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The enduring lie of the present is the sensation that all of it is a) important and b) will be reckoned with permanently. I don't really see any other viable way for experience to work, so I'm not really being critical of the people experiencing the present as such. To go further, it would categorically be a mistake to regard what is happening to you right now as an abstraction to be disregarded as insignificant when considered against the scope of the whole of your lived life. This is how people get hit by cars.

Right now today, it seems relevant to write about and try to contextualize the fact that Kristi Noem was just fired as the secretary of Homeland Security, thus far the biggest casualty of the second Trump administration. This is of course if we're using "casualty" in the sense the political press uses it when talking about the inside-baseball of Washington job shuffling, not literal casualties. Not only are there plenty of them to consider in the non-metaphorical sense already, we're making more all the time.

There was a rhythm to the first Trump administration, where a bunch of pinhead conventional doofuses convinced him he had to appoint a bunch of nominally capable normies to high level positions in order to give his administration a skein of competence/responsibility, like for example former U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis as secretary of Defense, only to eventually discover that neither competence nor responsibility were desirable traits within the workplace culture led by Donald Trump. These boring people would then resign, be fired, or resign but then have Trump proclaim that he had actually fired them, culminating of course in the consistently self-damning public campaign to make sure everyone knows that actually, that person who quit/was fired was actually a useless, traitorous moron. After all the terminations, by my count like 98% of that first cabinet was populated with useless, traitorous morons. To be fair to Trump, in some cases, this opinion was borne out.

This time around though, the administration was much more clear-minded in what they wanted from a cabinet and surrounding officials, which is how you get a Kristi Noem in charge of DHS in the first place: absolute tabula rasa personalities not just willing but eager to leave aside the nourishing ideals of integrity and service for the thin gruel of servility and obsequiousness.

So why fire a parrot when you hired someone with the job description "is a parrot" in the first place? Because sometimes a parrot fails you by actually repeating things you said, for which they must be mercilessly punished.

This is after Noem got beat to hell in a Congressional hearing that covered things like how much money she wasted and whom she was or wasn't boning. It didn't even get to the actual people she's responsible for killing on her watch at DHS, so you know this was some serious shit.

It's unusual because, as I said, in this second Trump go-round, the firings are way less frequent. Since it's right now, it has the feeling of being significant, but go back to that first paragraph: will this actually matter or is it just a moment? Consider that he's replacing her with Markwayne Mullin, by some lights the dumbest person in either house of Congress. Sure, Kristi Noem is gone, which feels like a win, but honestly, how are we even going to notice?

I would say Plus ça change... but I'm worried about a DHS AI bot finding this and prosecuting me for it when French finally becomes illegal.