Mrs. Parenthetical and I just finished Death By Lightning, primarily about the converging paths of President James Garfield and his assassin. I thought it started good and got better. 

An undercurrent in the plot is Garfield’s anti-corruption stance. We (well, many of us) learn that in one of the era’s more ironic plot twists, real civil service reform was ushered in by President Chester A. Arthur (portrayed by Nick Offerman), who had originally joined the Garfield ticket as VP after building a career on the patronage/spoils system that Garfield had opposed. 

Some of you may also recall that Chester A. Arthur enjoyed another 15 seconds of fame as the subject of an important riddle in the second-best Die Hard movie.

But I digress. The Pendleton Act that Arthur signed into law started to shift certain government jobs toward an exam-based meritocracy rather than a “who do you know” or “whose palm can you grease” structure.

Which would all seem moderately arcane if it weren’t so ironically, impeccably timed alongside the Trump administration’s efforts to deconstruct the stability that the modern civil service has given to both its employees and the public it serves. No accident that these efforts open another front in the right’s war on expertise, deploying an Orwellian mantra about meritocracy while dismantling the very protections designed to rank merit over political whim.

There’s a lot you can count on MAGA not being able to comprehend, but somewhere on the list is the value of a core of knowledge and experience behind countless government functions, regardless of who is in the White House or controlling Congress at the moment. They can’t grok it because they’ve been raised on “gubmint bad!” dogma that (what’s the limit on irony for one post?) also programmed them in turn to vote for people who neither believe that government can work nor know how to make it work.

The other thing MAGA cannot comprehend is the existence of civil service workers who believe in doing their job to the best of their ability regardless of whether they voted for the Current Occupant or not. It’s as foreign to them as a brown person with legal U.S. residency status. Well, almost as foreign.

The most literal example at work is the administration’s efforts to fire labor board officials and unravel longtime civil service protections. As Vox explained recently, the right is coming at this from another angle as well, as it deploys SCOTUS to allow the executive to hijack a lot of agency-level authority from Congress, where it has resided for, well, centuries.

When I said MAGA can’t comprehend the value of what they’re undoing, that overlooks the scenario that they’re creating: Potential upheaval across many important agencies with every change of administration, chronic knowledge drain, and a system that will inherently discourage those with valuable skill sets from applying to serve.

Do they think that will result in a better, more efficient government? Or do they even bother to imagine how a Democratic administration might take their own turn at this newly opened battleground? Of course they don’t. Partly because it’s not their style, but also because they rightly assume that Democrats will not seize those reins as aggressively. We try to build and maintain while they are acting out of half-thought, ingrained rage. Rage and deconstruction are always easier, and always harder if not impossible to fix.

At least the spoils/patronage system encouraged a sort of stability, as corrupt as it might’ve been. This onslaught can’t even aspire to that. It’ll just bring on the bureaucratic equivalent of mood swings and chaos. Because that’s how DJT rolls.

I have no happy ending here, so let’s pivot this back around to Death By Lightning. Garfield is played by Michael Shannon, who is having quite a year. In addition to this show, Shannon spent a chunk of 2025 on tour with a tribute to R.E.M.’s Fables Of The Reconstruction (there’s a title we could dive into further …).

How great was R.E.M.? Forty years later, there’s a successful tour in honor of the 4th-best album of their first four albums.

As evidenced in this clip, the lineup included Wilco’s John Stirratt on bass, and Shannon could hold up his end of the bargain just fine. As for the rest of us? Even as the logical consequences of Fealty Over Competence rear their ugly heads in both the FBI and DOD this week, our destination feels like it’s still a ways away …