I’m rooting for America to fail.

                  This is a weird new sensation.

                  All my life I’ve been a patriot – more of a patriot, I now think, than my homeland deserved. My nation was more my family than my family. There was more gusto and sentiment in JFK’s funeral than around my family’s starchy dinner table. I did not hate my family – it was all I knew – and I’m not a hater – but my spirit ached for more excitement, engagement, affection. Like many thirteen-year-olds, I planned to be President.

                  Six years later, like other young men my age, I debated whether I’d serve in Vietnam. I deplored the war. But sedition and defection were not my way. Happily, I wasn’t drafted and the war ended. America’s ignominious defeat saddened me. That photo of embassy workers skedaddling Saigon in a helicopter brought no joy.

                  Thirty-one years later, out of work and estranged from my first marriage, I wrote a patriotic book about America. I recommend it – it’s a dandy read. Again my nation had become my family. I wished her the best.

                  Fast-forward to today. America gets licked in World Cup soccer after our President strong-arms authorities to cheat in our favor. Hurray. America’s getting our ass kicked by little old Iran. Iran is a nasty nation but so what? – the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Hurray. Disgusting algae invades the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after ill-considered and extortionate “repairs.” Hurray. America’s 250^th birthday bash is a bust. Hurray. The imposition of ill-considered tariffs is backfiring, inflation is spiking, the stock market’s shuddering, the nations of the world mock us, hurray, hurray, hurray.

                  I want the Nameless One and his crime family to fail – not just so we reject and eject them – but because we deserve correction. I wake each morning wishing our rulers writhing in boiling oil. They have earned torment and humiliation. As have we the people, who lodged them in office. My rage is righteous, not partisan. Shame, shame, shame.

                  Which leaves me where in the world?

                  Practically, I am a captive; spiritually, an exile.

                  Jane and I live in America because our children and grandchildren are here. Our doctors too. Dealing with breaking bodies in broken Italian is no fun. More importantly, the war for America is here, which recruits us like it or not. No ducking the draft this time around.  Though only a limping foot-soldier, I must give my all to this fight for three reasons. First, I owe my loved ones my best efforts to secure a tolerable future. Second, the battle for America is a battle for civilization: without the freedom to think, do, and be who we choose, why bother being? Third, if I shirked this challenge, I’d loathe myself. On my deathbed I long only for this self-appraisal: he did his best.

                  The good news about the bad news is that it’s so bad it’s good. The ineptitude and depravity of the Nameless One are becoming evident to all, including the dummies who voted for him. Even the contumelious tech bros will find a shipwrecked America corrosive of their bottom line. I predict this gang will be vomited out of office because they’re noxious, not because it’s right.

                  Whether democracy is workable in modernity is an open question. No one knows. America has stumbled badly, making bone-headed choices: what prevents a recurrence?

                  That’s a debate for tomorrow. Today we must extirpate our exterminator. To save the state we must become its opponent, rooting for the calamities that will waken us all to our plight.

                  Go, algae!