Everyone Gets Arm Bands and 3D Glasses

I'll be honest, it's not incredibly easy to focus on a) sitting still to do anything like write and b) do so with my expected and established superhuman levels of wit, charisma and bon vivantisme when a lot of the professional universe around me is made of stitched-together what-ifs and intentional, bespoke chaos. I try to monitor things as best as I can, and I have a history as a more or less together understander of things. I have the capability to comprehend events in context as well or better than most probably, it's just that in the years since the invention of the iPhone, I've chosen to let those skills atrophy in favor of becoming a dab hand at Angry Birds or whatever.

Reading the news isn't all the helpful at the moment, when all I can really see is the growing list of agencies targeted and the blood-red, pulsating bolded keyword PROBATIONARY spotting every bit of coverage like a herpes outbreak. I'm not saying specifically if that does or doesn't apply to me, I just know there's no Valtrex available for "unemployed in service of discredited trickle-down theory of economics."

The system so far (if we can generously call it that) seems to be to tie up/fire the oversight people first (inspectors general, the FBI, etc.), then swoop in and shitcan the probationary people. It doesn't make a lot of sense when you're trying to "purge" the agencies in question and you're only keeping the longest tenured people (the ones who know best how to throw the levers labeled Fuck Shit Up), but as intimated above, I'm not sure sense is a massive part of the program here. In a newborn political philosophy born out of the accidental syncresis of Heritage Foundation white-paper porn and Donald Trump's dimming mind, rooted in libertarian fantasy, gluttony and opportunistic revanchism, you get a sort of distilled capitalism we haven't seen since Victorian England. The idea of a blended economy where a portion of the wealth it generates can be translated (via a civil service) to any kind of social benefit is not just frowned upon, but something to be hunted and killed, for the benefit of the people who have the most any people have ever had in the history of humans. Some people might die, sure, but we're reminded it will be in service to a greater cause, the cause of You Should Have Thought Of That Before You Decided To Be Poor/Sick/Elderly.

In the meantime, my main strategy is to try not to read the news, ironically something I now can't seem to stop doing as a compulsion. All those years I spent skimming headlines and calling myself "informed" have really come around to bite me in the ass. I'd call this a penance to make up for allowing my civic literacy to atrophy as it has, only to have a resurgence of interest when it allegedly/potentially affects me directly, but maybe that's also a sign that I'm getting the hang of this New America: the bodies of the fallen are a ladder up if you pile them correctly. Face down, probably, so they can't watch you do it.