The Country That Was Here Is Gone

[LudwigPastorius]

The United States handled its affairs with plenty of brutishness and hypocrisy before, abroad and at home. Now, though, everything the government sets out to do is mercenary, vicious, and slapdash by design. It is no longer trying to operate as a great power—even a cynical great power—but only as whatever feels epic to Musk or gratifying to Trump in the moment.

What's striking about the current round of destruction and betrayal is how gratuitous it all is. If he wanted to, Elon Musk could not only have flown every overseas USAID worker home, he could have personally bought each one of them their own Bombardier Challenger 650 private jet. It wouldn't have even knocked him out of the top five in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Instead, he's treating the government like a simulation game, moving the control sliders toward privation and disaster just to watch the little figures scurry.

-snip-

Somewhere behind it all is a political program, like the agenda of the Second Ku Klux Klan refracted through tech supremacy and meme-space. Trump and his square-jawed, alcoholic, white TV-host-turned–Secretary of Defense have issued race-baiting orders and targeted women in military leadership. Musk and his junior computer-goons appear to be lashing out at whatever people and programs they suspect, or a crude keyword search suggests, might represent Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, or any sort of racial or gender integration, or merely the sort of humanities-educated softness that makes someone care about consequences.

After years of complaining that bias trainings and pronouns in bios were the equivalent of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, America's aggrieved reactionary class has brought about its own version of the actual thing: Bands of juvenile ideologues and agitators, invested with the authority of a senile but absolute tyrant, have been turned loose to smash the load-bearing structures of society, guided by pure spite and ignorance. Experienced professionals are being hounded out of their jobs for the crime of knowing and caring about how things work. People and programs and archives are being purged in the most stupid and capricious ways possible. On Friday, the Musk team was frantically trying to undo hundreds of firings from the Department of Energy, once they belatedly figured out that the "National Nuclear Safety Administration" meant not some OSHA-type inspectors of the kind who annoy Musk by trying to prevent worker injuries, but the people who keep the country's nuclear arsenal up and running. "Move fast and break things" now applies to everything, right up to the things that could annihilate life on Earth.

More here: https://defector.com/the-country-that-was-here-is-gone

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Yes.

[Justice matters.]

3. And millions upon millions will suffer and die

because of that ignorance of "consequences" ...

The only species that will survive will be fat leopards.

[C0RI0LANUS]

4. She's singing for the whole country here.

[C0RI0LANUS]

5. She too sang for our country 40 years ago. Vocals, syncopation, counterpoint superb.