Without the energy to write something new this morning, I lazily looked back on what I offered in the aftermath of Trump’s election in 2016:
• Attempts to explain Trump’s election.
• Pep talks quoting Thomas Paine.
• Introspection.
• Critiques of newspaper coverage of the Trump transition team.
• “An Open Letter to a Dear Pal Who Urges Me to Have a Sense of Humor About President Trump” (Which I concluded, “So how about I won’t tell you not to laugh at a wake, and you won’t tell me it’s not wake.”
And so on.
But just as I didn’t feel like live-blogging last night, I don’t have much to say this morning.
For weeks in semiconscious preparation for this day, I’ve been contemplating a thing I’ve come to call “civic suicide.” Not actual suicide, as I still love my family and our dog and playing baseball and golf. I just want to get out of civic life, and all civic talk. I want to go into the woods for a long while. You can call that a “privileged position.” I would only reply, “It’s not a position.” Nor is it what I’m going to wind up doing, in the end, I’m sure. Or what the professional rhetoricians in the community I serve will be doing, either.
But for today, I relate to my manic-depressive mother’s psychiatrist, in the 1970s. “Dr. R. says he’s been depressed lately, too,” my mother wrote in her journal. “Dr. R. said, ‘Last Thursday, I just didn’t give a shit. I closed the office and went home.'”
I think I’m going to take the dog on a nice long peaceful leisurely walk, to pick up some bloody Mary mix.