The news, the commentaries, the opinions and the speculations all flood in here like the water we used to shoot under dormitory doors with dustpans and watering cans. The net effect is hard to ignore. You’d have to be a confirmed Luddite or hermit to be unaware of it.

But there is this good thing about it: It has a dominant aroma that suggests strongly whether the news is good, bad, disastrous or hopeful. It’s a lot like the news that we got from the radio during the Battle of the Bulge. After six months of steady, bloody progress, our troops seemed on the verge of complete success, when suddenly they were being pushed backward by German armored divisions, digging into frozen ground for shelter and fighting for their lives. From where we sat, glued to our radios, it could go either way. And then, slowly at first, our troops stopped retreating. General McAuliffe’s famous “Nuts!” response to a surrender ultimatum when his troops, surrounded in Bastogne, were nearly out of supplies and hope did a lot to turn the tide. Six months later Germany surrendered. Those of us old enough at the time to appreciate that crisis likely will never forget it. Especially now.

It’s important to remember it now because, in a way, we’re once again engaged in another Battle of the Bulge, coincidentally again in midwinter. Just as we did in December 1944, I’m sifting and sniffing everything that comes in here by every medium to see if there’s reason to hope our government will be able to function after the current extraordinary and extra-judicial attempts to dismantle it and, it would appear, further impoverish and disenfranchise the poorest classes.

The summary sackings of many senior administrators, both civilian and military, and their replacement with presidential loyalists, is extremely ominous. The “orders,” issued by email to civil servants from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (a legally nonexistent creation of the Trump administration), to justify in writing their employment are as bizarre as they are inhumane.

But here’s where the aroma gets a little less unbearable. Most federal administrators have advised their employees not to answer. That’s a small, and perhaps temporary, victory, but it probably signifies and predicts more to come. On another front, the so-called town hall meetings being held by many congressmen are often fraught with voter discontent (in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, however, one woman who spoke up in protest was forcibly removed by black-clad musclemen directed by the sheriff. She was briefly hospitalized. Moral: Free speech is determined by congressional district.

Air traffic control centers have been minimally staffed since Ronald Reagan’s heroic mass firings created temporary chaos during his administration. The grandstanding South African with the chainsaw (allegedly a gift of a Trump admirer who’s also the president of Argentina) has symbolically taken the saw to the Federal Aviation Authority with the predictable result of understaffing. Another accident like the recent one at Reagan Airport, and travelers will be switching to rail; airlines, faced with plunging revenues, will complain; and the chainsaw will be seen no more.

That’s kind of the good news. The public, initially stunned by the blitzkrieg of sweeping (and legally questionable; see ACLU) presidential orders, is starting to realize that many of them are the dead wood and lazy swine Mr. Musk has mentioned in his pronouncements, and that their jobs, benefits and retirement are gone.

It’s probable that most of Musk’s young hatchetmen who’ve been invading federal offices have little idea of the implications of their actions. Witness the recent kerfuffle when they realized they’d fired the folks who guard our nuclear weapons, and then couldn’t recall them because they’d erased their contact information. If the whole operation were more polished, it’d be more dangerous. That’s the good news.

Musk and Trump have reason to feel themselves invulnerable at the moment. Musk is busy dismantling the government organizations and personnel responsible for overseeing his business interests, and Donald is busy carving up Ukraine (he knows that Gaza Riviera’s a nonstarter). But instead of grinding our teeth at our own apparent impotence, we should remind ourselves that a lot of what we’re watching and reading about is performative; that both actors live and die on the oxygen of public attention; that neither has a sense of humor. If we lose ours — an easy thing to do in the fell clutch of this circumstance — we’ll have lost a lot more than that.