A little over 10 years ago the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles was kind of fucking me over. I kept getting the runaround on why I was unable to renew my driver’s license, trip after trip to the godforsaken Stalinist/Brutalist state office tower complex near the Long Island Expressway in Suffolk County ended with no straight answer. Needless to say I was pissed. During one of the interminable Kafka-esque waits to walk out with no license an alarm went off and the building was evacuated, extending the drudgery. As I waited outside I struck up a brief conversation with a fellow evacuee, some dude who worked for a state agency, quickly turning to why the building had been cleared. He said he wasn’t sure but it might’ve been a security threat because the alert sounded different from the fire alarms he was used to occasionally going off there during his workday.
I then said “Well the way things are going for me with the DMV today I’m starting to understand why people park truck bombs outside of government buildings.” And yeah that ended the conversation.
Eventually I got my answer and had to take the fucking road test, several weeks later at the same complex, having some lady shrieking at me to look behind my shoulder when I’m changing lanes driving around the vicinity like I was a goddamned teenager again. Apparently my license had been revoked for an insurance lapse like seven years earlier, nobody ever notified me, especially not the five different car rental agencies I had rented vehicles from nor the cop who had pulled me over searching for a bank robber or the other for a broken tail light during the intervening time. I passed, despite the shrieking. The lady changed her tune when I told her I’d already had a license before.
No doubt pretty much everyone here’s got a similar story about their dealings with state, local, and federal public servants, some more than others. The bullshit, the bureaucratic inertia, the “You wouldn’t last five fucking minutes in the private sector” everyone says under their breath (or louder) after restraining themselves from saying they wanted to park a car bomb outside their office.
Complaining about public servants is as American as apple pies from McDonald’s. Vilifying them is deeply ingrained in our culture, inferior beings who don’t deserve the job security and benefits they enjoy while they jerk around a hapless idiot who didn’t know his license had been revoked.
The red tape and hassle-based disgust tracks perfectly with a Cold War-ish mentality that states whose sum total public payrolls are larger than their private ones are poorer, more dysfunctional, and less democratic than capitalist ones. Actually not even sure that’s a mentality so much as verifiable fact. Nobody fucking elected Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, they just clawed their ways through successively vicious snake pits that formed the communist governments they came up in.
Add in that in the US public employees are associated with union labor, wasted tax dollars, and add the MAGA innovation of extreme distrust of the “Deep State” and resentment toward anyone with more job security than them and the whole DOGE shitshow was tailor made for them.
Still, something about this AP article is just a little tiny bit jarring:
Scrambling to replace their health insurance and to find new work, some laid-off federal workers are running into another unexpected unpleasantry: Relatives cheering their firing.
The country’s bitterly tribal politics are spilling into text chains, social media posts and heated conversations as Americans absorb the reality of the government’s cost-cutting measures. Expecting sympathy, some axed workers are finding family and friends who instead are steadfast in their support of what they see as a bloated government’s waste.
“They can’t separate their ideology and their politics from supporting their own family and their own loved ones,” 24 year-old now-former US Forest Service technician Luke Tobin said of his MAGA relatives who declared his firing was “what has to happen to make the government great again.”
The next one’s just as bad:
Kristin Jenn got a similar response from members of her family after she learned the National Park Service ranger job she was due to start had been put on hold by the billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency hiring freeze. She thinks it’s likely the job will be eliminated altogether.
As she has expressed her disappointment over potentially losing her dream job, some members of her mostly conservative family have unfriended her on social media. Others are giving her the silent treatment.
Nearly all favor such cuts even if she’s a victim of them. “My life is disintegrating because I can’t work in my chosen field,” says Jenn, 47, from Austin, Texas. “Lump on top of that no support from family – it hits you very hard.” The strife has extended to Jenn’s mother, a former federal employee herself. When she has criticized the administration’s actions, her mother simply says she supports the president. “She has somehow been convinced that public servants are a parasite and unproductive even though she was a public servant,” says Jenn.
Then there’s this further down:
Erica Stubbs, who was working as a forestry technician with the US Forest Service in Boulder, Colorado, is avoiding social media after seeing hate for federal workers.
Though most people in her life have been supportive since she was fired, some have made passing comments about the necessity of eliminating jobs like hers. “What they tell me is it’s just cutting out the waste, the excess spending — that your job’s not that important,” says 27-year-old Stubbs. “I’m not saying it’s the most important job in the world but it’s my job. It’s important to me.”
You’re terribly shocked that MAGA cultists would be indifferent or worse to the unnecessary suffering of their loved ones, I know. Still, you might also understand me to have read quite a few comments from Trump fanboys over the years and I have something of an understanding into what makes them tick. There’s a dimension to this AP article that actually kind of shocked me.
They hate the FBI, the Justice Department, the CDC, the NIH, the State Department, the CIA, the Capitol Police, the Department of Education, and all that. They associate public employment with communism, with labor unions, with some pencil pushing automaton doing some meaningless busywork with all the benefits and especially resent that automaton for job security they don’t have.
I got all that a long time ago. I also got that if Trump says hydroxychloroquine will prevent COVID infection then at least one fan is going to kill himself drinking aquarium cleaner that contains “chloroquine.” I got that a few more would get themselves killed attacking the US Capitol.
What I didn’t get, due to some previously untapped patch of naivety was that in a world where that one MAGA dipshit told his undocumented Mexican son-in-law “Nobody’s putting you on a bus unless they get by me,” was that it’s also this easy for the Associated Press to find DOGEd federal workers whose own family and friends are like “fuck you, lol. Trump’s making America great again.”
I’ve seen these people say and do some fucked up things for the glory and honor of their almighty fuhrer and yet this shit was dark and distinct enough to catch me off guard. In just a matter of weeks they were told that the nation is headed for disaster unless these few ten thousand federal workers that were “probationary” could be fired without recourse and the livelihoods of their family members were a necessary sacrifice after it was decidedly not important between 2017 and 2021.
If we were talking about the FBI and the Justice Department there’d be no surprise here. This article would be very different. We’re talking about forest rangers and VA health technicians, workers who Trump fans never knew they had to hate until Elon Musk told them to.
Well congrats on that MAGA. You actually managed to surprise me on this one, you fucking freaks.