Not secure

     Sometimes, the small things get to you in a way the big things don't.
     It isn't that tearing off the East Wing of the White House to install a grotesquely huge ballroom that 44 presidents managed to live without is worse than, oh, a crusade against immigrants sending masked thugs into cities to kidnap workers off the street, or squashing the free press, or murdering people at sea, or demonizing LBGTQ Americans, or corrupting the justice department, or extorting money from the government, or accepting bribes from foreign governments, or undermining of women's rights, voting rights, science, health care, higher education and the general destruction of the federal government as a tool for helping people.
     To name a few.
     That latter part is worse. Far worse. And yet. Seeing the rendition of the huge honking Versailles of a ballroom he is erecting hurt in a new way. The surprise, the suddenness of it — an airy plan one day bruited by a chronic liar who sometimes follows through, usually doesn't. Then backhoes ripping out the walls. It's so symbolic of what is happening all around us. A hundred novelists couldn't dream it up. Ripping apart the White House. It would be too obvious, too crude. Too wrong. It would look trite in fiction. 

     But it's not fiction. It's real. Another impossible to image development that, in retrospect, we should have seen coming. Outrage was both on point and pointless.
     "It's not his house," Hillary Clinton said on X, summing the situation up perfectly. "It's your house. And he's destroying it."
     Got that right. Maybe the creeping terror is because the White House is still exactly that. A house. A residence where people live. Like all homes, it's supposed to be secure. Safe from vandalism and the whim of tyrants who temporarily — or not so temporarily — dwell there. 

     But it isn't safe. None of us are. Not anymore. We're supposed to be secure. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be secure in our houses. If the People's House is not secure — if Trump can destroy it at will, right before our eyes — then whose home can't he destroy?