The National Guard ending crime in Washington D.C. Screen grab via video by Fox 4
The National Guard ending crime in Washington D.C. Screen grab via video by Fox 4
He is the Big Boss now, boys, so we’re going to do what the Boss wants. Pick up that Starbucks cup! Groom that mulch! Move that median! It’s in the President’s way!
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
I don’t know exactly where it is, but somewhere in the Bible, there has got to be a verse that says, First God created work; then he created make-work. It took exactly two weeks for the 2,200 National Guard soldiers deployed in Washington D.C. to hit the make-work stage. Today, uniformed National Guard soldiers were seen in the touristy areas of the District in orange and yellow safety vests picking up trash. More soldiers were laboring over near the Tidal Basin raking mulch. The Washington Post reported that 200 employees of the Park Service used to do those jobs, but Elon Musk and DOGE came to town and decimated the Park Service, and now there are only 20.
So, with a couple thousand Army guys standing around doing nothing, the White House said, let’s put them to use. Or maybe nobody had to say anything. That’s the way make-work works. Yesterday, at his three and a half hour Praise Our Lord Trump Fest of a cabinet meeting, Trump announced that he had solved the D.C. crime problem. Someone at the White House clearly noticed that there was starting to be some reporting, complete with pictures and video, showing soldiers standing around D.C. street corners and hanging around the Mall doing nothing. A bureaucratic tendency quickly came to life: What you do with vacuums containing nothing is, well, you fill them, and if you can’t come up with anything to fill the vacuums with, then you fill them with nothing, which is the very definition of make-work.
With a guy like Trump, that’s easy. If you’re an ass-kissing underling eager to make the boss happy—in other words, the entirety of the current Executive Branch—you quickly examine the boss’ obsessions, another thing that’s easy to do, since he comes up with a new one about every three minutes, and harps on his older obsessions during the two minutes in between. Our nation’s capital isn’t beautiful enough for him, so he’s been going on about “beautification.” There is trash on the streets and in the parks. Something is wrong with the “traffic medians”—he doesn’t say exactly what the problem is, but trust me, there is an entire floor of the Executive Office building trying to figure it out, so they can do something to fix “the medians” and make him happy.
The way it works in the Army is the way it’s working in Washington D.C. right now. What you do is, you clean and polish everywhere the boss is likely to walk, drive, or observe from a helicopter. Soldiers are dispatched to pick up trash along the road the commander drives to work every day. On Army posts, the “main drag,” as it’s called, from the post gate to the headquarters building, is groomed to within an inch of its life, the same with the roads taken by lesser commanders to their headquarters—grass cut to a measured height of inches, sidewalk edges trimmed, trash picked up, signs straightened so they’re perfectly vertical, fresh paint on every visible surface.
At the commanders’ headquarters, the nit-picking gets real nitty. Names of commander and staff are stenciled on parking spots; rocks chosen for the perfection of their size and roundness are painted white to line the sidewalks.
In Washington D.C. right now, metaphorically the National Guard is painting rocks. Trump’s obsession with traffic medians doubtlessly comes from the infrequent occasions he is stuffed into the back of his bulletproof SUV appropriately called “The Beast” and driven the few blocks necessary to get him to a location such as the Federal Reserve headquarters, to give a recent example. Traffic medians efficiently move the traffic from lane to lane. Trump’s security convoys create lanes and efficiencies of their own, of course, so medians must appear superfluous to him. Or perhaps they are unsightly. Or maybe he saw a Starbucks cup resting against a median curb one time. Who knows.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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