The Great Dismantling

In Washington, D.C. the mood is grim. The administration is ripping the copper from the walls, and we’re all about to lose our heat. Maybe punk offers a way to cut through the noise.

A photograph purporting to show an upside-down flag—a universal distress signal—outside the State Department.

People tend to have interesting reactions when I tell them I’m from Washington, D.C.

Once, on the Oregon Coast, a woodsman and habitat restoration contractor asked me where I was from. When I told him, he chuckled. “Oh,” he said. “You’re from Mordor.” I had to laugh, but it gave me pause. The political is personal here, in a very literal way. “The government” isn’t a faceless entity to me; it’s a million faces—actually about 3 million of them—each with its own features, its own personality, its own origin story. One of them is my stepmother’s, who worked at the C.I.A.—as did many people in our social circle. And right now, the mood here is very, very grim.

A few nights ago, a friend of mine—an investigative reporter who happens to be Southeast Asian—took me to a tiny pizza place owned by a friend of hers. He’s Venezuelan; they met when they both went to the State Department the same day to secure travel visas.

It was obvious the two of them were happy to see each other, but their reunion wasn’t exactly joyous. The news that day was especially grim: The entire USAID staff of roughly 13,000 had just been notified that effective Friday—that is, today—they were to be put on administrative leave. Both my friend and the restaurateur are immigrants, and it cut close. “How are you doing?” he asked her. “Holding it together,” she said, though her expression said otherwise. I could see that her eyes were wet.

There were two other people in the restaurant: A middle-aged white woman and her young black daughter. I couldn’t tell if the woman knew the restaurateur, but she knew exactly what they were talking about. Now she spoke up too. “I can’t believe it,” she said, her own eyes welling up. “People are going to die.”

The despair in the room was a nearly physical presence, and I was touched. People of many different backgrounds and skin tones, all coming together in a moment of shared anguish. It felt like something seismic was shifting, everything moving far too fast, far too unpredictably. Everything we thought we knew is being turned on its head.

Welcome to the Great Dismantling.

In Denis Johnson’s short story “Work,” two men salvage copper wiring to buy alcohol and drugs.

They trek out to an abandoned neighborhood: house after house, decaying under the Iowa sun. As they tear apart the walls, the younger man asks the older one:

“Who owned these houses, do you think?”

He stopped doing anything. “This is my house.”

If there’s a more cutting metaphor for what’s happening in America right now, I can’t conceive of it. But there’s another dismantling happening, a mental and emotional one. What we took to be solid is becoming liquid, untrustworthy. Many of us are panicking, despairing, or tuning out. And it brings me back to a moment I shared with my former therapist, just a few months into the pandemic. “Right now, everyone is finding their world being dismantled,” she said. “But you’re lucky. You already experienced that.”

She was righter than she knew. She was referring to the psychedelic therapy she’d guided me through, but my real dismantling had happened decades before, when I found the D.C. punk scene. Being in communion with others who saw what I did—that there was something we weren’t being told, that the goal of our lives wasn’t merely to accrue more stuff—was life-changing. Even today it’s the copper rod that grounds me to the earth, a core identity I always home to.

I’m lucky I grew up here. This brand of punk isn’t nihilistic or self-destructive. It’s about looking around and linking hands because we need each other—now more than ever. And it’s built on the acknowledgement that no one is coming to save us but ourselves.

We were the canaries in the coal mine, railing against Reagan and Bush. Now that the seeds they planted are bearing fruit, it’s time to remember what we’ve always known. I don’t know that we’re all going to end up on some giant commune with a steampunk grain mill, living off the land and fending off the MAGA zombies. But the ability to turn down the noise and focus is a survival skill, one we’re going to need more than ever. And we can start by tuning out the static.

During the first Trump administration, I read a deeply unsettling book called They Thought They Were Free (if that’s not a punk title, I don’t know what is.)

Written by an American Jewish journalist and academic named Milton Mayer, it chronicles his yearlong stay in postwar Germany. His mission was to find more or less ordinary people who’d joined the Nazi Party and learn what motivated them (if this sounds familiar, it may be because I’ve written about the book before).

Though written in the early 1950s, the book is eerily prescient. One of its subtexts is the power of illusion. Early on, the Nazis passed what was called the Enabling Act, transferring law-making powers from the parliament to the executive branch. What followed was known as “rule by decree”—or sometimes “rule by chaos.” It worked something like this:

Adolf Hitler would issue a proclamation, directing all the energies of the state into countering some urgent threat. Then, a short while later, another even more urgent proclamation would be issued—quite possibly contradicting the earlier one. Very soon, people became numb to it. How do you stay alert to so many alarms? In the words of one of Mayer’s ex-Nazis:

“The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?”

We Americans got a taste of this during the first Trump administration, but this time they’ve gone pro. Ezra Klein speaks about this, more or less, in a recent podcast episode (Substack hates offlinking, but search “Don’t Believe Him Ezra Klein” and give a listen).

The basic premise is that—just as Adolf Hitler did—Trump is harnessing the power of illusion to project total control. But despite Republican ownership of both houses of Congress, the President is politically weak—for now. But once total power is seized, it is never willingly given back. Right now the rule of law is so thin we’re seeing through the holes in the fabric. Sooner or later, it will tear—and then we will be in some new, and very frightening place. Again, from one of Mayer’s book:

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained…one no more saw it developing from day to than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

We may not be able to stop what is happening, but we absolutely have power over how we relate to it. It’s time to drop our notion of what’s normal, and allow ourselves to be dismantled.