“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” – Nietzsche

The Nameless One is my profound professor. He acquaints me with aspects of the human character I wouldn’t have known. I am working toward my Ph.D. in depravity.

I’m not being cute. Yes, I’m making lemonade out of lemons, but how else make lemonade? I’m not arguing, he’s so bad he’s good, only that I am learning – every day – about our species. And while the truth is bitter, enlightenment excites.

I was raised clueless. My parents, like many, wanted me to believe in a pastel-perfect world, where humans behaved decently – that is, politely – and all conduced to a consoling conclusion. When bad things happened, if they couldn’t be hidden, they were explained away. The worst that happened never happened. A cousin was impregnated by my dad’s closest friend, who’d been invited to play parent while our parents traveled. The friend – my godfather – vanished. My cousin vanished – to a “boarding school” in Switzerland for nine months. Never happened.

With chilling recklessness Americans recruited a maniac to protect us. He’s not only raping us – literally and metaphorically – he seems impossible to dislodge. By the time he’s done, we’ll all have to go to Switzerland for nine months – to recalibrate, re-create. What’s happening to our nation hardly resembles what our parents promised. Were our parents lying? Or were they too clueless?

Nor is the depravity limited to one villain. Satan has accomplices, doing his bidding, rooting him on – and onlookers, who should be howling, nodding at his predations like dashboard dolls. Who knew Senators, proud personages in their precincts, could be so pathetically paralyzed by pusillanimity? How do they live with the shame of their acquiescence? Might I, comparably positioned, perform comparably? This is not at all what my parents taught.

Engulfed by calamity, we flail to survive. That is where we the people find ourselves today, more daily waking to the gravity of our mistake. Democracy is predicated on the decency of the majority. I rhapsodized about the quasi-mystical genius of the people in my book about our Presidents and Vice-Presidents. I wrote what I believed, what I’d been taught. I know better now – thanks to the tutelage of the Nameless One.

Assuming we survive – as I think we will for a while – how to proceed? Education means to lead out – e-ducare: where to?

There can be no going back to the naïve optimism of yore. Once raped, forever raped, recovery may be possible but not repair. I no longer believe participatory democracy is survivable in modernity – a woeful conclusion, of which I am far from certain. Having erred so spectacularly in our choice of leader, what prevents recidivism?

Those are questions for tomorrow, when with any luck a modicum of calm returns. Today we must accept that ghoulish face in the mirror as our own. The Nameless One is who we are; we’ve acclaimed him twice, cognizant of his crimes. Maybe once was inadvertent, but twice?

The good news about this bad news is that it will keep Decency busy from now to dark. In war, everybody matters. Every voice contributes to the chorus, every mite to our might. I mean to make good use of my new Ph.D., for the job market for moralists for once should be brisk. Charting the best course – for a person or nation – takes not only data and intellect but practice. We must learn to know what we do not know.

When the Nameless One gloated over the murder of two loving accomplished parents by their troubled son, he startled. For he is us.