23 January 2025

This past week, I read another inaccurate headline, online — for where else would anyone in the USA find the disembodied head of a news story that isn’t really a news story, is scarcely half-correct, and doesn’t go with the body of the story?
This clickbait money-model is dying hard, but methinks it will die, kinda like the Tyranny of the Bureaucrats.
The headline proclaimed The Era of Technocrats Running The Government is Over.
I sighed, more heavily than I usually do over the inaccuracies disguised as sensational reporting of a sensationalized event — which is usually a Statement Somewhere on Social Media.
Firstly, the past era, of about 50 years, has not involved the rule of government by technocrats. A technocrat at least knows some form of technical skill, often to the exclusion of any other ability, including common sense.

Secondly, this past era of mediocre yet monstrous governance of We the People has involved bureaucrats, bureaucrats, and nothing but bureaucrats: The upper tier tinpot tyrants are the Feckless Fonctionnaires that so chokingly clog up Brussels, the Eurozone, and the United Kingdom which looks terribly un-united in the here-and-now.
Sometime in the early-mid 2000s, round about 2004, my beloved homeschooling colleague asked me why do I think there are so many piddly government jobs, filled by ignoramuses, clogging up progress on any project, with organizational charts like a banyan tree?

I replied that it’s because of all of those do-nothing Baby Boomers, who, with their worthless college degrees, lack any marketable skills. The Government, or Daddy Sugar, had to come up with jobs for them.
My erudite friend sadly agreed.
Ergo, the productive members of society, the ones with technical skills and specialized know-how, have to put up with the spoiled-brat, self-entitled slackers. Those uppity lazy-bones prefer that the intelligent, industrious and ingenious busy-bee workers kow-tow to them, the Drones.
We worker-bees, however, have figured out ways to work around the laggards. A significant portion of our energies has been devoted, for decades, to inventively devising entire road-maps to get around Officialdom’s road-blocks to the realization of our goals.
Here, in California, the savvy operators among us have mastered the fine art of survival. It’s been decades since we had a real governor, and even longer since we witnessed a real President. We consequently turned those cruddy challenges into an art form: how to quietly and covertly prevail over the petty potentates of code enforcement and regulatory rule-by-inertia.

The traboules in Lyon, France are visual approximations of our steely determination to live life in liberty!
The mind-set and the imaginative perseverance inspired by confronting the latest cans of bureaucratic worms were put to fictional use by this writer in THE DAWN. There’s nothing like successfully dealing with, and prevailing over, inept but foul tyranny to unite people, particularly patriots.
I somewhat miss the camaraderie and creative esprit de corps that I shared with my faithful comrades. They’re no longer with me, except in spirit. That spirit guides me to this day. It gets me up and moving to plow through yet another fiat-roadblock to freedom.
The Tyranny of the Technocrats is, in reality, Intentional Policy-Inducing Paralysis. With eternal environmental analysis!

The most despairing of job-classifications that I ever encountered in the U.S. Government was: Life-Cycle Manager.
It’s the sound of the citizen, working on the chain gang! The Fascist Baby Boomers fostered into our fine nation the fulfillment of The Americans With No Abilities Act!
The Election of November 2024 was, for me, the very long-awaited Patriotic Ballot Enactment of Newton’s First Law of Inertia!
As We the People observe the non-productive bulge moving out of the generational snake, we are coming to a nirvana-esque point in time where worthless jobs for policy-wonk pointless bureaucrats are being deep-sixed, even as I sleep! Because . . .
The tyranny of the bureaucrats is, at last, coming to an end.

I personally, as well as professionally, have known, encountered, and fled the sight of the Non-Producers, from several generations, in my nation. I know that the hellish situation known as Repression of the 1st Amendment has been, rightfully, ballyhooed during the past few years.
How about the past few decades?
My free speech rights got trampled on so many times, years ago, that I quit technical writing/editing for engineers and geologists and, in 2008, engaged in my dream of writing a WWWII novel that takes place, for the most part, in France. The fiction made more sense and had a much closer vraisemblance to the propagandist reportages of reality. It still does.
I’m currently engaged in reviewing my translation of Chapter 23 of THE DAWN into L’AUBE. New characters are introduced, and they’re quite fitting for our current zeitgeist of reclaiming our Constitutional Republic.

Camille’s older sister, Simone, is a delicious character. She is, in fact, every bit what Dear Husband calls her, time and time again. It’s a five-letter word that starts with B.
Her husband is a doozie too. Somehow these two “types” always pair up, in fiction and in real life.
I’d forgotten all about my Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce (24 June 1842 - circa 1914). His short stories are superbly crafted, but are not for the faint-of-heart. Bierce was more a journalist than a fiction writer, but I’d welcome any attempt by any so-called journalist of today to even minimally mimic the man’s devotion to accuracy, reality, and detail.
For anyone who thinks that dealing with a Vaccine Zealot was trying on the nerves, and on that inner sanctum of morally smug blood relatives, I suggest you take to heart the heartlessness of one sister toward another in THE DAWN/L’AUBE. Blood feuds are as old as the hills, be they the Rockies or les Pyrénées.

Like most schoolteachers in wartime France, Simone Gervais, the older sister of Camille, was pretty. Simone was also a pacifist and a member of the French Socialist Party. She looked favorably on the Vichy government as a means of avoiding war, at any cost, but also as a way of rebuilding a thoroughly pure French society and reforming the supposedly decadent morality of France. Her husband, François Gervais, was an attorney, un avocat, who specialized in contract law, although it was a misnomer to call him an attorney-at-law.
François spent far more time finding loopholes in the contracts of his clients to better assist them in evading the law or, at the very least, to give the appearance of compliance. This avocat possessed a talent for detecting the gray areas of French law, and there were many of them, as a means of finagling profits for himself and for his clients. He enthusiastically believed that litigation was a market to be pursued, and he personified the definition of a lawyer as summed up by the American writer, Ambrose Bierce: one skilled in circumvention of the law.

This avocat was very involved in right-wing politics. He viewed Philippe Petain and the Vichy dictatorship as a gift to the nation of France. He secretly hoped that France would be transformed by the Vichy program of moral renewal; there would be many lawsuits arising from it. He believed that France ought to be returned to some form of monarchy, even if it meant a brief interlude of dictatorship. In short, Simone and François swallowed in one big easy gulp the myth of the National Revolution. They sought a place within the German France and Hitler-Europe, this purportedly efficiently run land mass in which France, as a monarchy, would serve as an elite unit of technocrats, intellectuals, and bureaucratic potentates. Monsieur Gervais would, of course, be employed as a legal popinjay.
These two followers of Vichy lived with their three children in Lyon, a city that would soon become the heart of the French Resistance. Camille knew better than to mention to those relatives anything of her activities or even her awareness of a resistance to the Germans, as well as to Vichy. She conveniently allowed her sister and brother-in-law to continue in their downward glance at her as a woman of easy virtue who had become involved with a dissolute aristocrat. Each time that Camille encountered them, they granted her a heavy sigh of disdain and a ripple of condescending derision. Their eyes never lacked a sense of distaste toward this relative who had proven herself to be so lacking in moral fiber.

Comme la plupart des institutrices de la France en guerre, Simone Gervais, la sœur aînée de Camille, était jolie. Simone était également pacifiste, et membre du parti socialiste français. Elle voyait favorablement le gouvernement de Vichy comme un moyen d’éviter la guerre à tout prix, mais aussi comme un moyen de rebâtir une société française qui soit absolument pure, et de réformer la moralité, prétendument décadente, de la France. Son mari, François Gervais, était avocat, qui se spécialisait dans le droit des contrats, bien qu’il fût impropre de l’appeler « avocat ».
François passait beaucoup plus de temps à trouver des failles dans les contrats de ses clients pour mieux les aider à se soustraire à la loi, à tout le moins, à donner l'impression de s'y conformer. Cet avocat possédait un talent pour déceler les zones grises du droit français, et elles étaient nombreuses, afin de réaliser des profits pour lui-même et pour ses clients. Il croyait avec enthousiasme que le contentieux était un marché à exploiter, et il personnifiait la définition de l’avocat telle qu’elle était résumée par l’écrivain américain, Ambrose Bierce : quelqu'un d'habile à contourner la loi.

Cet avocat était très impliqué dans la politique de droite. Il considérait Philippe Petain et la dictature de Vichy comme un cadeau fait à la nation de France. Il espérait secrètement que la France soit transformée par le programme de Vichy du renouvellement de la morale ; il y en aurait tant d'actions en justice à cause de cela.
Il pensait que la France devait revenir à une forme de monarchie, même si cela signifierait un bref intermède de dictature. Bref, Simone et François avalèrent d’une grande et facile gorgée le mythe de la Révolution nationale. Ils cherchaient une place au sein de la France allemande et de l'Europe hitlérienne, cette masse terrestre prétendument dirigée efficacement dans laquelle la France, en tant que monarchie, servirait d'unité d'élite de technocrates, d'intellectuels et de potentats bureaucratiques. Monsieur Gervais serait, bien sûr, employé comme fanfaron légal.

Ces deux fidèles de Vichy vivaient avec leur trois enfants à Lyon, une ville qui allait bientôt devenir le cœur de la Résistance française. Camille savait mieux que de leur parler toute chose de ses activités, ni même de sa connaissance d’une résistance aux Allemands, ainsi qu’au régime de Vichy. Elle permettait commodément à sa sœur et à son beau-frère de continuer de la regarder de haut, et de la considérer comme une femme à la vertu facile qui s’était engagée avec un aristocrate dissolu. Chaque fois que Camille les rencontrait, ils lui accordaient un lourd soupir de dédain et une ondulation de dérision condescendante. Leurs yeux ne manquaient jamais de dégoût à l’égard de cette parente qui s’était montrée si vide de la force morale.