H. P. Lovecraft's novel The Lurker at the Threshold is, like much of his work, uneven. At its best, it's atmospheric as hell, and has some scenes that will haunt your nightmares long after you turn the last page. (I swear, I'll never look at a stained-glass window the same way after reading that book.) It's the story of a man named Ambrose Dewart, who returns to rural Massachusetts after inheriting some property that had passed down in his family from a mysterious great-grandfather "whom no one in the family talked about." Upon arrival, he reads a set of instructions that had come along with the deed, and finds a baffling warning that he should not damage a stone tower located nearby "lest he abandon his locks and guards."
It's a phrase that's peculiar and evocative, and it's stuck with me since I first read the tale when I was a teenager. Especially since Ambrose proceeds to ignore the instructions entirely, knocks a hole in the tower so he can get inside, and unleashes chaos.
While overall it's a decent story, Dewart's actions always struck me as completely idiotic. If you're in an unfamiliar situation, and you receive a set of ominous directives, why would you blunder in and do the exact opposite? Especially when the implication is by doing so, you're getting rid of something that might be vital for protecting you?
I must say, though, that my sense that "no one would do something that stupid" may have to be revised, now that I've watched the last four weeks of actions by our so-called government here in the United States.
Just in the first month of Trump 2.0, he, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the various other lunatics in charge have:
- withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization
- stripped funding from the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, including ending research into cancer prevention and treatment
- proposed revoking the Affordable Care Act and making drastic cuts to Medicaid
- ended the CDC-led "Wild to Mild" flu vaccination campaign, just as flu-related hospitalizations reached a fifteen-year high of fifty thousand per week
- suggested that anyone on psychiatric medications, especially antidepressants and anxiolytics, should be taken off their medications and forced to go to mandatory "wellness camps"
- fired staff and cut funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center
- withdrawn the United States from the Paris Accords
- fired staff and cut funding to the National Parks Service
- fired senior staff in the military, replacing them with Trump loyalists
- fired all the Department of Energy staff who oversee nuclear weapons safety
When this last one got out, there was so much public outcry that the administration reversed course and tried to rehire the fired staff, with only partial success. It turned out that the person responsible for the cuts was Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old SpaceX intern -- one of the techbro hackers Musk now has infiltrating the Department of Justice, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS.
And not one Republican congressperson has stood up and said no to any of it. Sure, there are some who are probably loving every minute of this, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the spectacularly stupid Nancy Mace. The scuttlebutt is that a lot of them are horrified, but are "scared shitless" to say anything because they're afraid of reprisals by Trump and his goons.
The media, too, has been largely complicit, for which you can thank people like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong. It's being played as "eliminating governmental waste and fraud," but make no mistake about it. These cuts are not because they're examples of fraudulent spending. You bring in auditors to find fraud, not hackers. These decisions are being made purely for ideological reasons (when they're not just idiotic mistakes, like the firing of the nuclear weapons staff). Epidemics and pandemics sound bad, and things like mandatory vaccinations and mask mandates don't sell well with the MAGA "don't step on muh freedoms" crowd, so no more funding the NIH and CDC. Can't admit that anthropogenic climate change is happening, because it'll piss off Trump's BFFs in the fossil fuel industry, so destroy NOAA, the NWS, and the NHC. The National Parks Service stands in the way of opening up the parks to mining, logging, and drilling for oil and natural gas, so they've gotta go.
And we have to make sure the military is led by Trump's christofascist cronies. The firings went all the way up to the Chiefs of Staff, where Hegseth axed two -- Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and Joint Chairman Air Force General C. Q. Brown, Jr. Hmm... the only woman on the Chiefs of Staff, and the only Black guy.
Wonder what the motivation was there.
See why I thought about Lovecraft's book? Trump has had over two centuries worth of precedent basically saying, "Here's how to keep our nation and its citizens as safe as possible," and his response was, "Okay, I'm going to do exactly the opposite of all that."
Not that this was probably his conscious thought. There's a lot of speculation about his being a Russian agent, and working to destroy the United States deliberately, and I find that dubious. Thing is, he isn't that smart. His thinking never goes beyond (1) this will get people to praise me, (2) this make me richer, and (3) this will keep me out of jail. It's more a case of running roughshod through the government to pad his own bank account and keep one step ahead of the people who might try to stop him.
Yeah, if it causes chaos in the United States, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will be thrilled, but that's not why it started. Trump is more a sticky-handed toddler loose in a museum. He's likely to damage priceless stuff, but it's because he has the attention span of a gnat and zero impulse control, and throws hellacious tantrums when he doesn't get his way immediately.
As far as the other people in charge -- well, Musk is in it for the money, although you have to wonder why four hundred billion dollars isn't enough for anyone. Hegseth, Vance, and Noem are loony ideologues; of all of them, they're the ones most likely to be true believers. As far as RFK, who the hell knows? You look into that guy's dead eyes, and it's anyone's guess what's going on behind them.
Look, I understand that government isn't perfect. Not ours, not any country's in the history of humanity. There are porkbarrel projects and waste and cronyism, and probably at least some outright fraud. But you don't fix it by running around with a chainsaw (which, I shit you not, Elon Musk literally did at CPAC last week). What this represents is a coup by a coalition of fascists and burn-it-all-to-the-ground opportunists, who are using as their public face a man who has never had any thought beyond personal self-aggrandizement.
And in four weeks, we've abandoned -- no, destroyed -- our locks and guards. Maybe it's not too late to put the pieces back together and keep the monsters from getting loose. I don't know. But the Republicans now in charge of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court had damn well better figure out where their spines are and stop this.
Or in another four weeks we may not have a nation left to defend.
Very scary stuff. I've come to the tentative conclusion that at least half the people who voted for Trump -- and even more so those who voted for the kooky Republicans -- are simply insane.
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