The Cabinet of Chain Saws

Trump's team to fell the trees

With every cabinet appointment, I hear a chain saw.

It’s a visceral sound that you feel more than hear, both in your bones and in your stomach. Because that rnn-nn-nn, rnn-nn-nn brings destruction, death. It’s the sound of broken peace and panic and horror movies. Audible unease.

Last spring the chainsaws ripped through the mist of a dreary Saturday morning. I didn’t want to look, but forced myself anyway, just in case someone had gone rogue and was threatening the lone tree in our tree lawn.

Down the street, a rag-tag team was on the ground beneath a hundreds-year-old tree, picking up the debris dropped by a man high up in the canopy. He was suspended, swinging about in a sling, slicing through branches as thick as your waist.

The tree was healthy, a massive specimen whose only crime was shading out gardens and providing cover for creatures that humans find pesky.

I was horrified and angry and sad and helpless. After all, what right do you have to stop a tree from being felled when it’s not yours?

As a family, we had to leave the house. We could avert our eyes from the destruction, but we couldn’t escape the noise.

Big, great, things like that 100-foot tall tree take generations to develop. That it takes mere hours to fell them doesn’t discount the investment it took to create them in the first place. It just means they are more vulnerable than their heft and size would make them seem.

And it means that putting the pieces back together, remaking what was lost, will take decades.

When the great St. Louis tornado of 1896 cut through a nearby park called Lafayette Square, it completely demolished the bandstand and countless neighborhood buildings. But it was one resident’s reaction to the destruction of the park’s towering trees – which were snapped like toothpicks and strewn all over the lawn – that has always resonated with me.

As he looked out over the park from his balcony, he wept, saying “It took forty years to grow those trees, and I shall never see their like again. The house I can repair, but my trees are gone forever.”

Image Credit: St. Louis Public Library Digital Collection

Especially in our microwave-style society where three seconds is too long for a website to load, there is something both tantalizing and agonizing about the slow growth of trees. They are strong because they grow so slowly, of course – anyone who’s had a sappy fast-growing tree understands that usually the faster they grow the faster they break.

It takes time – sometimes years – for their roots to establish below the surface and become strong enough to anchor deep into the soil; only then do they really start to grow upward and outward and toward the sun.

But as solid and strong and venerable as trees are, they’re simply no match for a chain saw.

When I think of our great American institutions and vast agencies, I am reminded of hulking hundred-year old trees. They were established many decades ago; they’ve got deep roots that help them weather storms and withstand droughts. They’ve been pruned – sometimes skillfully and sometimes not. They’ve been damaged, and coddled, and mistreated, and loved.

But they’ve always been there, towering over our landscape – so much so that their presence is visual white noise. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine that they could suddenly cease to exist.

But just because it’s hard to imagine doesn’t mean it can’t happen, especially when the incoming administration has promised it.

With every cabinet position that’s been announced, I feel the rnn-nnn-nnn in my bones and my stomach.

The people who are being named for cabinet positions are qualified precisely because they are unqualified; they are well-qualified to destroy.

There’s a Fox News weekend host who has called for “an American crusade” against the left – for the Defense Department. A woman that Russian state TV refers to as “our girlfriend” – for Director of National Intelligence.

A pro-wrestling magnate with no education experience – for the Department of Education. An anti-public health activist – for Health and Human Services. A British/Hungarian/American media commentator who wants to “root out” those who would hold Trump accountable – for counterterrorism.

A tv doctor and grifter for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A registered foreign agent for the government of Qatar and election denier – for Attorney General.

They are not assembling a team to marshal America’s great agencies to help the American people.

They are assembling the team to take up the chain saws.

It would be a mistake to think this chainsaw cabinet can’t fell institutions and agencies in a fraction of the time they took to build. And once destroyed, regrowth is a long and difficult process. It’s best to stop the destruction before it starts, if we can. And, at least for some, I think we can.

Just as activists force loggers to go through them to reach the old-growth trees, actual people can stand in the way and try to protect the agencies that Americans rely upon. In theory, at least, Senators can oppose these appointments. And in theory, at least, we can give our Senators the steel backbones they’ll need to do exactly that.

But our options don’t end there. We can delay with protests and lawsuits. We can make the political fallout of the destruction as palpable and biting as possible with public outcry and shaming and targeted messaging to elected officials. We can write letters to editors and make videos and post on social media and have frank conversations with our neighbors that government infrastructure isn’t crumbling – it’s being cut down from within.

Let’s resolve that to take down these institutions, they’ll have to go through us first. And they’ll have to take full ownership of their decisions – and the very personal and political ramifications of them.

We can force that, friend. After all, these are our trees.

On Wednesday, as I sat at my desk musing over trees and chainsaws and democracy, I saw a commotion outside; through the blinds I could make out a truck with FORESTRY on the side. Dander up, I pulled back the curtain.

Just in time to see a few young men eagerly dig a hole and then gingerly – ever so gingerly – plant a tree.

I think it’s a good omen.

~Michele

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash