Resignation differs from surrender. The difference matters.
I resign when I give up a game I cannot win: I quit the field. I surrender when I quit the game, now and forever.
I resigned myself to my cancer treatments; I never surrendered to cancer – or would have, until hope had fled.
I resign myself to America’s new regime; I will not surrender – until hope has fled.
I’ve three reasons for resigning. First, they won. I do not – as these thugs did four years ago – deny the event. Their victory astonishes me but so do many phenomena. Life astonishes me each dawn. What might this day have in store?
Second, if we the people mean to commit suicide, how can I prevent it? All are free, as the Stoics taught, to exit existence, nations no less than persons. I believe America is embarked on that sorry experiment. You may not think so, but that’s your reality; my dread sees no refutation of its conviction. From previous outings, you know why I think this; I won’t bore us by repeating.
Third, my first obligation is to save myself. As Oliver Goldsmith jingled it (he was capable of much better):
He who fights and runs away
May live to fight another day;
But he who is in battle slain
Can never rise to fight again.
I owe my life to those I love, as do we all, if we’re thinking straight. Why else live except for the good of others? I’m susceptible to the disease called depression, which has whacked me twice. After November Fifth, I noted the recurrence of familiar symptoms which, if unaddressed, might lead to thoughts of self-destruction. I have learned the protocol in such cases: change your mood by changing your mind. I had to look away from what sickened my soul. I yanked my attention as one might a dog from a fetid rabbit. It took some doing, but most mornings now I wake thinking poems not politics. In the quiet of eternity (like a hospital room), I pray for my wits to regain their strength, so if summoned we can wage war again.
America’s Calamity can’t come soon enough. Since it’s inevitable, as our Civil War was, we might as well get it over with and begin rebuilding. That was Hamlet’s response to the rot of Elsinore:
If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.
Whoever cannot learn from their mistakes must be pummeled into comportment. As our mistakes have been grave, so must be our punishment. You cannot invite evil into your castle and expect tranquility.
And if my dread exaggerates – happy days! Cancer taught me this. Plan on death – and if you dodge it, hallelujah. Like A. E. Housman’s fabled king, I inure myself:
There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that sprang to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.
Drink up.