My current job at Waldhurst City Hall is not my first in the service of this august city. Back in the mid-2010s, I was an honest-to-God city official—not a rank-and-file plebeian, as now, but the sworn holder of an appointive office.
I resigned from that position after four years, but—this being a small town—my successor was a neighbor and friend and we would chat from time to time about how things were going for her. During one of these conversations, she asked me about my mirror.
Whenever one starts a new job, especially an office/"information worker" position like this one, there are inevitably certain traces and signs—a sort of archaeological record—of the previous incumbent, and one cannot help but try to form a picture of that person. When I started in that position, I wondered about the preponderance of mechanical pencils in the desk drawer (I'm more of a pen guy, myself) and what seemed like a surprisingly small number of folders on the computer hard drive. Just how much had that guy deleted before leaving—and why?
What my successor was wondering about was the stick-on, wide-angle mirror she had found affixed to the wall opposite the door.
"Is that what I think it is?" she asked.
It was—that is, I admitted, I had indeed placed this mirror so that, even when I was facing away from the door, I might have some warning of someone entering, even if—especially if—they were trying to move quietly.
Not generally being one to discuss my own defensive measures, I didn't inquire what she planned to do if the mirror showed her that someone was trying to sneak up on her, but I will now disclose that, during my time in that office, I had made certain... preparations.
I kept a three-foot wooden stake leaning in a corner near my desk, for example. This was, in fact, a perfectly normal object for me to have around, because I was involved with the administration of city elections and we issued these stakes to our poll workers for posting those "no electioneering" signs around the 300-foot perimeters of their polling stations. Only the custodian would have noticed that this particular stake never seemed to get issued to anyone and instead remained in the same spot, within arm's reach of my workstation, year in and year out.
As for the can of pepper spray in my top desk drawer—okay, okay, you got me. Sitting every day in a public office in a city government building with no access restrictions and a security posture that halfhearted at best, I had eventually concluded that there was a non-zero chance that I might one day be physically attacked and did not want to be entirely without recourse.
If this sounds paranoid, consider that—on the day of my swearing in—the mayor's secretary pointed out the "panic button" mounted under my new desk. Pressing this button was supposed to alert the police department on the first floor and bring an officer running, she told me, then observed that the system didn't seem to work very well, "so don't count on it."
Although some people might have been surprised and unnerved to find such a system in place at their boring new office job—as opposed to at, say, a bank or a liquor store—I would have been more unnerved to learn that no one had considered this kind of eventuality.
A city hall, after all, is the locus of decisions that, considered from a certain angle, can be summed up as restricting the rights and spending the money of the local residents and business owners. I understood coming in the door that this is a relationship that can reasonably be expected to stir strange and ominous passions under the right (wrong) circumstances, and that it is not unheard of for these passions to manifest in violence against public officials. It seemed crazy to suppose this couldn't happen here, in a state with the motto "mountaineers are always free," where residents have proved to be above-average susceptible to the generations-long rightwing propaganda project painting government as evil and public officials as enemies of the people, and where the population is probably about as heavily armed as in any other state in this extraordinarily heavily armed country.
This was my take on the situation even before, on my second day, someone who had been described to me on my first day as a "nutcase" dropped by to monologue at me for the better part of an hour about what he considered a conspiracy enabled by my predecessor that had prevented him running for mayor ten years earlier and "destroyed his political career."
This was my take on the situation even before, within my first year on the job, I found myself being filmed by two "sovereign citizens" as they presented certain bizarre "legal" documents in service of their request to access certain police department records.
This was my take on the situation even before the public meeting concerning the imposition of a new public safety fee for everyone served by our fire department, when one objector in the audience fixed me with a silent, baleful glare for the better part of an hour.
This was my take on the situation even before another public meeting when I was just about shouted off the stage while presenting information about a proposed law enabling relatively mild regulation of and limited action against dangerously dilapidated structures, but which a group of protestors seemed to consider objectionable to an extent on par with the Nuremberg Laws (not that this particular group would have been likely to object to the Nuremberg Laws specifically, but I digress).
And this was my take on the situation even before I came to understand that, if more than a few longtime Waldhurst residents suspected the worst of their city government's competency and honesty, they could have come by these suspicions honestly. I can verify, based on what eventually became my intimate familiarity with certain dusty bankers' boxes of records in forgotten basement storerooms, that it really was once fair to say that this town was run by a "good old boys" network of buffoons, well-intentioned amateurs, and a small but influential minority of genuinely venal individuals.
When I was first appointed to office, I enjoyed a public image as a non-member of this network, an outsider who wouldn't be beholden to the town's long-established ways and patterns and might therefore have a chance of effecting positive change. After resigning that position and then, a year ago, returning in a communications role, I was surprised to learn that, in some quarters, the fact that I'd served the city before meant that I was now one of the good old boys. I could only have been hired, according to this perspective, because of a kind of nepotism—never for my skills and knowledge as a mid-career communications professional with deep prior knowledge of the organization I'd be serving.
The fact that people's suspicions about Waldhurst city government were seriously out of date even by the time of my original appointment doesn't seem to have registered widely. There is still and will probably never stop being a small but vocal contingent issuing a constant drumbeat of allegations of corruption and malfeasance against the city government on the letters page of the local paper or on Facebook. It is discomforting to see how readily others seem to agree with and support these accusations.
Then came the pandemic and its stay-at-home, closure, and mask orders, and I saw a side of many of my fellow Waldhurstians that I would have preferred not to.
It was with professional interest, then, that—during this last summer of Netflix and quarantine—I ended up watching a documentary called Tread. Released July 29 and becoming one of the platform's ten most popular offerings within days, Tread tells the true story of Marvin Heemeyer and the destruction he wreaked on the small town of Granby, Colorado one summer's day in 2004.
Heemeyer, a talented welder, moved to Granby in the early nineties and established a muffler shop on a 2-acre piece of land he purchased at auction. I am no expert on real estate pricing generally, much less in Colorado specifically, so I cannot say whether his $42,000 winning bid would have struck most people as a good price for this land in absolute terms.
However, $42,000 must certainly have seemed an excellent price to Heemeyer during the brief period of time when it seemed that his neighbor, a concrete company, wanted to purchase his land for $250,000 as part of a planned plant expansion. But Heemeyer kept raising his selling price, ultimately to $1 million, and eventually the company decided to proceed with its plant expansion without buying his property.
At some point during Heemeyer's subsequent and ultimately fruitless battle opposing a zoning change needed by the concrete company, the town council fined him $2,500 for his ongoing failure to connect to the town's sewer system. Given that making this connection would apparently have cost Heemeyer something like $80,000, his reluctance was understandable even as his claim of unfair treatment was not. It is simply the case that Granby town code requires property owners to pay for the installation of water and sewer service-lines from the main trunk to their properties, and Heemeyer would have needed to lay such a line across some 60 feet.
Heemeyer seems not to have considered that maybe he got a good price on two acres of commercially zoned land inside city limits precisely because it lacked a sewer connection and installing one would be expensive. Heemeyer purchased his land at auction, which raises the possibility in my mind that he simply showed up and started bidding without the proper due diligence. If he'd consulted first with a real estate agent or attorney, he have been reminded that this was just the sort of possibility that one needs to look into before waving one's bidding paddle for the first time.
On June 4, 2004, Heemeyer drove this bulldozer through the wall of his shed and, for the next two hours, blazed a trail of destruction through Granby.
Using the bulldozer, Heemeyer destroyed 13 buildings, including the library, the town hall, the house of the former mayor (who by that point had been dead for three years), various structures on the grounds of the concrete plant, the offices of the local newspaper, and a hardware store whose owner was one of the local power brokers he believed were conspiring against him.
Somehow he managed not to kill or even hurt anyone, despite also shooting at power transformers and several huge aboveground propane tanks, the explosion of which could have caused death, injury, and property damage across a half-mile radius.
Although the Komatsu crawled along at only about 5 mph, it proved impervious to small arms fire and was, at least given locally available resources, essentially unstoppable. Colorado's then governor has for some reason always denied that there was talk of dispatching an Air National Guard Apache helicopter to take out the Komatsu with an air-to-ground missile, but—if I'd been in his position—I'd be embarrassed to admit I hadn't considered such an option.
Anyway, in the end, Heemeyer's rampage was ended by his own miscalculation. In the heat of destroying the hardware store, he dropped one set of his bulldozer's treads into a small basement and couldn't get moving again. So, in one of the more common final acts of this kind of rage spasm, he blew his brains out with a .357, making of himself the only casualty in a rampage that resulted in more than $7 million in damage.
In the grand tradition of cartoon villains, Heemeyer could not resist explaining his motivations and grand vision. Over the course of the two months leading up to the fateful day, Heemeyer made what eventually totaled about two hours of diaristic recordings. To hear him tell it, he had been wronged, shadowy local figures were maliciously aligned against him, and his planned attack was therefore necessary and justified.
"I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to become unreasonable," he intoned, like some piss-ant Travis Bickle wannabe. "Sometimes reasonable men do unreasonable things. I became unreasonable."
Just like many of the worst humans throughout history, Heemeyer felt his actions had divine sanction.
"God built me for this job," he said. "God blessed me in advance for the task I am about to undertake."
Our nation is currently rotten with rotten people who believe they are doing God's work and who, as a result, believe they are constrained by nothing more than the imperatives of what they understand as their divinely assigned missions. We saw thousands of these people at a certain riot in January, and Heemeyer's recordings sound like nothing so much as a 2004 preview of the self-pitying self-righteousness that was already on the way to becoming the dominant attitude of the U.S. right today.
Law-abiding until they see it necessary to break the law, "reasonable" until circumstances force them to be unreasonable, these are people who—like a small child starting to learn how to play board games—are totally willing to follow the rules, as long as they are assured of victory anyway, as long as it seems to lead to them winning, as, after all, God wants. And when God is on your side, what matter are the laws (and even lives) of mere humans, after all?
Just as White House official Stephen Miller is perhaps best understood as a school shooter who used immigration policy instead of an AR-15 to lash out at a world that had so far failed to take due notice of his excellence, so was the entire Trump presidency a sort of up-armored bulldozer of its own, doing its best to reduce our institutions to rubble and also seemingly unstoppable.
I suppose, in this metaphor, the pandemic is the pesky sub-basement where the leviathan finally tripped over reality. I'll go ahead and say it: Just as most of us now accept that a certain number of Americans had to die in World War II to ensure victory in that existential conflict, so may future generations come to give thanks for this pandemic and its human cost as the price of avoiding the total collapse of U.S. democracy. (Fingers crossed that this is not simply a four-year pause before the real deluge, but let's just say I'm glad I have dual citizenship and I have prioritized securing similar status and passports for my wife and children.)
It is clarifying to think of the current Republican Party as consisting of two distinct factions, "breakers" and "gamers," as Tim Snyder sketched out in a recent essay about rightwing coup attempts recent, current, and future. I don't know how original this formulation is to Snyder, but it's the first time I've encountered it, and it makes a lot of sense to me.
The GOP does indeed seem to be divided between (1) savvy institutionalists—for example, Mitch McConnell—who have mastered the current system as it is and would be content to continue manipulating its cranks and levers to protect and benefit the rich and powerful forever, and (2) wild-eyed outsiders looking for paths to power other than through democratic processes, who more or less openly believe that only the votes of White Christians count or at any rate should be counted, and that the definition of an unfair election is any that their side loses. (See: God on one's side, above.)
In the breakers' insistence that the U.S. is somehow more their country than anyone else's, in their ambition to take it back, in their acceptance of the idea that America was once "great" and now should be made so again, there is the distinct echo of Heemeyer's petulant and utterly unwarranted high self-regard. A certain mood is on the march, and I can't say I'm not concerned that it might express itself in violence, even here in Waldhurst. As my experience trying to share basic public health advice concerning the pandemic through the city's social media accounts has reminded me, this community has its share of damaged personalities not dissimilar from Heemeyer's.
These are people who exalt rules and rule-following until a certain rule gets in their way. Then, quite naturally, they feel frustrated. But unlike the legions of grownups who are able to accept, say, adverse zoning decisions or the requirement not to shit in the groundwater, there will always be some who lash out, apparently thinking, say, that frustration and setbacks aren't things that God wants people like them to experience.
The disturbing thing is that people like this now have so many narratives to choose from through which to elevate their petty grievances into heroic stands against awful and even evil people. These dark delusions range along a continuum from the power-behind-the-throne "good-old-boy networks" that so many people find it so easy to believe are the real power centers in places like Granby and Waldhurst, at one end of the scale, on up to the shadowy international cannibal-pedophile cabals of Democratic politicians, Jewish bankers, Hollywood movie stars, and lizard people whom Q followers and their fellow travelers rave about executing in the streets.
On the Reddit board r/QanonCasualties, I came across the story of someone who lives in a small town in eastern Ohio. He related how, over the last year, he made a concerted effort to counter "Q" material being posted by family and acquaintances concentrated in the next small town over. The results: His car has been vandalized, he has been openly called a "pedophile" by that town's police chief, and a police officer friend recently told him he'd probably better not even stop for gas in that town anymore. He felt concerned enough, he reported, to get a concealed weapons permit and arm himself. If you are tempted to scorn him for that and have not (1) closely examined the way Q followers actually talk online and (2) experienced the dynamics of rural small towns, you should consider that you really have no idea what the view is like from his shoes—and I'll just point out that he's not even a government official.
He is probably safe, of course. Most people like those who threatened this guy are unlikely to ever take the steps necessary to turn their violent fantasies into reality, of course, because they are lazy. Of those who actually do start to make plans, many are too stupid to avoid getting caught. For every driven, coldly calculating self-styled avenger like Heemeyer, there seem to be no shortage of dipshits who end up trying to buy explosives from an undercover FBI agent.
It only takes one, though.
