Dots on the ground

A colleague and I were chatting earlier this week, starting out on a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and then on to how the dénouement of the Mueller investigation has emboldened the Chaos Monkey to accelerate the destruction of civilization. From cutting funding for the Special Olympics to out-and-out ending the ACA, the administration doesn’t even bother to dress this shit up any more; they’re on a roll and the whooping and hollering is on maximum volume.

My mate marveled at the callousness of this crowd. How can they live with themselves, he wondered? I immediately thought of Harry Lime, the post-war racketeer who sold fake penicillin in Vienna, in Graham Greene’s novel and Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. In the iconic scene on Vienna’s Prater Ferris wheel, When his old friend Holly Martins, aghast, asks Lime how he can do it, what about his victims, this is his response:

And that’s pretty much how the entire Republican party gets through life; we’re all just dots on the ground to them.