Years ago, during my days as a remodeling contractor, we often had to demolish an existing structure, a wall, or plaster and lath in order to begin to work our magic. I asked my guys to list such labor on their time cards as “R&T” — Ripping and Tearing — and couldn’t help but notice that the youngsters went at it with incredible gusto, often with sledge hammers and lots of noise and dust. My tools of choice were usually just a claw hammer and a small “flat bar,” which I found more effective and a lot less noisy and dangerous. My counsel to my men was often, “Pretend you’re a 70-year-old man and work more gently.” First thing I knew, I was that 70-year-old man, and began to ease myself out of a business that I really had enjoyed.

The United States currently appears to be going through a great deal of R&T. I doubt there’s anyone who turns on the news these days without wondering what the chief executive is up to now. This, of course, is just the way that executive likes it. As a performer, rather than an executive, he thrives on the oxygen of public attention, both approving and disapproving. It’s clear that most of the ideas he comes up are not his own — nobody has that fertile or all-encompassing a mind — but have instead been cooked up by the boys and girls in the back room, each of them grinding their own axe to hack at the roots of the mythical Deep State.

Now, you’d think that a bunch of the executive’s minions so devoted to the destruction of a myth would take the trouble to be more versed in the classical myths. If they did, one or two of them might notice the similarity between the blitzkrieg of executive actions, likely extralegal deportations of alleged gang members, and attacks on government agencies, with the myth of Icarus and the folly of hubris.

That and others have remained alive for millennia because they remain relevant. Back in my prep school days, I wondered why we had to bother to remember all those names. No longer do I wonder.

Icarus and his father, Daedalus, you may recall, were imprisoned by King Minos on the isle of Crete. Daedalus, a master craftsman, fashioned two pairs of wings from feathers and beeswax. Their plan was to fly to freedom. But Icarus, intoxicated by his new power and in spite of his father’s warnings, soared too close to the sun, which melted his wax wings, with the predictable result.

The sudden rush of executive actions, though promised during the campaign, found most of the nation unprepared. Their effects upon both opponents and supporters of the administration have dismayed and caught many thousands by surprise. The majority party in Congress has seemed amazingly supine, the minority disarrayed. The media, apparently unequipped to describe the unprecedented situation of a president running roughshod over convention with the help and guidance (and financial support) of a frankly weird supernumerary, have scrambled to catch up.

The nation’s adversaries around the world are likely licking their chops at the opportunities presented by its disorganization; its friends are alternately amused at the effrontery of announcing intentions to subsume Canada, Greenland and Panama, and deeply worried that it can no longer be trusted with secret intelligence. Many of us who count ourselves utterly opposed to all the characteristics of the administration find ourselves effectively neutered by our odd majority/minority status. As the so-called Musk-rats blunder through government agencies with their sledge hammers, cutting staff and programs and saving perhaps the cost of a presidential golf weekend in Florida and the fees of the government attorneys defending against hundreds of lawsuits, we’ve so far been reduced to hand-wringing, not a normal American trait.

Two countervailing factors give me hope. One I’ve mentioned, the myth of Icarus and his fatal hubris. A photograph of the current cabinet, because we know so much about them (thanks to the free press), resembles a clown car. They aren’t going to take governing to any wing wax-melting altitudes. We can only hope they won’t try.

The second factor, we will be celebrating mid-month, on the 250th anniversary of the first battles of the American Revolution. There’s something stirring farther west, which we know about mainly because the media have been following the speaking tour of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as the turbulent town hall meetings held by Republican congressmen. We may not move very fast. It took a while for the United States to get into both world wars, but once we did…