The catastrophe

will continue and the obscenity will continue to sully the White House.

As Jack Donovan has written, in the wake:

That's right. It's never coming back.
This was your last chance.
It's not going to be OK.
The numbers are against you now.
It's not going to get better.
Everything that makes you angry will increase.
It's time to say all of the words on the tip of your tongue
that you've been trying to hold back.
----

PS.  Nov 8. I was joking with my friend Bill yesterday about how each of us hasve a character which does not match our values. He likes to think of himself as detached and a loner. But his attachments to the few people (and animals) he loves are fierce, as is his temper. I used to think of myself as stable, dependable and reliable, when in fact my history testifies to my restlessness and changeability. I often find myself in places --not just geographical but mental, emotional, spiritual-- where I could never have imagined myself to be.

One troubling (!) pattern in me is this: with very few exceptions, I cannot recall an attachment of mine to any group, either concrete or imaginative, that I have not eventually broken. My therapist once told me that I was clearly not meant for groups and to stop trying to find one to join. He was right about that. On upbeat days, my six decades plus of life seems, well, rich in variety. On down days, far more frequent in the last few years, they seem to be a long series of failed projects.

My good friend L kindly told me once that this was because I was a relentless seeker after truth and that I was not afraid to turn a critical eye on my own positions. I wish I had the character to embrace that idea and celebrate all the changes in my life, to be the eccentric crank I am turning into. But I always run up against that longing for stability and connection. I seem unable to stop digging and unable to stop wishing I could stop.

As aware as I can be of the vagaries and alleyways of my Original Sin tainted character and soul, I still cannot make myself believe in something once the evidence mounts against it. At least the evidence in my own eyes. Were I to be accused of intellectual pride, I would have to plead nolo contendere at the very least and, if acquitted, be astonished.

My turn to politics, around the year 2000, included a strong embrace of myself as an American and a renewed appreciation for and attachment to this country and its Constitution and its actual history. Now I find myself thinking, and feeling, that such a place is fading fast. As if I were a proud Roman in the fifth century.

Catastrophizing? The irritability of an aging man? Selection bias?

I listened to a post-election podcast by the author of the Northwest novels, stories which, literary merit aside, have lodged themselves into a portion of my brain. He, not unlike others on the Right, considers November 6th, 2012 to be, after a long illness, the death of what was once America. I will go on acting in public as if I don't believe him, but I do.

And here is where I find myself astonished yet again by my wandering soul. Perhaps the only stance against the mind-numbing pieties of a corrosive and tyrannical liberalism now decisively entrenched is an extreme and unnuanced rejection: a celebration and embrace of everything it hates.  The country that this avuncular fascist describes --not a paradise, but a sanctuary-- is a place that, even though it would never accept a man-loving man like me, I wish existed somewhere.

Because the one I am living in now seems more and more like a fast-fading dream.