King of the Dirt Pile
At home, a mountain of soil becomes a fairy garden. In the republic, every catastrophe is apparently a throne.
We are swimming in dirt. It turns out that when you undertake a minor excavation project to build a mystical fairy garden, you must eventually replace the earth you removed. The ground, despite decades of technological advancement, remains stubbornly committed to being made of ground.
I am now on a Christmas-card basis with several excavation business owners and their dump truck drivers, so I have joined a community. It’s a community built on dump trucks, dad jokes and spirited discussions about whether I need topsoil, fill dirt, scalps or some other material that sounds like it was named during a particularly lawless afternoon at the quarry.
The children love every delivery because the dirt arrives in a giant mountain, which immediately begins the race to become king or queen of the dirt pile. They scramble upward, declare sovereign authority and begin defending borders that didn’t exist thirty seconds earlier. It’s remarkably similar to geopolitics, except everyone is wearing rain boots and nobody has access to nuclear weapons.
Their joy is childlike and precious, but not nearly as childlike and precious as the expression on my husband’s face when he climbs onto the tractor and begins moving all that dirt around. There is a particular kind of happiness that overtakes a man when he has a tractor, a mountain, and his wife’s permission. He becomes less a husband than an appointed official in the Department of Extremely Necessary Back-and-Forth Driving. It’s a joy to watch.
Somewhere between working, school-clothes shopping, home renovations, child tantrums, illnesses, doctors, financial planning and the construction of a mystical fairy republic, there are still a few minutes to stand in the yard and watch the magic sparkle in my family’s eyes.
At least I have that going for me, which is more than I can say for the United States. The republic is also standing before several mountains of its own creation, but nobody appears to know where the tractor is, who was supposed to order the dirt or why the president is wearing a Burger King crown and announcing that the pile now belongs to him.
Donald Trump announced that negotiations with Iran would begin Monday after calling off another threatened “massive attack.” Iran’s foreign ministry then said that no direct talks with the United States were scheduled. Iranian officials were talking with Oman about safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, but that isn’t quite the same thing as negotiating with the American president, no matter how confidently he announces it.
Oil prices fell anyway, because international markets must now respond to presidential declarations before the other country has time to check whether it was invited. This is apparently how diplomacy works in the modern republic. The president announces a bombing campaign, announces that he has canceled the bombing campaign, announces negotiations, and then waits for everyone else to locate the negotiations. Somewhere in the Middle East, a conference room is presumably sitting empty beneath a handmade sign reading, “Historic Peace Talks,” while the Iranian delegation asks Oman whether this meeting could have been an email.
The stakes are considerably higher than the production values suggest. The United States has spent months cycling between strikes, threats, pauses and claimed breakthroughs, while shipping routes, oil markets and civilians absorb the consequences. Trump presents each retreat from his own escalation as a stunning act of restraint, which is a little like setting the curtains on fire and demanding a humanitarian award for carrying in a glass of water.
Back home, a proposed $1.8 billion fund for Trump’s political allies has been formally killed, although its brief existence deserves to be preserved in the Smithsonian’s future exhibit on Things a Functioning Republic Would Have Rejected During the First Meeting.
The so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund emerged from a settlement involving Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS and could have compensated allies who claimed they were unjustly prosecuted by the Justice Department. The list of possible beneficiaries reportedly raised concerns that people convicted of violence during the January 6 attack might receive taxpayer money for the distress of encountering consequences.
Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis threatened to block acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination unless the fund disappeared. Blanche eventually issued a written order rescinding it, confirming that no claims had been processed and no money distributed.
Trump responded by threatening to reinstate the fund if Blanche’s nomination was blocked, because the president of the United States is now openly using a potential $1.8 billion taxpayer slush fund as a hostage in a personnel negotiation.
The republic narrowly avoided paying political restitution to members of the president’s orbit, but only because two Republican senators noticed the fire alarm and, after careful deliberation, decided that the building should contain slightly less fire. Their reward will presumably be a commemorative plaque recognizing their bravery in stopping an idea produced by their own government.
Elsewhere, the machinery of the state has been turned toward something far darker. A Guardian investigation found that the Department of Homeland Security sought court approval to subject at least ten hunger strikers in immigrant detention to involuntary medical procedures during 2025 and 2026. At least three people were force-fed, two others were probably subjected to forced treatment, and five ended their strikes as the procedures approached.
The reported methods included feeding tubes inserted through the nose, forced intravenous hydration, involuntary blood draws and physical restraint. In six of the cases reviewed, the detained immigrants had no legal representation during proceedings authorizing the procedures.
These practices are not exclusive to Trump. The Guardian found that the Biden administration also pursued forced medical treatment against hunger strikers in 2024. That history does not excuse what followed. It demonstrates that cruelty embedded in an institution can pass between administrations until someone expands it, normalizes it and calls the expansion policy.
A hunger strike is an act of desperation by someone who has very little power left. When the government answers that protest by restraining the person and forcing a tube into their body, it isn’t preserving order so much as demonstrating what order has come to mean.
The republic loves to describe bodily autonomy as a treasured principle until the body belongs to someone imprisoned behind a fence, hidden from public view and left to face federal attorneys without one of their own. At that point, principle is escorted from the building and replaced by procedure.
There are, remarkably, still a few lawmakers attempting to keep additional parts of the government from being converted into extensions of the president’s mood. Senate leaders reached a bipartisan agreement to fund federal agencies through December 11, avoiding the traditional congressional ceremony in which everyone waits until the government is six minutes from shutting down and then begins sprinting through the Capitol carrying a stack of paper nobody has read.
The agreement would also delay a Trump administration rule giving political appointees more authority over federal grants. That rule could allow administration officials to judge research and public programs according to whether they align with the president’s priorities, because apparently peer review was insufficiently loyal.
Federal research grants are supposed to be awarded according to expertise, evidence and public value. Under the proposed system, scientific merit could find itself seated before a political appointee and asked whether its cancer research has demonstrated adequate enthusiasm for the chairman.
The Senate measure also excludes the White House’s requested $1 billion for “Trump-class” battleships. The president wants a new class of warship bearing his name, because the nation’s defense needs apparently include lasers, missiles and the emotional security of knowing that every vessel has been personally branded. The House must still approve the agreement, so the republic hasn’t been rescued. It has merely placed one hand on the emergency brake while the other chamber considers whether brakes are too woke.
Meanwhile, actual emergencies are burning across the Northwest. Wildfires near Spokane have forced approximately 60,000 people to evacuate and destroyed at least 600 homes, businesses and other structures. Patients were moved from the Spokane Veterans Affairs hospital, thousands lost power, and the fires remained uncontained as crews faced dry conditions and difficult terrain.
Another enormous fire spanning western Idaho and eastern Oregon has burned roughly 525 square miles and threatened more than 1,400 structures. Across the region, families are packing medications, photographs, pets and whatever pieces of a life can fit into a vehicle while the sky turns orange behind them.
There is no joke large enough to cover that reality, although the government has spent years trying to manufacture one. It cuts climate programs, obstructs renewable energy, withholds support and then behaves as though fire arrived without political history, carried into town by an unusually hostile breeze.
In my yard, we understand that the landscape keeps a record of what people do to it. If we remove dirt, we must replace it, if we dig a hole, we must fill it, and if we want something beautiful to grow, somebody has to calculate the cost, haul the material, move the earth and accept that magic requires maintenance.
The children climb the dirt pile because they know it’s temporary. Eventually, their father will spread it across the garden, I will plant something in it, and the little kingdom will become part of a larger home.
The people governing the United States appear to have reached the top of their own pile and mistaken elevation for achievement. They plant flags in disasters, crown themselves king and demand applause while the republic waits below for someone willing to build instead of rule.
For now, I will keep watching my family make something beautiful from the dirt, the republic should consider trying it.
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Thanks, Shanley ... you're awesome!!!