Playing backgammon, when I make a grotesque mistake, which happens often, I splutter with responses:

· How can I have been so stupid?

· Why wasn’t I paying attention?

· It wasn’t my fault (for some reason).

· It might have worked out, if…

· My opponent is sooo lucky!

· The gods (fates) have it out for me.

· I was distracted/ ate something/ have a cold, etc.

No messing with self-blame. Easier to exculpate, exonerate, excuse than excoriate, which is what I deserve. And all of my explanations are sort of true, though they explain nothing. I was asleep at the switch, cocky, sloppy, dopey, that’s the gist. Rapidly I resume play to eradicate regret.

So in America, a few months into the second administration of the Nameless One, we the people are spluttering. Of course we should have known better! We had four years of his malfeasance/maladministration to assess his M.O. He promised, gloated about, the mayhem he had in mind. The litany of his larcenies and lies was too voluminous to lament. Yet we reelected him. How on earth!

Now and then, for obscure reasons, I knowingly injure myself. I gnaw a fingernail till it bleeds, gorge on some forbidden foodstuff; I, well, you get the picture. I am not a masochist, I’d say, not to disfunction, but I sure am a reprobate to my tutelage and a disappointment to my better angels. These self-inflicted blows were not inadvertent but aimed where they landed. I knew what I was doing, that it was wrong, and did it. How come?

It consoles us to claim we were misled into our mistakes, that this isn’t “who we are.” Only this is who we the people are. Whether you voted for or against or failed to vote (which is a vote), we own this result. If we survive our insanity, how do we retool ourselves to avoid its calamitous recurrence?

Maybe because this is my obsessive fascination, I’m convinced we all need to enlist in Morality #101 and memorize our lessons. Our remedy lies not in getting richer or cleverer or attending church (where preachers preach what their congregations want to hear). It lies not in civic lessons, though these might help, or in switching off our “electronic devices”, though that too might help. It lies with our heart-to-heart tussles with ourselves in the dead of night, when we set aside our masks, face our facts, and demand, if we dare, “Is this my best?”

Nearly three years ago, God visited me in the lively dead of night. Whether He was God, a ghost or a gust makes no difference, His reality was absolute, unimpeachable, indestructible and sublime. I would not want to explain Him away if I could. What He showed me during our intimate, silent, thrilling, wondrous one on one session, was not my real right way, but that I knew that way, had always known it, but had often forsaken it out of vanity, timidity, rapacity, fear. All of us, I’m convinced, carry within us the capacity for sanctity, but we flee it because it is hard. Saints do not know more than we do, they obey better; they possess more of the courage to become who they ought to be.

America got prideful, indolent, selfish, cruel, vicious, stupid, self-delusive, grotesque, not because we didn’t know better, but chose not to look. There was never a good reason to vote for the Nameless One, only bad, discreditable reasons, which we roared as if they were worthy.

We deserve our punishment, even if it’s capital. Our proliferous excuses notwithstanding, we did this to ourselves.