiny office. It was about September 1st. He was tiny, too – this was 1979, before calories were invented – so he stood on his desk and exhorted us to speed up our contract dispersal.

“We have to get all our pending contracts approved and out the door before October 1st. It doesn’t matter what they’re for, just get them out! Otherwise we won’t get even more money from Congress for the next fiscal year!”

What a surreal pep rally.

All of my formal “education” about government, from stellar professors such as Bob Wells and Bernie Lammers, was discredited. The government is really all about spending indiscriminately so as to be able to beg for even more money to burn the next fiscal year.

I could have saved four years of fake education at SLU by just going down to Bob Merrill at Merrill Brothers Hardware.

Bob would have told me something like, “Government is a joke.” And he would have been right. At least in my first little adventure in it.

Education and idealism are utopian. Practice and reality are what hits you upside the head for real.

Meanwhile, can I interest you in some KFC thanks to some birds that failed to shit enough?

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It’s what’s for dinner tonight.

A New World Order is Coming

The three most powerful nations are in the early stages of transitioning the world into a new geopolitical arrangement.

President Trump clearly wants to go down in history as the initiator of this new order. It will destroy the outdated, antiquated, gasping remnants of the 1945 world order.

Please notice that this is a revolutionary, progressive movement. Normally we think of Democrats and liberals as progressive; in this matter, they are the reactionaries, the czars, the mandarins of the past.

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Trump believes that America is being bled dry by international demands from the 1945 way of things. The only way to stave off bankruptcy and decline and still pay for things like health care is to rearrange the world.

We will indeed “get”, in at least an influence sense, Panama and Greenland, and North and South America in general. We may retain the last vestiges of Europe, of England and France and maybe Germany, after they finally buckle under the demands of military buildups combined with maintaining their munificent social welfare spending.

Or maybe the second great new power, Russia, will get Europe.

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They’ll certainly get Moldavia, the Baltic States, and the Ukraine. But they’ll likely get the rest of Eastern Europe, too, at least as strong allies. Maybe Germany.

And, of course, China is the third leg of the new world order. The United States and Russia still do not fully trust the Chinese, but they may come around. The Chinese, for their part, still harbor fantasies of a totally Chinese-dominated globe.

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Not likely. As soon as reality sets in, and they get hegemony over Taiwan and Asia and maybe even India and New Zealand/Australia, they’ll settle into the new swing of things. And be happy for it.

Trump has already floated the idea of an American Israeli-style “Iron Dome” total coverage anti-missile system for the U.S. I expect the next “float” will be a proposal to sell versions of it to Russia and China so that they do not freak out. Or to invite them to share the development and costs of such a system.

A U.S., Russia, China iron dome would create great stabilty for these three dominant powers and their citizens, as they would then be able to (mostly) stave off attacks from terrorists, terror states, and rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran.

Or from whoever. For there will always be rogue states wanting “in”.

This will all be to the approval of most of the citizens of the world. Notice Trump’s re-election. Notice the rise of populist (they really aren’t right wing) parties all over Europe.

Most people, most places, in most times, have preferred stability. They don’t like social change, the kind where you don’t know what pronoun to use, and where you are required to attend college campus/North Korean-style re-education training sessions. They like to know their place in the order of things.

I’m American. I’m Russian. I’m Chinese. These are solid things that people can get their arms and their minds around.

And this is why liberals are impotently dancing and singing and swearing.

They thought they were the progressive ones. When, sadly, they are the conservative ones, the reactionary ones.

I’m not endorsing any of the above. I’m just trying to read the situation.

And what I see are a bunch of people trying vainly to hold onto the past. And another bunch lurching forward toward something new and filled with potholes. They’d better all get a grip on reality.

Fast.

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