The polity has no doubt become inured – predicting a 500-year flood every two years does have a way of drowning itself out – to candidates depicting this as the most exigent election of our lifetimes.  But it is troubling, is it not, that the President claims he can alter the Constitution with a mere wave of his disturbingly toddler-sized hands? You’ll get no argument here that repealing the 14^thAmendment is a worthy endeavor, but certainly not at the expense of consolidating all our nation’s executive, legislative and judicial powers into the stubby baby mitts of a delusional moron.

It is undeniable that Trump supporters cannot be swayed by facts.  To them, multiple bankruptcies and the $400 million gifted by his father fail to mar the image of a self-made man.  They remain unconvinced that the broken scrabble and tumbleweeds dotting the open range between West Texas and Chihuahua is anything less than a gleaming $5 billion border wall.  And while many who have eschewed the MAGA Kool-Aid are markedly perturbed by this symptomology, the explanation is rather incomplex: Trumpists have overtly traded reason and morality for self-preservation. Because of the inexorable demographic shifts that threaten their White-Male-Christian way of life, they will abide almost anything to forestall the degradation of their standing.

To that end, they defended Judge Cosby.  They then explained away a dozen pipe bombs as a liberal plot to curry sympathy (recall: burning of the Reichstag) before being muzzled by the arrest of a registered Republican living in a white cargo van plastered with pro-Trump stickers.  And after multiple GOP candidates ran attack ads picturing Jewish rivals holding stacks of $100 bills, party officials deflected criticism by claiming – wink, wink – the spots merely depicted the Democratic candidates as “tax-and-spend liberals.”

Then came Pittsburgh.  On October 27, Robert Bowers, who regularly posted streams of anti-Semitic vitriol on social media, strode into the Tree of Life synagogue and gunned down 11 worshipers.  While it would be hyperbolical to imply that Republicans pulled the trigger on that Saturday, it might be safe to say they bought the bullets.  Similarly, the misogynistic attitude displayed during the Kavanaugh hearings by Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham (The lady doth protest too much, methinks) manifested in the murder of two women in a Tallahassee yoga studio.  The gunman had uploaded videos onto the Internet complaining that his attempts at pussy grabbing had garnered only rejection and thus fueled his disdain for women and sexually active couples.  In my day, unrequited love spawned masturbation; in the era of Trump it engenders murder.  Though it is a distinct challenge to mobilize behind Joe Biden’s airless, near somnolent admonition that “words matter,” something needs to change before every Hispanic child in the commonweal is sundered from their family and herded into that tent city in Tornillo, Texas.

Afraid of the human caravan wending its way up towards our southern border, the Donald showed no compunction in rehashing the old Willie Horton ad, though updated with a Latin twist and a total disregard for the facts.  In his commercial, since pulled by even Fox News, Trump falsely claims that Democrats welcomed in Luis Bracamontes, a Mexican drug dealer who went on to kill two California sheriff’s deputies.  It went unmentioned that Bracamontes was in fact deported by the Clinton administration before resurfacing during the tenure of George W. Bush when the murders actually took place.  Perhaps more to the point, law enforcement has since solved this problem all on its own; cops nowadays merely execute unarmed coloreds right there in the streets long before the trouble can begin.

Unabashed lies and manipulation have become so commonplace that one cannot help but doubt the pendulum might ever swing back the other way.  When Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate and current Secretary of State’s bid to suppress the black vote was repelled by the courts, he cravenly announced an eleventh-hour and patently bogus investigation of the state Democratic Party for a “failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.”  The mid-term elections take place today and it’s anyone’s guess at this moment whether the commonweal will be preserved or if we will continue our descent away from the foundations of decency and the rule of law and plunge towards the chasm of civil unrest.  True, the summer protests of 1968 eventually promulgated our withdrawal from Vietnam but they also brought these cautionary words from Jim Morrison:

There’s blood in the streets, it’s up to my ankles
Blood in the streets, it’s up to my knee
Blood in the streets in the town of Chicago
Blood on the rise, it’s following me