By Scott Graber
It is Friday, early morning, sunlight trying to break through a slate-gray, overcast sky.
When most of us think of the French Revolution we think about the overthrow of the monarchy. We remember the nobles shoved into mule-drawn carts and carried across the cobblestones to the guillotine.
But the Revolution was also the toppling of the Catholic Church in France — and removing the purpled-robed archbishops and the rules of morality that had been developed over thousands of years.
On Jan. 20, 2025, as Donald Trump finished-up his inaugural address inside the Capital; a similar revolution was starting in the United States. As he read what he was about to do most of those listening did not hear what he was saying. Or, if they heard, they didn’t believe what they were hearing.
Several hours later one could see and hear the pillars of our government crashing down — I don’t need to recite the governmental pillars that have fallen since January 20 — but the employees at United States AID; Agriculture; Education; EPA: Consumer Protection and every other agency can give you this detail.
The continuing daytime destruction that is now underway began with a sweeping accusation of corruption — sometimes a few specifics — then these stunned folks were told to clean-out their desks and then escorted out of the building and into oblivion.
No, this is not the same as loading shamed, shaved-headed men into a succession of wooden carts; wheeling them past angry crowds to a guillotine where heads are cut off. But, certainly, one can see a parallel between the be-heading of the federal bureaucracy and the destruction of the French Monarchy and the Catholic Church in 1791.
The question that everyone is asking — excepting those in the ICU at Beaufort Memorial — is where does the destruction end?
During this last 70 days the Wall Street Journal; New York Times and NPR have been providing coverage for these firings, or attempted firings, removal of records, or attempted removal of records, and there seems to be no shortage of newspaper reporting on these hourly confrontations and public humiliations.
In the evening network, ad-supported television puts on show after show that repeats the 30 second eviction and then attempts to “analyze” that event with the same tired panel of experts they have used throughout their years of Trump coverage.
This next-to-useless “coverage” does not tell us who is making the raid; what planning attended the raid; where these Musk people meet, eat and sleep and otherwise decide what agency to hit next.
This non-coverage marks the end of the pharmaceutical supported television news reporting — the numbers confirm ever-declining audiences — and it will be interesting to see what kind of digital entity rises-up to fill the void.
Notwithstanding the WSJ and The Times and their consistent, long-form essays, most of us remain in the darkness about where this destruction (of government) is going.
We wonder if this diminished bureaucracy is supposed to function at any level? What administrative functions does Trump considered essential? Will the government be whittled-down to a skeleton-like IRS to collect income taxes; an ever-growing Defense Department to keep the Venezuelans at bay; and some kind of Social Security Administration to write nominal checks to old folks like me?
Those of you who remember your history know that the French Revolution ultimately brought Napoleon Bonaparte to the fore and he — for a time — did some positive things involving education, science and the re-writing of the Civil Code. But, ultimately, the manhood of France ended-up dead or bleeding-out in the November 1812 snows of Moscow. There is a musical overture that celebrates this slaughter.
.“For twenty six years France would wonder and waver under the spell of the Revolution and Napoleon — the greatest romance and the greatest romantic of them all; and half the world would be frightened or inspired by that eventful quarter century in which an exalted and suffering nation touched such heights and depths as history had rarely known before and has never know since.” (“Age of Napoleon,” Durant, page155)
And, of course, we know that Waterloo was not the end of this story — historians argue that France spent the rest of the 1800s trying to shake-off the Revolution and recover some semblance of stability.
And then there was another generational kill-off at Verdun; and let’s be honest about France’s uneven, unhappy performance in World War II.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
