The entire staff of the Central Intelligence Agency received buyout offers this week. I got my buyout offer Tuesday.
Haha, see what I did there? Both sentences are true — one can play games with this writing stuff — and while I did interview with the CIA fresh out of college, under the charmed notion that my year of Russian language gave me a snowball’s chance, whatever they were looking for, I wasn’t it.
A condition that lingers, apparently, since my offer came from the Sun-Times. “Here’s a bag of cash, Mr. Ego, take it and scram…” But that too is deceptive. I wasn’t singled out for my abrasive personality. Everybody got offers, though mine was big enough — I can be a jerk — that I surprised myself by thinking about it.
Again, deceptive. The amount was determined, not by my capacity to cause headaches for my superiors, but the 38 years I’ve been on staff. “It’s nothing personal,” said Michael Corleone in The Godfather. “It’s just business.”
A business shredded by the grinding tectonic plates of technology. At the same moment the government is being torn apart in an orgy of unrestricted Republican institution-wrecking. A lot of people making hard personal decisions, while the choice of what kind of country we are seems suddenly settled. The United States used to consider itself a force of good projected into the world. We welcomed refugees at home, brought hope, democracy and clean water abroad.
Now the United States Agency for International Development was declared “a criminal organization” by our shadow king, Elon Musk, and summarily disbanded. I’m not sure the intention was to yield the field to his business partner, China. Though that will certainly be the result.
So yeah, it’s self-absorbed of me to focus on my own little drama while the government is literally being wrecked around us. But that’s being covered elsewhere and besides, to paraphrase Stalin, a person losing his job is a tragedy, a million losing their jobs is a statistic.
Besides, the big picture is almost to horrible to contemplate. The Department of Education is next, for the crime of imposing uniform standards on a country keen to sink back into regional intellectual darkness, unbroken by any intrusive light from without. Tennessee might be able to expel evolution from its curriculum just in time for the centennial of the Scopes Trial this summer; 100 years and not an inch of progress — they can put that on their license plates.
So … if it’s 1925, again, that means we have to look forward to … what? Four years of mania followed by a crash, another Great Depression and a third genocidal world war? That sounds terrifyingly plausible.
Not to equate the two organizational refashionings. The changes at the paper are due, not to ideological malice, but survival math. You can’t pay employees with money you don’t have. People must go. The past 20 years of journalism have been the longest game of musical chairs ever. Another chair is yanked away, “Pop Goes the Weasel” drones again, and some poor soul’s rump can’t find a chair when the music abruptly stops. Rinse, repeat.
Far easier to shift my gaze from the nationwide disaster to my current dilemma. If I take the money, I’ll finally clean out the basement, beaver away at books nobody wants to read, make another run at “Remembrance of Things Past.” Sure, I’ll miss the faint whiff of significance that comes with this job. But I’ve already figured out that this is not the greased hub upon which the city spins.
If I don’t take it, there’s a chance I’ll enjoy years more, happily doing a job I truly love. There’s also a chance I’ll get laid off later, along with other valued colleagues, not so much because I’m disliked but because I get paid more than others.
What to do, what to do? Coin flip? Gut call? I was talking to a young woman about her career choice: whether to make a bunch of money being a quantitative analyst — “quants,” they’re called — or stick with her field of obscure research.
“Try to imagine yourself 20 years from now and ask which path you’d regret more not taking,” I advised.
I actually don’t have to imagine myself 20 years from now: I can just go visit my father and see. Which I did, Wednesday, deciding to put the question to him.
“So Dad,” I said. “The paper’s offering a buyout. It’s a good chunk of money. Should I take it?”
He looked up at me with a flash of his old acuity.
“The choice is up to you,” he said.