Each morning as I wake up, I wonder how close we have gotten to the finality of this slow-motion collapse — not of our civilization but of the small, uncivilized cluster of lunatics who have gnawed their way into our government.
Exhausting, when I punch up the news on my computer to see how much farther this creature has sunk down overnight. Its life span seems to be headed for the “national security” basement bunker, the only part of the grand ballroom for which a federal judge has allowed construction to continue.
What I don’t do, though, is figure we, i.e., We the People of the United States, are fucked. Tired to the bones, yes, but not fucked.
The trouble with even masterly history books is, you only have to read a couple of pages to see a regime in destruction. A couple of pages, that’s it. I’m a fast reader. A couple of pages, even dense pages crammed with facts and details, takes me only a few minutes.
Meanwhile, back here in temporal reality, we are living with the agonizing slowness this collapse is. Well, I believe it needs to be slow to benefit our massive country, the democratic civilization of which has been moving (slowly) forward for 400 years.
Trump’s incohesive, incoherent cabal must disintegrate slowly, slowly, slowly — so we can watch it in its death throes and fully accept that this awful anomaly has really happened.
We won’t be able to shrug it off in a couple of years as a long nightmare and get on with our lives. We’ll have to pay attention to the good people we elect to establish a wiser, fairer, finer Reconstruction than the last one, and to start, mindfully and respectfully, to seal up the structural holes in our foundation through which the maggots crawled.
P.S. OK, forgive me for all the explosive vocabulary and metaphors (I began to go off on a Mordor reference but, as you can see, have managed to control myself. Sort of.).
