Ramble On: Waiting for the Barbarians (video)

Morning thoughts on exfiltrations, the gutting of the FDA, tomorrow's protests, and how to quiet the brain by visiting Alexandria

Good morning! Here is today’s ramble:

And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. It is Friday, April 4th, 6:17 a.m. We’ve made it. Those of us who have made it have made it through another batshit crazy week, courtesy of Trump and Musk and Vance and this entire cockamamie administration.

There’s so many things to discuss. The Five 8 is gonna be lit tonight. I encourage you to watch that if you’re around, at 8 p.m. Eastern, on our YouTube channel, The Five 8.

This morning, I don’t know, I want to talk about a couple of things and my own emotional state this week, because I think that might be helpful.

Two stories that really stuck out for me. One of them I wrote about on Monday, or Tuesday rather, in the April Fool’s piece, which is that the ICE Gestapo is just disappearing people. We’re using the term “deported,” but that’s not really accurate. They’re taking people off the streets and forcibly exfiltrating them to foreign nations without due process or anything, really. Many of these people are here legally. Almost none of them are members of whatever gang they’re trying to scare us into thinking they’re members of.

And what occurred to me on Tuesday is that these people are not coming back. There’s not going to be any effort made in the administration to right any of the wrongs. So anybody that gets scooped up accidentally, that’s it for them. I’m thinking of the gay hairdresser who clearly was not part of the gang, or the guy who had the autism awareness tattoo in honor of his younger brother. And, you know, those people are gone. So this is horrifying. And it speaks to where this is headed, because the longer that they do this kind of thing without any repercussions, the more they’re going to push it and start rounding up other people also—which on The Five 8 we’ve been talking about for a long time now, that this is something that might happen.

The other thing that has stuck with me: Katherine Eban, one of my first guests on the podcast, terrific reporter at Vanity Fair, wrote a piece about how RFK’s HHS is going about its dismantling of our national healthcare system, which is absolutely terrifying. She talked to people at the FDA, which is the Food and Drug Administration. Now I know that Trump and the MAGA like to pooh-pooh regulations, but we want regulations on things like the food we eat and the medicines we take and stuff like that. I think we can all agree that that’s probably a good thing rather than a bad thing. You know, I get that the free market can, you know, make decisions. “Well, I’m not going to buy that meat from that company anymore since they tainted the meat and killed all these people.” That’s not really an effective remedy, you know, realistically— here on planet Earth.

So we want these kind of regulations. And what’s happening now is that these DOGE people, or whoever these people are that are working with DOGE, these security guys, I don’t know if they’re Erik Prince guys, I don’t know if they’re like Civil War reenactment cosplay guys that they’ve given different uniforms to. I don’t know who they are. But they’re going into these places and causing complete havoc. So this is from Katherine Eban’s piece:

By 6 a.m. yesterday, a nightmarish scene was unfolding at the FDA’s White Oak campus as employees arrived. A security team working under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lined them up and checked their badges against a list.

Those targeted for elimination, including Pohlhaus, were then handed what are being called RIF (“reduction in force”) letters, with their jobs eliminated on the spot and in front of their colleagues. The scene was “brutal,” one FDA employee told Vanity Fair. “People were sobbing and crying like I never thought I would see. These pathetic lunatics chose April 1, as if this was a joke. People were being embarrassed in front of their coworkers and hand-delivered these notes of no-go.”

Relying on algorithms rather than real-world understanding of how the FDA operates, DOGE lopped off key arteries of the public health system, decimating divisions for everything from the approval of new drugs to the regulation of tobacco products. An HHS fact sheet said that no food and drug inspectors were cut. But frontline staff members—who accompanied them on inspections, helped analyze their findings, cleared their reports for public release, and brought unsafe manufacturers into legal compliance—were cut all around them. One source says inspections at overseas manufacturing plants have already been halted due to lack of staff to coordinate travel and arrange visas. The FDA has allegedly reached out to some RIF-ed staff to ask them to temporarily return to work so that inspectors already overseas are not stranded and upcoming inspections can proceed.

“The people making these decisions, they are clueless about what the FDA does,” says the FDA employee.

This is scary. Like, there’s so much going on right now, but the health stuff is really scary because it’s going to end in death, mass death, eventually. You know, I feel like it’s a great big Jenga game and they keep pulling out these little blocks of wood and eventually it’s going to collapse. It’s only a matter of time and method. How will it collapse?

So that was on my mind. Now, the other thing on my mind is obviously, you know, Cory Booker was on the floor of the Senate for well over 24 hours, breaking the record of that hideous racist Strom Thurmond for longest ever speech on the Senate floor. And I think that was wonderful. That provided hope and positive energy and guidance, right? Because the Democrats had been so weak, generally—not all of them, but generally, and the leadership especially. Chuck Schumer just is so beyond at this point…he’s…I don’t know, put him out to pasture. Retire, Chuck. Hand the keys over to somebody who can still drive the car, please. So that was good.

And then coming into Saturday, which is now tomorrow, there are these Hands Off protests in cities all across the United States. And this is wonderful to see also, because if there are this many cities participating in this, offering places to gather, cities large and small, all over, that’s a major, major thing.

Now, heading into that, I wanted to read a little bit from the Gene Sharp book, From Dictatorship to Democracy. Just this one little paragraph, because it’s important. Heading into this mass protest event tomorrow, I think there’s going to be a lot of excitement, certainly, a lot of anger and rage and fury, a lot of communal togetherness, and also probably a lot of fear. Because there is not no danger associated with going out in a large group right now. It’s dangerous. It is. Anything can happen. I don’t know. I might get rounded up and sent to El Salvador. And that would be terrible, because then I would miss the White Lotus finale. Some idiot MAGA could drive a truck into the protest. There’s all kinds of things that can happen. And what I want to encourage people to do is to be brave. (And I’m speaking to myself here.) So this is what Sharp says on openness, secrecy and high standards:

Secrecy, deception and underground conspiracy pose very difficult problems for a movement using nonviolent action. It is often impossible to keep the political police and intelligence agents from learning about intentions and plans. From the perspective of the movement, secrecy is not only rooted in fear, but contributes to fear, which dampens the spirit of resistance and reduces the number of people who can participate in a given action. It also can contribute to suspicions and accusations, often unjustified, within the movement concerning who is an informer or agent for the opponents. Secrecy may also affect the ability of a movement to remain nonviolent. In contrast, openness regarding intentions and plans will not only have the opposite effects, but will contribute to an image that the resistance movement is in fact extremely powerful. The problem is, of course, more complex than this suggests, and there are significant aspects of resistant activities that may require secrecy. A well-informed assessment will be required by those knowledgeable about both the dynamics of nonviolent struggle and also the dictatorship’s means of surveillance in the specific situation.

There’s gonna be lots of means of surveillance tomorrow, for sure. But I believe that what Sharp says is true. The image of the resistant movement tomorrow is going to be seen as very, very, very powerful. And I think it’s going to have a galvanizing effect, piggybacking on what Booker was doing and what he was talking about.

So I wanted to talk again about my own week just a little bit and my mental state because, as I said, I think it’s helpful for people to understand what other people are going through emotionally and all that stuff. So I was in Baltimore. I came home on Sunday on the train and I got sick on the train. I started to get this stomach bug or whatever it was. And fortunately I made it home before the fireworks happened, but I was basically laid up for the rest of Sunday, all of Monday into Tuesday. And I really didn’t start to feel better until yesterday. Like, my head was foggy and I think it was Wednesday—Wednesday night—I was really freaking out a little. I had a bad day Wednesday. This happens to people that I know: one day, for whatever reason, you’re just not up for it. Right. And you feel like everything is too much. Everything is overwhelming. There’s too many things to think about, too many things to track. And it just feels like there’s no hope, you know, what are you going to do?

So I was feeling this way in my brain. It was like, I don’t know, like disco lights going here, here, here, here, here, here, all over the place. And to quiet this, I put my laptop down, I put my phone off, and I got a novel that’s one of my favorite ones, which is Justine by Lawrence Durrell. (This is the picture that I wore on my t-shirt at The Five 8 event in New York City, this book.) And I like this book because it’s artsy and pretentious in the best possible way. And he’s so self-absorbed that you’re able to go into his world and not think about your own so much. But it also, the level of the writing—it’s a short book, but it takes a long time to read because the level of the writing is so high and so complicated, and he’s conveying thoughts that are complex. So you really have to read every word, every sentence carefully. You know, like you go through some books, you’re flying through to see what happens. Justine is not a book like that. It’s not complicated like Ulysses where you don’t know what he’s talking about, but it’s complicated enough that you have to stop and slow down and adjust to his pace. I focused on it. And when I found my eyes skipping ahead or my mind wandering, I would go back and read again and read again and read again. And it worked. It worked. It quieted down the noise in my brain and focused my attention on something else—quite like meditation does. And it enabled me to have a good night’s sleep, which I desperately needed, and feel better the next day.

So why I wanted to bring that up is first of all, that does work. People have lots of things that work, I’m sure. This is an easy way to do it because everybody has books laying around. So don’t read a book about fascism; you know, don’t read a horror novel or something, but something sort of poetical will work. You don’t have to finish it. You just have to read part of it. Focus on it intently, and the brain will quiet.

But the other thing is Durrell talks a lot about this poet, Constantine P. Cavafy, C-A-V-A-F-Y, Cavafy, C.P. Cavafy. He talks about him in Justine. The poet is from Alexandria, the Alexandria Quartet is obviously set in Alexandria, and he talks about this poet. I said, you know, I should probably look into that for “Sunday Pages” maybe. But again, there’s not gonna be a “Sunday Pages” this week.

So I found this poem, and first of all, it was interesting because he’s written poems about many of the characters in Empress, my novel about the Byzantine empire, which is kind of crazy because it’s like, nobody knows who these people are, but here he’s writing poems about them. And I felt like that spoke to me on some way, on some level.

But I found this poem. It’s one of his more famous ones. It’s called “Waiting for the Barbarians.” And I want to read this. And there’s not much to interpret here. You know, it’s not a complicated poem. There’s a poet named J.L. Williams over at the Scottish Poetry Library, who wrote a piece about Cavafy and analyzed this poem a little bit.

I thought that J.L. Williams was going to be some stodgy Oxford guy from like 1920. And it turns out it’s a woman and she’s younger than me and she was born in New Jersey and lives in Scotland and is a poet. Anyway, she says, and I like this line a lot: “[S]ociety is so often dependent on that which it excludes.” And that’s what the poem is about, she says—but that’s also in itself a very poetical line.

Because there’s no “Sunday Pages,” I’m going to leave you with the poem. And, you know, I’m not even sure exactly what it means. It means a lot of different things. It’s called “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Here we go:

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

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NOTE: No “Sunday Pages” this week.

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