Harper’s Magazine’s cover blared: “Round Two: Trump’s Futile War Against the Deep State”. Before even reading it, I was struck that this liberal publication would admit the existence of the Deep State. It seems it wasn’t till Hillary Clinton, a liberal of liberals, said that her husband’s problems in office – I will be discreet here – were due to a “vast rightwing conspiracy” that it became acceptable to even think of political machinations going on deep within the state.
Well, the cats so far out of the bag now it’s out of sight. It’s an “open secret” (more about secrets later) that there exists a Deep State and from Harper’s “Rage Against the Machine” by Andrew Cockburn, it seems historically that attempts to dismantle, disempower, or at least de-emphasize is has come from both sides of the aisle and miserably failed.
Of all people, Donald Rumsfeld was especially set on bringing the bureaucracy to heel. “Rumsfeld succeeded in canceling just one weapons program. …Less than nine months after talking office, Rumsfeld admitted defeat” (25).
In the military I was a part from 1975-1995, you were warned about messing with clerks. During this time, very few of them were civilians but low ranking enlisted men, and some women, whom you outranked most of the time. A misplaced file here, an errant typo there, and you could be in a world of hurt quickly. So you’d see even the officers with scrambled eggs on their hat Eddie Haskell-ing if not kowtowing to clerk-typists.
That’s the Deep State. That’s the power behind the scene not, as usually thought, in smoke- filled rooms with fat men drinking good scotch, but an interconnected web of worker bees. They don’t live by the supposed evolutionary compulsion to “reproduce this”, but by the Deep State’s mantra: Not only do we determine how you exist but you can’t exist without us.
Everyone knows about Eisenhower’s 1961 speech where he warned about “the military industrial complex.” What no one knows – apparently apart from British Journalist Francis Wheen – is that “In the draft of his valedictory speech Eisenhower referred to the ‘military-industrial-congressional complex,’ but he removed the third adjective because it was ‘not fitting…for a President to criticize Congress’” (How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions, 166 (Italics added)).
And now, as the Lord showed Ezekiel progressively “greater abominations” in Chapter 8, I will show you something some consider far more dangerous, threatening, and invasive: Not the Deep State but The Dark State. This is what Matthew Connelly is sounding a clarion call about in his 2023 The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets.
Connelly’s point is that with the advent of digital records there is no way to keep track or even keep all the stuff that is being classified as top secret. Remember the scene from Raiders Of the Lost Ark where they “store” the ark recaptured from Nazis?
What the Deep and Dark States have in common is the Roman Empire. It is thought – at least by Gibbon – that the Roman Empire’s collapse wasn’t due only to the enemies from without (the Goths and Visigoths) some of whom Rome foolishly let in in large numbers, neither was it only the moral rot from within (not just homosexuality, but easy divorce, and low birthrates), its collapse was in large part due to the bureaucracy which became so deep and dark (and I might add tall) that it collapsed on itself.
Harper’s rather prosaic shading towards a banal answer is found in a piece of story they published decades earlier relating to this topic. Harper’s always does this with its lead articles. Their “From the Archive” piece was from 1936. It was entitled “The Bureaucratic Sublime” by Marquis W. Childs. The complete article was titled: “Brains in Washington”. This is the concluding paragraph of their snippet: “On every piano in the Western gambling halls, or so the legend has it, was a sign that said: please don’t shoot the pianist. He is doing the best he can. It is a sign which, with some alterations, might well be placed on many Washington desks.”
Well, we are the people who have since baptism been looking for the City whose Builder and Maker is God; we are the people who pray daily “Thy kingdom come” and it does come even without our prayer daily to us in Word and Sacrament. We are the ones who’ve been taught since infancy to sing, “God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, And though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea;”
This is Psalm 46:1-2 and when Luther would get depressed he would say to Melanchthon, “Let us sing Psalm 46” by which he meant his hymn of victory: “A Mighty Fortress”. In this we sing “ though devils all the world should fill,/ All eager to devour us” it won’t, it can’t no matter how Deep or Dark. Why? Because “for us fights the Valiant One…” And so, “The Kingdom ours remaineth.”
