Invasion of the Agency Snatchers by Linda Greenhouse
'“At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”
Those lines are from the opening voice-over in a great midcentury American movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Giant vegetable pods mysteriously arrive in a typical American town. Each takes over the identity of a local inhabitant, becoming an exact likeness except for the absence of emotion and of everything else that makes a person human. The town’s brave doctor tries to sound the alarm, but no one believes him, and it’s too late anyway. Trucks piled high with pods are rolling inexorably across the landscape.
The date was 1956. Many viewed the film as an allegory, although to what remains in dispute 60 years later. Some saw the soulless automatons that the pod people became as a reference to Communism. Others saw the target as McCarthyism. (The director, Don Siegel, denied any political message. “I think the world is populated by pods, and I wanted to show them,” he once explained.)
Personally, I see the Trump cabinet.
Stay with me and picture the first cabinet meeting. The white (almost all) men (almost all) sitting around the table will look like their predecessors, generations of them. But they won’t be the same as their predecessors, not at all. They will have been placed in their positions and handed the reins of power not to govern, but to destroy.
It’s not only Rick Perry, the former Texas governor whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has named to head the Department of Energy. Mr. Perry so disdained that department when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2011 that he blanked on its name when listing the federal agencies he wanted to abolish. It’s also Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma state attorney general, who has devoted his adult life to fighting environmental regulation in partnership with his financial backers in the oil industry, named to head the Environmental Protection Agency.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/opinion/invasion-of-the-agency-snatchers.html?
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