The Morning After

 I decided not to watch my country lose its collective mind last night. 

Instead, I cued up "National Treasure" on the streaming whatsis, and watched Nic Cage steal the Declaration of Independence again. Symmetry, you might call that.

And now?

Now it's Wednesday morning and there's a gloomy lid of November gray where I live in Indiana, which is appropriate considering Indiana resoundingly decided last night to continue its bid to be North Mississippi. This was not surprising. My home state has always had a thing for kooks, demagogues and zealots. Occasionally we elect all three.

Which is how we woke up this morning with a colorless ideologue (Mike Braun) as our governor, a Trumpist Moonie (Jim Banks) as our senator and a grandstanding attorney general (Todd Rokita) who'll remain in office to keep us safe from hard-working Haitians, transgender athletes and women who'd prefer not to bleed out when a pregnancy goes wrong.

And the rest of the country?

Well, right now, as goes Indiana, so goes the nation. The kooks, demagogues and zealots are about to control both houses of Congress. And we're going to return the keys to the White House to a half-mad felon whose grip on reality loosens by the hour, and whose limitless capacity for grievance is the sharpest knife left in his drawer.

To that I say: So be it.

To that I say, we get what's coming to us in a democratic republic, an old saw that still cuts true. If we've decided a half-mad felon is the solution to our problems -- even the problems he and his acolytes make up just to scare us -- then madness is what we'll get. 

The good news is, we won't get it forever.

We are a resilient nation, always have been, and our resilience springs from the fact that you can play us for rubes only so long. Eventually we figure out the kooks are indeed kooks, and we throw the bums out.

It may take longer this time for the light bulb to go on, because in a good chunk of us the light bulb has grown exceedingly dim. But sooner or later enough of us will realize we've been had, and we'll do something about it. 

In this case, I give it two years. Mid-terms in '26. The chickens come home to roost.

And, yes, I realize how Pollyanna-ish that sounds. Or naive, as some people like to tell me. But as a card-carrying history nerd I tend to take the long view of things, and my long view tells me if we survived a Civil War, the First Amendment assaults of John Adams and Woodrow Wilson and countless other crises both foreign and domestic, we'll survive the half-mad felon.

Bottom line, I refuse to believe a circus clown like Donald J. Trump and his collection of servile hammerheads can bring down the American republic. Not after everything else we've been through.

Can the hammerheads do significant damage to everything we hold dear? You're damn right they can, and will. Can they do everlasting damage? That's not nearly as inevitable, or so it seems to me.

Last week I cued up another film, mostly as a cautionary tale. It was the 2006 remake of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," starring Sean Penn as Willie Stark, the fictitious Louisiana politician Warren transparently modeled on Huey Long. Like Long, Stark got things done. He was also, like his real-life doppelganger, an increasingly ruthless dictator whose excesses eventually brought him to a violent end.

What was chilling about that was how much Sean Penn, in rhetoric and style, sounded like Donald J. Trump. And how much he also sounded like one of Stark/Long's contemporaries -- a ranting psychopath over in Germany whose name we all know.

Historical analogies, of course, are never exact. The aforementioned aren't, either. So there's no way I'll surrender to hysteria and say we're now about to become Germany in 1933, and that therefore we've seen our last election and have only persecution and mass murder in our future.

Not buyin' it.

Experience, see, tells us that in America the kooks and demagogues and zealots always overstep when handed total control of the tiller. It happened when the Drys pushed through Prohibition, and all it did was make America thirstier and Al Capone 'n' them rich. And it happened when the Klan took over Indiana during the same decade, only to go into decline when its leader -- a sick SOB named D.C. Stephenson -- thought he was so untouchable he could assault a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer with impunity.

Turned out he couldn't.

Just as it will turn out the crazy people we've put in charge won't be in charge forever. Because in America, the only constant is change.