Meditations in an Emergency

07/13/2025

The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn’t making that clear. When I was a kid, there was a popular phrase–“what if they had a war and no one came?” What if we were in a war and no one noticed? Obviously all the people under direct attack have noticed, along with all the scientists and federal employees who’ve been fired, the foreign students afraid to come back, the medical professionals who understand what’s happening to public health, the economists who see the wrecking ball swinging, the university administrators whose institutions are under attack. I think most of us feel it and see it and know it. But too many of the powerful voices in this country are downplaying the crisis we’re in, and that tamps down the reactions that could save us.

All the pieces are being reported on, one way or another, but it’s as if someone was just run over by – well let’s just say a giant armored vehicle driven by faceless goons in camouflage dress-up and body armor, since there’s a lot of goons and vehicles like that out there – but the journalists reported it all in close-up, so we got a report one day that a spleen burst and another that lots of ribs were shattered. It’s when you add up all the individual injuries that you see the victim is in critical condition. And when you look around that you see the armored vehicle is revving up for another pass. And another.

If you treat each injury individually, each becomes a distressing and maybe perplexing thing that’s happened but you can gloss over motives and consequences. It’s when you assemble the whole picture that you have to raise the question if the intention is to destroy this country and whether this country is in fact being destroyed. We know that Steve Bannon, who at various points has had a lot of influence over Trump, wanted or wants “to destroy the administrative state,” that an earlier influential far-right ideologue, Grover Norquist, said of the federal government that he wanted “to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” and that some tech oligarchs want to dismantle nation states and replace with with feudalist-totalitarian “network states.” Is that what’s going on?

We saw Elon Musk, who while apparently high as a kite onstage waved a chainsaw around to signify what he was doing at DOGE, actually destroy a considerable portion of the federal government, by taking over offices and departments, firing or sidelining their employees and messing with their data. From the Internal Revenue Service to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the foreign service, staff has been slashed, missions undermined, functionality sabotaged. What are the consequences? Is this like sawing halfway through the support beams of a building? How far can you saw before it collapses, and does it maybe just take a high wind to come along?