Trump, Chainsaw Massacring

THE DREADED TRUMP-MUSK CHAINSAW mows inexorably on, doing its daily damage, slicing up one government agency at a time, the latest carnage reproted duifully on the nightly news, like wartime London neighborhoods blasted to bits by the blitz. Its all happening so fast that nobody can yet calcuate the damage being done, or predict future harm. The government, like the nation, is large, and it will take time to undo so much of it. The remaining bureaucrats are hiding under their desks, the way baby boomers did in their classrooms in the nineteen sixties to avoid Russian atomic bombs, hoping they won't be next. A better metaphor might involve cattle lined up, walking one at a time into the guillotine. Just the other day the monster reached the Environmental Protection Agency, which, may it R.I.P., is essentially no more. The building is apparently locked up, as are most of the offices; their former occupants were allowed to quickly remove their personanl possessions, and will continue to receive their paychecks, for a little while. Although it still exists formally, in name, it has essentially ceased to function. When the courts finally decide what is already obvious; that only congress, and not the president, has the constitutional power to destroy government agencies, Trump and his clever attorneys will be able to cleverly say that that they did not eliminate the EPA, they merely cut it down to size. Trump, with the stroke of a pen, also declared that every thing the agency has eve done, every regulation it has ever instituted, is now null and void. Thereby, on paper at least, the United States is reverting to the level of environmental protection it "enjoyed" in 1970, which,essentially, was none. In the nineteen sixties it became more obvious than ever what had been obvious for a long time; that the air, soil, and water were being heavily polluted, and that the ecosystem was in trouble. A new science of studying and measuring the health of the ecosystem was born: "ecology". I was in ninth grade in 1969-1970, and I joined the "econolgy club' at the high school. I remember one Saturday we went as a group to a local cave where parties were often held, and picked up what must have been a thousand empty beer cans. It seems strange now that a Republican, Richard Nixon, signed into law the Clean Air Act, the Clean wter Act, and the Environmental Protection Agecny. Although Nixion was an environmentel crusader compared to today's Republcians, he basically went along with the Democrats in their environmental protection agenda, for reasons of political capital. In 1970 America's rivers were burning, her lakes choking to death in sewage, and the air quality in her cities was filty. I can recall standing on a sreet corner, Hollywod and Vine, in Los Angeles at high noon, surrounded by what I thought was deep fog. No, a local assured me, we were stangin in smog, not fog. All that has totally changed now, much to the credit of the EPA and the clean air and water laws. But now, here we are, in the era of Trump, destroying it all as if it doen'st matter. Whetehr the rivers and lakes will one again burn, and the air will once agains stink, time will tell. Mayb, despite Trump's new inviation to do so, we the American people and nation and corporate oligarchy will refrain from reverting to our formerly filthier ways. That may be asking for a lot, come to think of it.