by Charles Carreon
February 19, 2025
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Insanity has invaded the highest offices in the land. The criminals have taken over the government and are prosecuting the cops. And Hakeem Jeffries can’t even find the bat-signal to summon Batman to save Gotham. I am reading words off the page, comprehending their significance, but a part of me says that what they are telling me just can’t be, unless I went to bed in one dimension and woke up in another, where instead of being a continuous institution with consistent policies, the federal government has decided to turn and rend itself to fulfill the revenge fantasies of a crazy old man whose rantings now rock the foundations of the world. An Anti-Atlas, this new American political Frankenstein, shocked into life by the torments of his prosecutors, is now up and about, seeking to visit the retribution he promised his followers, unconcerned with how it works out, or if it works out. As he staggers toward his personal apocalypse, in his mind, the destruction of the entire earth would be collateral damage, a pyre of empire fitting and suitable for an ape man who never rose above the law of tooth and claw.
Oh, you think I hyperbolize! It cannot be that the FBI agents who worked to convict J6 rioters are suing to prevent the President from doxxing them for the J6’ers, crazier, more empowered by impunity than ever before, and likely to cause somebody grievous bodily harm from a patriotic motive, inclinations that got them locked up once before, until their gangster President pulled the biggest jailbreak since the Bastille fell. But no, this is what the FBI agents’ lawyers wrote in a motion for temporary restraining order to prevent them from having to fill out a form with twelve questions that would identify them as targets for the same purge that already claimed the jobs of hundreds of J6 prosecutors:
Not only do Plaintiffs assert that they are likely to be terminated in the very near future (i.e., the week of February 2-9), but also that their identities and personal information could easily be leaked or published to make them targets for the convicted felons who were recently pardoned, or any number of other bad actors seeking revenge. Indeed, some personal information about FBI agents has already appeared on the dark web, and Plaintiffs have reason to fear for their own safety and that of their families.
Federal employees have been the people least worried about job instability, yet here they are, with the passing of the Biden Administration, they see the passing of their own federal careers, as if a king had been deposed and his courtiers ousted. This has never been the way of Washington. Before my father went to Washington to claim his job in the Johnson Administration, after twelve years as a loyal New Deal Democratic legislator in Arizona, he talked about “getting a GS-13,” and I thought it was the type of airplane he was going to fly to DC on, but it turned out to be the employment ranking system. He went in as a GS-11 in the Department of Labor in the mid-sixties, and I was in military school in Virginia, so during vacations, we’d walk around DC. I also remember him standing on Constitutional Avenue, as we looked at the two rows of government buildings flanking the great thoroughfare where so much history had been transacted, and said, “Son, the Government is the engine of the economy,” and as he did, it was as if all the buildings were giant motors powering this great machine called the nation, keeping it humming, keeping the tractors running in the fields, the trains on their rails, the airplanes tracing their contrails through the sky. It was all mysterious, vast, powerful, and it was the work of caring for humanity that was done in those buildings. Inside, where my dad worked, everyone was intelligent, polite, respectful, even though I understood from my dad that some people were not easy to work with, but nevertheless, work with them he did.
When Dad came back to Arizona, having served enough time to get a posting back to his home state, he had an office upstairs in the Post Office on Central Avenue. I’d go up there to see him in the afternoons after I got off school, and he’d introduce me to his fellow workers at the Department of Labor. Not quite as smart and sophisticated as the folks in DC, but still real nice guys who seemed to do their jobs. My Dad, though, he really did his job. He was a contract supervisor, and he made sure that people who were getting paid to run job training programs for the Government actually trained some people to get jobs. He made programs spend the money they were allocated, didn’t hire too many of their relatives, and actually tried to perform the terms of their training contracts. And he did it live, and in person. Sometimes he’d show up right when I got off school, pick me up and take me on a drive a few hundred miles to go see some folks in an office in a tiny town. I’d wait in offices, reading a book, while he did business. One day he came back out to the car and showed me a check for about $8,000 – money he said he’d found stashed away in a little account, unspent program money that as he observed, “was just waiting to be stolen.” Because he was on the lookout for fraud, waste, and abuse, and he didn’t let it happen on his watch.
Dad considered himself a public servant, an attitude he would push onto his fellow public servants, the police. Whenever he got pulled over, he’d make a comment about the officer being a public servant, which coming from anyone with less confidence than my Dad, could of course lead to undesirable consequences, since most cops believe the public’s there to serve them. But it was his way of putting the relationship on the right footing. He knew he wasn’t supposed to speed, but he also knew that the cops are supposed to play fair, and have to prove their case in court if you fight it. Because they are public servants, and they have to play by the rules of being a public servant.
Treating Government officials from the President on down to the street sweeper like public servants is really the only right way to treat them. The idea that we need to elect “strong leaders” is obviously extremely dangerous. Following that notion, the fools who dominate the red state electorate have nicely hung a rotting albatross ‘round the nation’s neck for the next four years, and if we don’t die of infection from pestilent moral decay, we will certainly end Trump’s tenure with America’s reputation at a previously inconceivable low, with our economy devastated by self-inflicted injuries such as the deportation of much of the low wage labor that feeds us, the rewarding of criminality among high and low, and the theft of intangible assets by the horde of techno Nazis swarming over the government under the moniker of DOGE, a nonexistent entity that isn’t headed by Elon Musk, at least according to the latest lie filed by the DOJ today, that will be rolled into the new lie tomorrow.
A good government official is a trustee, because they care for the resources of the many with the same care they would apply to taking care of their own property. The Forest Service acting like a trustee would be a good thing for the forests, whereas a Forest Service that was managed to profit the head of the Forest Service, or the timber and mineral industries, would not be a good trustee. Because the rules of trusteeship are simple – manage the property as if it were your own and never use it to gain a secret profit for yourself, because that profit belongs to the “fiduciaries,” the persons for whom the trust was established, and not to the trustee. The trustee gets a fee for good management, and what is good management? It’s management of the asset that puts it to the best, highest use. When it comes to parkland that also has oil under it and trees on top of it, or a lake populated with endangered fish that is also a favored spot for boating, it takes government workers some effort to balance these needs. And it’s true that the federal government has done a poor job of being a trustee of public resources, failing to collect oil royalties, funding unprofitable logging, prioritizing mining interests over recreational and farming interests, etcetera. The answer is not to fire all the bureaucrats, but rather, I would argue, to instill a spirit of public service and trusteeship into the government workforce.
Oh, well this is a lovely time to talk about that, when FBI agents are being marched into cattlecars and sent off to administrative Gitmo, when CFPB employees have to sue to keep their agency from being shut down overnight by Russell Vought, when the entire federal workforce is being purged just for the hell of it. Well actually, when the building’s been knocked down, it may not be a bad time to talk about how it should be built. Admittedly, it’s a scary subject. When hell’s empty, and all the devils are here, as Shakespeare put it, it seems a strange time to talk about how we could do things if we weren’t getting destroyed. Like, when will we ever get back there, to someplace sane, where reality is restored to its former condition?

Saturn eating his son, by Francisco Goya, 1820
Perhaps sooner than we expect. Without minimizing the danger to the nation, which is extreme, this is a nation of laws, not men, and I believe that after the novelty of being governed by an old man’s pique and caprice wears off, there will be a return to sanity. And at that time, we will be rebuilding a government that is now in the process of destroying itself. We will still be staggering from the shock of seeing Trump devouring the federal bureaucracy like Saturn cannibalizing his children, when vital functions of the economy, greased by the gutted bureaucracy, start to stutter and seize up, and the fools who cheered on the destruction cry out in dismay, at last realizing that it wasn’t their bravado that was keeping the world running. It was just hard work by a lot of people the President and his Pet Bigot Billionaire despised because they were actually useful. Too late, the idiot flock will realize, we need government to keep us safe, fed, educated, and employed. Of course, we’ll never get there unless some gods of the Empyrean bless us with the sense to unplug from social media and release ourselves from the digital yoke that the Zuckerberg – Musk axis of evil has hung ‘round our collective neck. Because until we free ourselves from the control of these media manipulators, and assume the power to govern ourselves, we will continue to be governed by those beloved of the oligarch class – criminals and fascists.