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I well remember what it felt like to be 27 years old. Boy, was I a hot shot. I was coming off as a series of real scoops and victories writing for the Village Voice newspaper in New York City. As the saying goes, I was making a name for myself. I had spent a year on the Bebe Rebozo beat of the Watergate story which had recently ended in the resignation and final disgrace of Richard Nixon. I'm not saying that anything I wrote contributed to that grand event, but just being a part of it felt like being a witness to history. At the same time I was covering Nixon’s gangster pal Rebozo in Florida, I was returning to New York to write a series of stories for the Voice about a scandal in the city buildings department. Scams involving empty apartment buildings on the Lower East Side had corrupted building inspectors and real estate paper pushers up to and including the city's Buildings Commissioner. I'd been after him for more than a year, and although he was never criminally indicted, he had been forced to resign, and my stories had gotten me on the Channel 5 10:00 news again and again.
It was heady stuff. The Village Voice had been bought by New York Magazine that year, and the paper’s new editor, Clay Felker, somehow came up with the idea that there was going to be a war in the Middle East and decided to send me over there to Israel to cover it. See what I mean about riding high? By the fall of 1974, it felt like nothing could stop me. I needed a passport to make the trip overseas, so I went up to Rockefeller Center to the passport office and filled out my application. There was only one problem: I didn't have a birth certificate proving that I was a United States citizen. I had been born in Japan right after World War II, and the army of occupation wasn't prepared with stuff like birth certificates for American babies born overseas in what had been a war zone only two years before. What I did have was a Defense Department medical discharge form from the field hospital in which I had been born. It had my mother's name on it, and her date of admission, and then further down on the form it had the discharge order for her and for me, describing yours truly as an infant child and giving my name.
I stood at the passport counter in Rockefeller Center arguing with the clerk, explaining how and why I didn't have an official birth certificate, but he wasn't buying it. It was looking like I wasn't going to be able to get a passport without some sort of intervention by a member of Congress or the like, and I didn't have the time to organize such an influence campaign before the war Felker had assigned me to cover was expected to begin. Just then a guy passed by behind the counter and overheard our argument. He told the clerk I was working with to hold on for a minute and called loudly into a back room, “Hey Herman, get out here. I've got something I want you to see.” A man in his 60s appeared wearing one of those green plastic eye shades and garters around his shirt sleeves above the elbows like a character out of a movie from the 40s.
He took my Department of Defense hospital discharge form and studied it for a moment. “I haven't seen one of these in 20 years,” he said. He pointed to my name at the bottom of the form. “Is this you?” I said yes, and he turned to the clerk and explained to him why the form was valid as a proof of birth, pointing out that I had not been admitted, but I was being discharged, proving that I had been born in the interim.
He told the clerk he would handle my passport application, lifted one of those pass throughs in the counter and took me to an office in the back, and within a half hour, I walked out with my passport, and the next day I was on a plane to the Middle East.
That guy had both experience and wisdom. He knew what a DD Form 204, or whatever it was, looked like, and he knew what it meant. That guy, and people like him in departments across the government, along with their experience and wisdom are what is being lost every day in Washington DC right now, as Elon Musk and his people, some of whom are quite literally teenagers, wreak their havoc on the bureaucracy they call the deep state. You damn right it's deep, and in the case of passport offices, it really is the state, as in State Department.
The damage goes even deeper, with reports that Musk and Trump plan to slash the Social Security Administration (SSA) workforce by 12 percent, some 7,000 federal employees, and close offices around the country. Former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley told Rolling Stone today that the “cuts will result in widespread failures, including checks not being distributed to some of the 73 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits.” Closures of local offices will make it more difficult for people to apply for benefits and to get problems solved when they come up.
Musk is cutting this important and essential part of our government the same way he went after the workforce at Twitter when he took over that company, firing people willy nilly and then rehiring them when systems started to fail and parts of Twitter shut down.
But of course Social Security isn't Twitter. It's a lifeline for senior citizens, especially those with no other retirement income, for whom a missed check could mean not making the rent or eating. The same is true for other parts of the government. There are reports that the chaos created by Musk and his teams of tech wizards has left farmers unable to plan for the amount of seeds they'll need for planting, or even the kinds of crops that they should plant this year. Farmers, being famously unable to count on the weather, depend on local Department of Agriculture offices to help them apply for loans and other programs that cover crop losses from extreme weather and other problems farmers face as a matter of course in their business.
You don't have to get dirt on your boots, or even wear boots, to understand this stuff. The workers in the federal government who help the elderly with their Social Security are not themselves old, nor are Agriculture Department field offices staffed by people who are farmers. They are instead office workers, the people that Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk, and Stephen Miller, and the rest of the right-wing maniacs denigrate as part of the bureaucracy they call bloated, and that Trump continually lies is full of people who don't even show up for work but collect paychecks nevertheless.
It's hard to put into words how dangerous is what is happening every day in Washington DC right now. Reporters are getting quotes from people who have been laid off and are worried about making their mortgages, and there have been reports of food aid to foreign countries rotting in warehouses because of Trump's suspension of foreign aid and wholesale firings of workers for USAID both here in the United States and overseas. Cuts in the FDA and the National Institutes of Health are already affecting programs to track the spread of disease, and they have even gone after offices that plan for the eventuality of new disease outbreaks including pandemics. And that doesn't even address the fact that one of Trump's first executive orders was to pull this country out of the World Health Organization which is involved in disease prevention and health care all over the world.
Expertise and experience and the wisdom that comes with both is being thrown out with the trash every day by Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the rest of these fools who apparently think they will never need help in their own lives. Musk is even said to want to cut the number of air traffic controllers working for the FAA. You would think that with the amount of time he and Trump and their pals spend flying in private planes and now, government aircraft as well, that they would be hiring instead of firing the people charged with keeping air travel safe.
Saturday Night Live has done a fantastic job with their cold openings featuring Mike Meyers as Musk, James Austin Johnson as Trump, and Marcello Hernández as a whimpering Rubio. However, nobody ever did but noooooooo better than John Belushi, and boy do we need him now.
