I’ve not watched any of my usual news programs since November 6th. Liberals have proven themselves to be both naïve and feckless.

No one can know what the first day of the Dark Ages must have felt like, including those living at the time. But we have the perspective of history to help us know what it should have felt like. 

It should have felt like this: a light going out that had been guiding the pursuit of progress, the march of civilization itself. An end to the pursuit of knowledge, understanding and tolerance. The last appeal to our better angels. Foremost though, the last ray for hope is also extinguished.

What triumphed on November 5th was stupidity and willful ignorance: Half of the country believed it had become worse off than the previous four years, even though the truth clearly demonstrated otherwise. Half of this country enthusiastically elected a man of profound ignorance and grievance, and the more he professed both, the more he was embraced as one of their own. Rage, resentment and retribution are now the order of the day. It can and will get worse, because they’ve vowed it will, and they must deliver on that vow to retain power.

We are no longer a divided country; we are a conquered one. There are no guardrails any longer, and any attempt to for them will be met with vile threats and worse. History might not repeat or even rhyme, but it can certainly provide the roadmap to Hell civilization has chosen so many times before. Turns out, to our dismay, history is merely cyclic and as accurate a pathfinder to perfidy as any GPS.

So yeah, this cycle will end, as all authoritarian cycles in the past have ended. It took a thousand years for the Dark Ages to give way to the Renaissance. True, the last one of these descents into Hell lasted less than fifteen years. But the country that defeated authoritarianism in 1945 is the perpetrator today. 

In the course of human history emperors gave way to divine right kings and then to constitutional republics. Maybe authoritarianism is simply the latest iteration of governance, and we’ll eventually endure it as we’ve endured the others. Perhaps the rot of emperors, kings and now dictators will one day fertilize the tree of liberty.

Unless it once and for all poisons it.

I’ve never been happier to be seventy-five and not twenty-fiveor thirty-five in my life.

Carol tells me I didn’t retreat into this hole in 2016, and she’s right. I thought then that 2016 was an aberration and 2018 and 2020 suggested I might have been right. I grew up in the Deep South, but was sustained by the belief that liberal government would sustain and nurture social progress over the forces of regression and persecution. Yet after more eight years of MAGA further revealing and growing its pure inhumanity, it now has triumphed. That Deep South is now one half of all America, and that half has more guns and more rage than our half.

What have we wrought? What difference does it make. We’ve seen it many, many times before. The Rev. Jeremy Wright might have been premature, but he had it spot on.

God damn America!