Guillotine The air in the Capitol smells like floor wax and old fear. Not the good kind. The kind that sets in when you’ve eaten too much processed nonsense, and your stomach starts to bloat. The diet begins now.
We do not cut out the people. We cut out the waste.
Think about the last time you saw a bill pass. Did you see it? Or did you just see the smoke? Smoke is the byproduct of combustion. Policy is the fire. Most of what they feed you is just smoke. It looks like action. It feels like heat. It burns the roof if you breathe it in. But it does not fill the belly.
I have been reading the fine print on the subsidies. Or I have been trying to. The fine print is designed to be unreadable. It is a font that exists to confuse the eye so the mouth can just swallow. They want you to gulp. They want you to choke on it, or better yet, to let it slide down without tasting the flavor.
The flavor is expensive. The flavor is labor. The flavor is the time your neighbor lost to make their shift longer so the quarterly report looks green.
There is a beauty in a clear line. A straight edge. A cut that is clean.
Look at the budget for “administrative oversight.” That is a phrase that means “people who watch other people work so they can tell them how to work.” It is a pyramid of hands. Every hand takes a cut. By the time the money reaches the bottom, it is not money. It is dust. It is confetti. It is a joke told by a man in a suit who has never held a tool that wasn’t a pen.
The Guillotine is not a threat. It is a tool. You use it to trim the fat. The fat is the middle management of policy. The fat is the consultant who charges fifty thousand dollars to say “do more of the thing you are already doing.” The fat is the committee that meets to discuss the purpose of the committee.
We need to strip it back to the bone.
What is the bone? The bone is the teacher in a classroom that smells like wet wool and chalk dust. The bone is the mechanic under the car who knows the engine better than they know their own heart rate. The bone is the nurse who works a double shift because the hospital cut the night staff to save on overtime.
These are the things that hold up the roof.
The rest is decoration. The rest is wallpaper. The rest is the marble columns that look great in photos but fall down when the wind picks up.
I am tired of eating wallpaper.
I am tired of the taste of paper. It has no nutrition. It fills you up so you cannot eat the real thing. It is a diet of illusion. You look full. You feel heavy. But you are starving.
So we take the blade. We slice the ribbon. We cut the red tape not with scissors, but with a guillotine. Because scissors are for crafting. This is for survival.
The cut must be clean. There should be no dragging. No lingering. No “we will look into it next fiscal year.” That is just a slower way to die.
The people who lie for a living have built a machine that runs on ambiguity. Ambiguity is the lubricant. If the gears are slippery, the machine keeps turning even when it is broken. It is a lie that moves.
We want it to stop.
We want it to sit still and be measured.
When you measure a lie, it usually shrinks. It used to be a “strategic pivot.” Now it is a cut. A cut is honest. A cut ends something.
I believe in the end. I believe in the thing that is left when the noise stops.
The noise is the diet. The silence is the truth.
And the truth is heavy. You have to have strong shoulders to carry it. I have strong shoulders. I have been carrying this for a long time. My coffee is cold. My eyes are dry. But my hands are steady.
Do not let them feed you the smoke again.
Chew.
Taste the iron; it’s the only thing that has a flavor.