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Thursday
A reader has just reminded me that DOGE—the acronym that Elon Musk invented for his “Department of Government Efficiency”—was also the word that the Republic of Venice once used for its head of state. I’m sure Musk knew this when he came up with the acronym since he aspires to be America’s unofficial head. That fact leads me to two passages, one comic, one not.
The comic one appears in the The Court Jester, a 1956 Danny Kaye comedy that was the first videotape owned by our family. (To this day, my sons can quote large swatches of it by heart.) The scene I have in mind has Kaye, a Robin-Hood type spy named Hawkins who is masquerading as an Italian jester, covering up the fact that he knows nothing of the Doge of Venice, even though he supposedly has been sent by him. King Roderick, who has usurped the throne, asks about the doge, prompting Hawkins to dodge, deflect, and finally launch into the kind of tongue twister for which the actor Kaye was famous. The imagined scenario he invents could describe the bumbling incompetence of Musk’s DOGE team, where everyone has the knives out for everyone:
King Roderick: The Duke. What did the Duke do?
Hawkins: Eh… the Duke do?
Roderick: Yes. And what about the Doge?
Hawkins: Oh, the Doge!
Roderick: Eh. Well what did the Doge do?
Hawkins: The Doge do?
Roderick: Yes, the Doge do.
Hawkins: Well, uh, the Doge did what the Doge does. Eh, uh, when the Doge does his duty to the Duke, that is.
Roderick: What? What’s that?
Hawkins: Oh, it’s very simple, sire. When the Doge did his duty and the Duke didn’t, that’s when the Duchess did the dirt to the Duke with the Doge.
Roderick: Who did what to what?
Hawk: Oh, they all did, sire. There they were in the dark; the Duke with his dagger, the Doge with his dart, Duchess with her dirk.
Roderick: Duchess with her dirk?
Hawkins: Yes! The Duchess dove at the Duke just when the Duke dove at the Doge. Now the Duke ducked, the Doge dodged, and the Duchess didn’t. So the Duke got the Duchess, the Duchess got the Doge, and the Doge got the Duke!
So DOGE Musk is going after essential government employees, thereby sinking Trump’s popularity ratings—which might, if history is any indication, ultimately result in Trump going after Musk. It would be comical if there weren’t thousands of people having their lives upended, not to mention the beneficiaries of the services they administer.
Essentially Musk is aiding Trump in turning the government into one large grift machine, one in which bribes, nepotism, conflict of interest, and corruption will play increasingly large roles. Already it appears that Musk is going after those watchdog agencies that were monitoring him. At the same time, he is steering new goodies towards himself, including government orders for his Tesla cybertrucks and a special FAA contract for Starlink.
All of which leads me to the other great northeastern Italian city, Florence, in which the doge equivalent was the podesta. (I acknowledge that I’m cheating by moving on from “doge,” but I think you’ll find it worth it.) In Lord Byron’s poem The Prophecy of Dante, we hear about Cante dei Gabrielli da Gubbio driving out men of genius like Dante and replacing them with “gilt chamberlains.” After years of service to his beloved Florence as a member of the White Guelph party, Dante never returned because of threatened execution.
While government employees aren’t Dantesque geniuses, they are certainly superior to their replacements. Over just this past week, we’ve seen a Donald Trump, Jr. hunting buddy chosen as the nation’s top food regulator, a three-star Trump-supporting general replacing the far more qualified Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., and rightwing podcasting shock jock elevated to Deputy Director of the FBI. All of these Trump sycophants, as Byron puts it, stand “sleek and slavish, bowing at his door.”
For all the GOP mantra of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the current federal workforce, which is chosen through a merit-based system, is actually well-qualified, hardworking, and committed to serving the public. A Washington Post in-depth study debunks the myth federal workers are lazy, concluding that “they work longer hours than their private-sector peers.” The reason, the study’s author thinks, is because of “dedication to their mission.”
This certainly fits the profile of every government employee I know, including a number of former students. Without exception, their major reason for going into government service was “to make a difference.”
Back to the poem. Byron’s Dante describes a man of genius such as himself as
the meanest brute
To bear a burthen, and to serve a need,
To sell his labors, and his soul to boot…
But although “toil[ing] for nations” may leave him poor, it also means that he is free. I think of how so much freer those Republicans are who have broken with Trump than those who continue to grovel before him.
Still it’s hard, and Byron notes the difference between the adulation that nations may bestow upon their “sons of fame” and the wretched state they leave them in:
And how is it that they, the sons of fame,
Whose inspiration seems to them to shine
From high, they whom the nations oftest name,
Must pass their days in penury or pain…
The speaker contrasts these geniuses with governmental suck-ups (“he who sweats for monarchs”), describing such people as
no more
Than the gilt chamberlain, who, clothed and fee’d,
Stands sleek and slavish, bowing at his door.
Dante observes that their earthly power, while it resembles God’s power “in outward show, “ is least like God’s “in attibutes divine.” These people tread on people’s necks—or in Musk’s case, fire them—and then assure us that their rights come from God:
Oh, Power that rulest and inspirest! how
Is it that they on earth, whose earthly power
Is likest thine in heaven in outward show,
Least like to thee in attributes divine,
Tread on the universal necks that bow,
And then assure us that their rights are thine?
There you have it: self-righteously citing a great cause and higher mission (“waste, fraud, and abuse”), those unleashed upon us by Donald Trump are rampaging through the federal workforce and our constitutional order. They’ll emerge from the experience with a tidy profit after having degraded life for the rest of us.
Their souls will have been hollowed out as a result. But that appears a tradeoff they’re willing to make.
