“Help! I’m Locked in the Waterloo!” The Spectacular Rise of the Shallow State

Our glowering POTUS has wrecked all our excited rumormongering with the usual blunt force. Isn’t it in the interest of a benevolent despot to keep his cards close to the vest? Promulgate an air of mystery? I suppose after all these years of having been enslaved by the deep state we should be grateful for our President’s utter and nearly deafening transparency. But c’mon… can we have a little fun with it? Just as we’re deliciously rubbing our little paws together and wondering aloud about the toxic depth of our President’s power fixation, he just comes out and aligns himself with Napoleon – not the delightfully flaky puff pastry with layered vanilla crème and fussily scalloped icing. The other one, with his hand in his waistcoat. 

When Mr. President posted on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” he was tipping his inscrutable hair to the French Emperor – whose use of the quote is probably apocryphal, as no records reportedly trace the words directly to the sword-swinging equestrian, but rather to a book by an admirer. 

Our own Emperor-in-waiting is likely ignorant of the fact that the phrase has been more recently and verifiably utilized by the Norwegian terrorist and mass child-murderer Anders Behring Breivik in his 2011 manifesto The European Declaration of Independence. Hoo boy! The President’s researchers missed that little factoid. Strange, since his newish reign has otherwise been typified by a surgeon’s exactitude.

Our President’s scholarly commentary – flung like a rubber chicken into the public sphere for maximum effect – predictably unleashed the blowback that is the gentleman’s food and drink. Thoroughly energized by the force of the scorn storm, our Chief Executive doubled down by delightedly re-posting the quote and accompanying it with a picture of Napoleon riding into battle, presumably Waterloo. “Wait’ll they get a load of this!” 

But these nettlesome details may be set aside in the interest of pell-mell Republic-breaking. History is such a mess anyway! A little more broken crockery will hardly be noticed at this 11^th hour of what was once The United States of America.

Sir: Your Derrière

The beloved French Emperor/rockstar who routed the Russians and Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz and later had his ass handed to him at Waterloo? He has become an historic object lesson in overreach and may otherwise provide a glowing metaphor we can map to our current schoolyard maelstrom. 

The beginning of Napoleon’s end was his mildly overconfident and fabulously disastrous 500,000-man campaign into wintry Russia, whose lousy weather and SuperSize^®flu season decimated his army, the half frozen, half-starved remnants of soldiery arriving in “conquered” Moscow to find it already abandoned and aflame. Trudging back to Europe, then, his soldiers dropping like flies, Napolean reportedly departed by sled and returned to Paris. Wintering in summer uniforms and logistically screwed by the mass death of their pack animals, Napoleon’s troops wasted away in the thousands. Tolstoy produced War and Peace from the cataclysm (whose later classic film version featured the divine Audrey Hepburn – uh… where was I?) – but it was otherwise an unmitigated and ghastly boo-boo of Empire-ending proportions. 

By then Europe was more than prepared to wash their hands of Mr. Tourette’s-on-Horseback. The initial excitement that had attended Napoleon’s rapid rise? His stupendously clueless missteps in Russia had lifted the veil on his once-venerated chutzpah. Defeated in the Battle of Nations and exiled to an island called Elba, the vanquished Emperor sulked. And probably played lots of golf, his form hopefully more practiced than that of our Emperor, who addresses the ball like an animatronic panda. 

Of course, Napoleon escaped his captors, sailed back to France, raised another army and began his brief but busy-bee second term. He was uber-pissed and had a lot of catching up to do. “Hey, est-ce que quelqu’un ici a commandé une pizza Mayhem?” Napoleon angrily rang some more continental bells – swinging wildly and with a stern expression – until his second defeat (and ABBA’s later victory) at the Battle of Waterloo. This time when they exiled the grown brat it was to a yet more distant island. *sigh*

The Republic for Which We Stand

We Americans have long believed in the ironclad foundation of our almost ridiculously young Republic. There is dishware older than our country. Our common fever dream of New World freedom and equality has produced crazy scenes and acts of selflessness in defense of what we had believed was an inviolable contract. Brother tragically fought brother in the Civil War, kids nauseous with terror and seasickness jumped willingly out of their Higgins Boats and sprinted up Omaha Beach into an expected fusillade of interlocking machine gun fire, the asshat Nazis determined to rule the Old World they would first have to smash to its foundations. We even sacrificed 50,000 of our youngsters in someone else’s Civil War – we were so determined not to let (recent BFF) Communist Russia get the better of us in Vietnam. 

But, look: startups stumble and fail with unsurprising regularity – dismantled by bad ideas, strategic ineptitude, and pedestrian incentives. And 236 years? It’s been a decent ride. What’s to complain? 

Now, in an atypically classical nod to the chattering classes, our President has invoked Napoleon to publicly suggest he is above the law. This would seem to confirm the claim that our Republic is indeed, after a comparatively scant 236 years, under assault “from within” (to borrow a popular phrase of the current administration). Our Emperor is at least doing us the favor of operating from what I’ll call The Shallow State, a refreshingly transparent answer to the sinister and secretive Deep State from whose tentacles we may now consider ourselves rescued. 

The “Deep State” suggests a sinister subterranean syndicate – layer upon byzantine layer of secret codexes and dazzlingly interwoven cabals. Now that our Emperor is back in power – returned from Elba with a chip on his shoulder and fairly unfettered power – he is going straight for the deeply buried evil we’ve been assured is actually running the country, that diabolical substrate you can defeat by firing civil servants. 

As our President continues his angry dismantling of the Federal government, up to and including his abrupt termination-and-woops!-faltering reinstatement of the National Nuclear Security Administration, we can at least know we are in the capable hands of the Meritocracy we have long been promised. His thrashing approach to governance and preparatory statements about the coming autocracy suggest our Chief Executive is blissfully unaware of the gangrenous template he is reenacting. Oh well.

It’s not clear what they teach at Wharton, the President’s alma mater, but history seems not to have been on his dance card in those days. What they say about ignorance of the past is still true. “Those of us who fail history are doomed to repeat it in summer school.”

Yeah. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. See you in class.