Gyre widens
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 133

CURRENT EVENTS DEP'T.
How Is Any of This Going to Last Till the Midterms?
THE OFFICIAL IN charge of urban search and rescue for the Federal Emergency Management Administration, Ken Pagurek, quit his job this week, reportedly because the Trump administration's slow response to the deadly July 4 Texas floods was the "tipping point" for him. The rescue teams he oversaw were held out of Texas for more than three days because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had forbidden any expenditures over $100,000 without her personal approval. The same order from Noem was responsible for more than 15,000 calls to FEMA going unanswered after the flooding, because the call center contract happened to expire on July 5 and the people who answered the phones were laid off en masse.
This can't go on. This isn't a normative claim. It's just an observation about the structure of things. For six months, day after day, the Trump administration has been breaking various parts of the federal government out of both ideological malice and equally ideological ignorance, until nobody can even keep track of what's still supposed to be operational. The government is essentially a collection of phantom limbs: people think things are there—it feels as if they're still there—and when they need them they're just gone. Dozens of little children were swept away in a flood, and in principle the government still had elite search-and-rescue teams but in fact when people called the government (if the government even answered the phone) the mechanism to send out those teams was broken.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security put out a statement after Pagurek resigned: "It is laughable that a career public employee, who claims to serve the American people, would choose to resign over our refusal to hastily approve a six-figure deployment contract without basic financial oversight. We’re being responsible with taxpayer dollars, that’s our job." Even within the realm of cold-blooded calculations of the costs and benefits of saving lives, the Department of Health and Human Services currently estimates the value of one statistical human life at $13.6 million.
What else can't or won't the government do? Congress played absurd accounting games to try to conceal how much damage Trump's budget will do to the balance of spending and revenue, but even that assumes that the IRS is going to be capable of collecting revenue at all. So far, air traffic control allowed one military helicopter to crash into one passenger jet, but earlier this week another air traffic controller directed another passenger plane into the path of a B-52 bomber, forcing the airline pilot to yank his plane away from the collision on his own. You can't get on a plane and count on the controllers not steering you into another aircraft.
The president is openly taking bribes. Masked agents are seizing authorized immigrants and sending them off to be tortured abroad or locking them up in deliberately squalid conditions in the United States. The attorney general and the deputy director of the FBI are reportedly fighting about the administration's efforts to conceal the fact the president's name is in the files from the Jeffrey Epstein case. The House of Representatives has shut down early and gone home, abandoning its remaining business for the summer, to avoid Democrats bringing up any Epstein-related matters for a vote.
How is this supposed to keep on happening? Again, this is not about the emotional sense that it must not be possible for the kind of wickedness that has been loosed to continue. It's appalling to think that brutality and abuse are going to keep spreading, but there's no moral thermostat that resets a society when the wickedness exceeds a certain level. Generations lived and died in this country with the institution of chattel slavery securely in place in their daily existence.
A society whose basic functions are shut down, though, doesn't seem likely to endure in its current form for very long. Is it even going to hold on for 18 months, until there can be some sort of new solution put in place with the presumed support of the voters? The sudden surge of leaking and recriminations around the Epstein stories makes it feel as if even the president's inner circle doesn't really believe they can keep things together. No one has a plan for what the next thing will be, but that doesn't mean it won't arrive anyway.

WEATHER REVIEW
New York City to Aberdeen, Maryland, July 22, 2025
★★★★★ The newspaper lay dry on the stoop with no trace of air conditioner drip to be seen. The air coming in was not just cool but hushed. Unimpeded sun made it hard to work on the balcony early, but once the direct rays moved off, the shadows were almost chilly. A red-tailed hawk floated overhead, nearly motionless. The stream flowing down and around the corner from the now unnecessarily opened hydrant glittered in the gutter. Glory rays cut across the western clouds. Down in the subway for the ride to the car-rental place the air was old and hot. It took an extra minute or two to figure out how to make the buttonless slab on the dashboard curtail the air conditioning of the Subaru. The crosstown west was a brilliant golden-white haze. Tiny silhouettes of jet skiers and their spray moved up the blinding silver of the Hudson. On the turn east to get to the tunnel, even a coil of west-facing grimy barbed wire looked OK. Dumb buildings collected their share of the magic illumination along with everything else. At first along the Turnpike the sun seemed lost, but the car came around an outcropping just as the disc slipped out from below the lone cloud that had been covering it. That moment passed and the progress to sunset was lost behind the dark wall of roadside trees, save for occasional glimpses: a vast, dark bat-winged shape rearing up against a sky of lemon yellow; then some far-off slashes of metallic orange; then deeper and deeper reds. Then the visible sky was every color at once and no color at all, and then the car was driving through the featureless dark, crossing the unseen Susquehanna, on its way to the warm and insect-thrumming country night.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!


ADVICE DEP'T.

HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.

SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Encyclopedia of Cookery; 1001 Recipes, Menus & Rules for Modern, Scientific and Economic Cookery (Vol. 4), by Eugene Christian and Molly Griswold Christian, published by the Corrective Eating Society in 1920, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
CRAB MEAT SANDWICH
Mince the meat from one or two hard-shell crabs. Add the same amount of finely chopped celery and a bit of pimento. Mix in mayonnaise dressing sufficient to make a paste and season with paprika. Spread between slices of buttered whole-wheat bread.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .

SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
