EAST MONTPELIER – On an early spring day in 1958 I was tooling north in Constance Green, my trusty old Plymouth, on Route 9N in New York State, with Lake Champlain off to my right. The frost heaves were fierce, but in those days I treated them more like ski jumps than speed bumps. I did notice that on some of them, I was getting a groaning, rumbling sound from the area of my left rear wheel. Hmm, I thought. I’ll have to take a look at that when I get home, and sped onward.
A little south of Port Henry, I hit a major bump. The sound in the nether regions grew very loud; Connie seemed to stagger; and I was treated to the very unusual sight of my rear wheel passing me on my left. I pulled over very carefully, prayed that the wheel wouldn’t roll out of sight or down the bank into the lake, and began the long process of putting it back on with lug nuts borrowed from the others.
Ever since that incident, which could have ended far differently and unhappily, I’ve been alert for a repeat of the unique sounds that preceded it, and can report happily that I’ve never heard them since.
Till recently, that is. Lately I fancy I’ve been hearing them from the area of our nation’s capital, where Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops seem to be infesting the great paddy wagon of State. (If you’re not familiar with the Keystone Kops, your education is incomplete. Luckily, these days you can google them.)
I learned years ago, in my contracting days, that in order to get a job done right, you had to have the best people available working with you, and then assign them to the jobs for which they were best suited. Every task had to be done right, from waterproofing a concrete foundation with tar to getting the crown moulding just right. To this day, whenever I go into a house I’ve never been to before, I unconsciously scope out the joints of the window and door trim. If I find one poorly done, I try to sit where I can’t see it, and certainly never mention it. The operations of the current administration betray little thoughtfulness or proper attention to detail.
First off, the people. If ever there was a place for the pick of the litter, it’s in the choice of cabinet heads. The person in charge of the biggest budget, the military’s, should be someone respected by the hundreds of officers under his command. In these days of slapstick governance, however, we have instead a man whose qualifications, though not militarily insignificant, are shadowed by a tilt toward toxic masculinity, disdain for homosexuals and women, and a conspicuously tin ear when speaking with the brass. Apparently unpopular within his department, he’s unswervingly loyal to the president. This may cause him serious problems (a common malady of Trump associates) if the international court finds him guilty of extrajudicial murders of crews of small boats in the Caribbean. It will avail him little (the defense died with the Nuremberg trials) to plead he was just following orders.
The list of relative incompetents goes on. There’s little to be gained by reciting all the misappointments. The Secretary of Health and Human Services (it’s pretty easy to get under his skin at committee meetings by asking pointed questions) has fired his entire staff of scientific advisers and replaced them with loyalists who believe, among other things, that life-saving vaccines cause autism. The Attorney General has managed to botch the appointments of prosecutors assigned to try to convict the president’s most-hated adversaries. It’s hard to see a rosy sunset in her future.
The Secretary of State, probably the glibbest of the Cabinet, speaks with such staunch adherence to whatever is the current party line that I’m constantly looking for buds in his ears. At the moment he’s flacking a “peace agreement” that essentially gives one of the parties everything it wants, in language apparently translated from Russian. And Homeland Security, the young lady who poses in military gear (but with hair and eyebrows just so). When she wrote about killing her puppy because “he wouldn’t behave,” and appeared with her masked goons rooting out people and children who don’t look like us, that was it for me. It was sub-human.
My friend Bea and I, when we manage to be together, often talk about where the country is headed and whether it’ll get there during this awful administration. She’s often distraught about it, which bothers me. I’m slightly more optimistic. I’ve heard the sound a vehicle makes before the wheels begin to fall off, and I’m hearing it now.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
