Severance and Our Own Kier Eagan

Can it be mere coincidence that Donald Trump offered Severance to millions of Federal employees? Or that he has attempted to Sever relations with nations long our friends, Sever contact with immigrants, with transgender people? Sever his reliance on and commitment to Federal agencies, the rule of law, the Constitution, Judges, Prosecutors, the media? Sever our capacity to understand the distinction between private and public conversation, between classified and non-classified, between actual threat and exercise of free speech, free thought. Sever everything we as a country have known as our reality for 250 years?

We need not wait for a third season of Mark S, Helly R, Irving, Mr. Milchick and the others to have our minds altered, to be desperate for an answer as to what is real and what is fiction, to try to distinguish between our innie and outie selves. It is being served to us each and every day on a platter.

We see it in the subservience of those universities, of those companies, of those politicians who feign independent thought but who are controlled as if they were in the vice-like grips of the Eagan family. We see it in the terror in the eyes of students ripped from our society, from their homes and relocated to a place foreign to everything they know, as if they have entered Lumon and taken that elevator ride down into a universe that is cold and barren. Utterly, completely the product of some mythical, mystical universe created by a person Severed from any moral underpinning, Severed from any hint of compassion. Done with malevolence. Dehumanizing.

Donald Trump has in the past been the star of an act of fiction "The Apprentice." Where we were offered a con man with a string of bankruptcies and failed undertakings, a man held in low esteem by so many, somehow transformed into the chairman of a magical dominant world over which he ruled with a thumbs up or down ease. Lives elevated or eliminated at his whim.

And now we have his second, inglorious act. "Severance, the Real Truth and Lies." Playing seven days a week, twenty four hours a day. In our heads and in everything we see, or maybe don't. Starring our own Kier Eagan.