Winter Reading⁠↗

Once again, “gov­ern­ment waste” is in the wind, & I’d like to take a moment to immu­nize you against this tired rhetor­ical loop. Not because it doesn’t matter at all; only because it mat­ters so little, it shouldn’t take up any space in public discourse, or in your wild & precious mind.

I’d like to pro­pose a maxim, which is: you cannot cut your way to suc­cess. Any time you see a com­pany penny-pinching, warning their employees not to waste money on the good printer paper: I assure you, that com­pany has already failed.

The truth of life is this: our bodies (all bodies) are not ele­gant machines. They are huge weird messes, full of redun­dancy & noise. Routes are cir­cuitous; work is wasted; ene­mies are present — processes fully rogue. The deepest state! BUT. AND. Our bodies (all bodies) are so vital & resilient that these inef­fi­cien­cies are basi­cally beneath notice.

The watch­words for 21st-century gov­ern­ment ought to come from the vocab­u­lary of life: vitality, muscularity, resilience. Instead of skin-&-bone states, I imagine public orga­ni­za­tions so robust that “waste”, even graft, is basi­cally beneath notice, tol­er­ated with amusement: the way mas­sive sharks tol­erate the tiny fish that swim beside them, nib­bling on scraps. The time to snoop around for “waste” is when every­thing else is going so great you’re get­ting sort of bored. It would be nice!