I see there has been another acrostic resignation letter. First it was the 17 members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. See their letter here, with its R-E-S-I-S-T message. I had never heard of that Committee before, and after looking at the examples of the "Committee's accomplishments over the years” that are highlighted on its About Us page, only three of which are from this century, I wonder what it was all those committee members did before they resigned and whether the taxpayers will miss them now that they’re gone.
And today it’s one of the Science Envoys the State Department employs as unpaid volunteers, a UC Berkeley professor named Daniel Kammen, who has resigned and put an I-M-P-E-A-C-H acrostic on his resignation letter. I'm sure he'll be missed. However, Science Envoys “usually serve for one year” as it says here, and since Kammen was appointed on March 31, 2016, it looks like he was due to leave about now in any case. So he added a little humorous touch to his inevitable resignation letter. How edgy, kind of.
No one enjoys that sort of gag more than me, you understand. All good clean bureaucratic fun. Back in the Cold War years, I managed to rename the branch for which I worked the “Certification and Core Chancery Policy” Branch so that it could have the office symbol “xx/xx/CCCP.” That office symbol was on the books for about two weeks before a senior official got the joke and changed it back.
About Mr. Science Envoy Kammen’s resignation letter with the IMPEACH message, though, how is it anything more than a puerile gesture? The audience for that is who, exactly, outside of his faculty lounge?
Nothing in the new fad of anti-Trump acrostics will have any impact on Trump himself, surely, or on anyone else who makes decisions for his administration. If it makes any impression at all on them, it will be to confirm the Trumpists’ preconceived opinion of government lifers and political appointees as a hostile Deep State that is to be dismissed or simply ignored.
Enjoy yourselves and resist away, all you many appointees and commissioners out there, but don’t pretend you’re not validating the negative expectations of the guy who got elected.
10 comments:
As they relentlessly march on with absolutely no self awareness.
Okay, this is shameless, but these people remind of this:
https://youtu.be/ZPiR8eX2EpU
TSB: So Florida Maquis' wife came up with the question..Why were those destroyers traveling thru crowded channels filled with large ships when they were rammed? Maybe they were looking for something very dangerous on one of those ships?? Maybe something radioactive? Japan has given up containing all their meltdown stuff at Fukashima and are now paying ships to take it
out to sea and dump it to save their own fisheries. (You can't eat any of those fish.) So there are hundreds of tonnes of highly enriched materials available to the highest bidder. Many hundreds of freighters and tankers have been gathering in unusual places and turning off their transponders to hide their location this year..according to the Brits this is making a mockery of their attempts to monitor imports and prevent smuggling of weapons and people. gwb
James: A little intellectual humor is never inappropriate.
GWB: I think the most plausible theory is that the shipping channels are so crowded, and our warships are so stealthy and hard to see, that these accidents are bound to happen. The solution might be as simple as better traffic control.
TSB: BINGO!! https://youtu.be/MiNUUrSJZF8 Indonesian authorities foil "dirty bomb' attack! (Reuters) gwb
Reuters says "The three counter-terrorism sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the militants had hoped to transform low-grade radioactive thorium 232 into deadly uranium 233." That sounds like the usual aspirational plot in which the sad sack plotters wish they could do something really spectacular if only they had the knowledge and equipment. Two of the five arrestees were migrant workers from Singapore and Hong Kong who were evicted from those places for making jihadi posts on social media. Not the A-team, I think.
TSB: 50 years of public service rewarded!! gwb
Trump Pardons Sheriff Joe Arpaio
TSB,
A theory about these gestures: When people feel compelled to act in ways they do not wish to, like being in the highly challenging position of having to work for a malignant narcissist, they hate the person who makes them act so...but not as much as they hate themselves for knuckling under. A festering self-loathing which becomes ever more toxic with time. It erodes the leash we all maintain on our inner 7th-grader particularly.
Mark K.
Mark,
I can't think of any elected official who isn't a narcissist. It's a narcissist's occupation. The non-elected worker bees who staff the USG's offices have to work for the administrations they dislike as well as the ones they like (if any). When I see one of my fellow civil servants making a melodramatic show out of his dislike for any particular constitutional officer, I think the narcissism must be catching. I say, the political pendulum swings both ways, and if you want to have a career of any length at all you'll just have to endure the opinions of others. Let us cultivate modesty; it would do most of us a lot of good.
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