My wife brought home the first volume of John Lewis’s book series, March, and eventually went back to the library to get the other two. The three are all written as graphic novels and depict Lewis’s early life and the journey he took in the 1950s and 60s as he engaged in sit-ins and marches throughout the deep south, interwoven with scenes from Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.

The series brings home a remarkable period in Lewis’s life and in the life of the nation, as the deep south is brought kicking and screaming to a place where black people are given any seat on a bus, service in diners and restaurants, tickets at movie theaters, and most significantly the right to vote. The books depict the travails and dangers and sacrifices, the strength and courage it took to win the day.

This, in tandem with finishing the first—and only?—season of The Gray House, has opened my eyes wider to the penchant humans have for embodying tall tales and holding onto lies with a death grip. I realize the writers and producers of The Gray House probably employed a certain dramatic license, but the core of the message is a familiar and likely accurate recounting of the long slog, of what it took to bring an end to secession and slavery in this country. And how entrenched many were, how firmly they held onto a “way of life.”

Between the books and the streaming—and the current administration’s insistence on returning to the “good ol’ days” when people knew their place– what has become painfully obvious is that colorblindness is still a long way from a certain universality.

Though maybe colorblindness has never been the goal. Maybe it goes beyond that, to a place where we simply carry on without making a big fuss over our different hues. To where we simply, finally understand that our intrinsic value has always been more about the intangibles and way less about skin-deep pigmentations.

The problem with our current political reality is that the Kennedy Center nonsense is only the tip of the iceberg. A symptom. A metaphor for the other thousand things that give us reason to scream and roll our eyes and maybe utter angry, spiteful things under our breath. Or totally out loud.

The MAGA base and most Republicans in Congress cannot be convinced that there is anything wrong with being in bed with the Heritage Foundation, with making mountains out of mole hills and inventing media frenzies out of thin air, with betrayed allies and stupid tariffs and a costly, unnecessary war and 4^th grade fights with longstanding trading partners and incompetence and kneecapping critical personnel who once kept tabs on weather and diseases, and ignoring environmental damage while kowtowing to the fossil fuel industry’s billion$ and tearing down the East Wing and building a totally unnecessary ballroom complete with bunker, and holding fucking MMA fights on the South Lawn and a Formula 1 race through the streets of D.C. and trying to dictate what kids can read and who they pray to, if anyone, and taking away a woman’s right to choose because they refuse to grasp the concept of separation of church and state, and weakening higher education because they can’t deal with a populace that can actually think for itself, and undermining health care and trying to start his own federal banking institution and grifting to his heart’s content and the constant misdirection in service of running from what’s in the Epstein files, and making fun of a physically challenged reporter and inciting an insurrection and pardoning the January 6 offenders and berating Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and firing the chief of Labor Data and cutting Medicaid funds in the “Big, Beautiful Bill” and saying white refugees only need apply and sending National Guard troops untrained in police work to Los Angeles and springing ICE goons on unsuspecting populations in various urban areas all over the country and putting many in “detention centers”, and taking nepotism to new heights and trying to ban TikTok and approving a pipeline through Native land and wanting his bust on Mt. Rushmore and his name or likeness on everything else, and the glib, uninformed wise-ass commentary, and lying through his teeth, and…

Making fun of the reporter should have been all anyone needed to see. As good an indicator as any of the overbearing, obnoxious, insensitive, shallow, immature, useless, empty pretender we’ve had to put up with for 11 years and counting.

-Pretend he’s on the ballot? By all means. That should solve the problem. One might think that pretending Trump is running in all the midterm races might improve the odds of a blue wave.

-Is gerrymandering a guarantee of expected outcomes? No! Voters can change their minds.

-It all seems so unnecessary. The EU is floating the idea of making Canada an honorary member because of Donald Trump’s incessant whining and griping and relentless pursuit of ghosts and goblins. Why is anyone putting up with this nonsense? And where in the hell is the Republican outrage over a President who should have long ago been excoriated and disowned? Hey, Mitch is back. Maybe he’ll set everyone straight.

-Oil prices too high? It’s difficult for me to be moved by all the whining. Maybe we should have thought about that decades ago, as wind and solar became more sensible and available, and battery tech improved. Yes, Trump is an idiot and this current crisis is on him and his administration, but we could have been much further down the road to energy independence and reducing our need for fossil fuels if leaders and the general public trusted the vast majority of climate scientists who rang the warning bell and confirmed rising CO2 levels back in the 1950s.

At what point does a person’s relentless pursuit of material wealth start raising red flags? Is it pure innocence, wealth being a merely pleasant and well-earned by-product of capitalism or someone’s ambition and know-how and desire to “make a difference”?

I’ve heard people say that the money they make is secondary to the joy and satisfaction they get from doing something they love to do, and I guess I believe some of them, to a certain extent. Still, the skeptic in me is often roused when I hear someone say such a thing. I hear it as something that’s easy to say when one feels safe and secure and money issues appear to be just one less thing they need to worry about.

The hackles are really raised when someone goes on to say that they’d do what they do for nothing.

Anyway, I wonder about people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers and the Ellisons, along with Donald Trump and his teat-suckling offspring, who appear to have crossed the altruism Rubicon a long time ago.

One person’s altruism is another’s greed and deep-seated need for influence and power, and I feel as though what Trump in particular has been engaged in since he took office– and long before– falls in the latter category. I’m sure he or one of his lawyers would argue otherwise, offering up the tired excuse that The Donald is just a boundary-pusher, maybe even a “groundbreaker,” that everything he’s doing is legal, even above-board. But that whole defense is perhaps the most appalling and maddening aspect of this interminable nightmare.

For Trump, bumping up against acceptable norms and crossing lines is his brand, and The Base love him for that. But for the rest of us, we know a crooked, self-absorbed empty soul when we see one. A self-absorbed empty soul who’s building his own bunker, like the rest of his billionaire… pals?

Has Trump reached the point where he feels unassailable? Like he can do or say anything and there will be no repercussions?

I know, I know—it’s always seemed like that for as long as he’s been in the political arena. But lately he’s been saying and threatening things like a person who either doesn’t give a shit anymore or someone who feels that there is enough of the government under his thumb, enough insulation between an angry public and himself that he can say or do anything he wants with no fear of consequences.

We know he’s always been needy and infantile, but between the Midterm Convention, the SC ruling on mail-in ballots, and his threats regarding the Kennedy Center, it’s starting to feel like he’s closer to being ready to pull out all the stops and go scorched earth while he still can.

He has to be tormented. Even he has to feel tormented sometimes by his own ineptitude, or by the level of criticism that shows up on a daily, hourly–constant– basis. Natalie may feed him only the happy stuff, but he has to have gotten wind of what else is out there.

Many are hoping there is mounting inner turmoil that leads to a series of lethal missteps or some systemic, bodily failure, and not that he is already dead inside. Like a zombie with a hair piece.