One way or the other, a year from today, we will all wake up

When I was small, I suffered from what psychologists call "sleep paralysis." I was visited at night by an invisible entity with an eldrich, creepy voice in whose presence my entire being was enveloped in a kind of dread which even now I cannot find the words to describe. I could move only in slow motion and could speak even in a whisper only by summoning every bit of willpower at my disposal. Once, I actually saw him in the large mirror on the wall of our bedroom. He was featureless and coal-black all over. He had black antlers.

He would pick me up, and carry me around the apartment. Nothing more. But while I was in his grasp, somehow the horror I felt was beyond words. The dreams (as I understand is usually the case with sleep paralysis) were extraordinarily vivid. Our family shared a single bedroom, and as we passed my sleeping parents I would try to call out for help. But no sound would come from my lips. In the morning, I would tell my parents about it. They would say that it was only a dream. At first, I couldn't believe them; how could anything so realistic, down to the details of the objects in our apartment, be a dream? But eventually, I came to believe them somehow and developed the ability to will myself awake. I could interrupt the horror. I could come back into the realm of sanity and safety. I could fight back.

But it was a struggle, and sometimes it didn't work as well as usual. I remember one night when I was sure that I had fought my way back to wakefulness. I was back in bed. But suddenly, a weird, cartoonish crayfish or lobster floated in segments across the room and disappeared into the mirror, and I once again sense the presence of "the Invisible Man," as I called him.

The incidents became less frequent as I got older. I dreamed that he was dragging me out of bed a couple of times when I was a teenager. I only remember one such incident since I became an adult, and it was many years ago.

Even after all these years, writing about those childhood nightmares is cathartic, somehow. And ever since I first read H.P. Lovecraft, I've always wanted to use the word "eldritch" in a sentence. Well, now I have.

The Trump administration reminds me of those dreams. This almost feels like reality, doesn't it? But common sense tells us that it can't be. A man that clownish could never be president. And while I'm all too familiar with the political bias which infests the mainstream media, despite all the professionalism journalists can muster- how could it be otherwise, given how similar they've become in background, education, attitudes, and even the circles in which they socialize?- it simply can't be possible that so many people could seriously believe that the Washington Post is nothing but political propaganda, but that Breitbart and OAN and Information Wars and Fox News are nothing but the gospel truth!

How can so many honorable, principled conservatives all have reached the conclusion that the Constitution, free trade, and freedom itself are all of secondary importance to "sticking it to the libs?" And how can they believe that anybody will ever take them seriously when they speak of those things in the future?

How can a man be elected president, and remain so for three long years, with so few of us knowing anything at all about his life, his habits, his reputation before his election- and so many refusing to believe the truth about them when we hear it? How can the man who lives in the hottest and most unrelenting spotlight of them all lie so often and so badly, and still be believed by so many of us no matter how absurd the things he says might be?

How can a man so ignorant of history, of economics, of geography, of the Constitution, and of the mechanics of government be our president for so long, and yet have learned so little about any of them? How can a nation which, with all its many faults, has always had a reputation around the world for an unmatched generosity of spirit and a warm, compassionate heart; a nation of immigrants built on diversity and which prides itself on a firm conviction that all human beings are equal in the sight of God, ignore its own history and turn inward in parochial tribalism and suspicion of the world outside and even outright bigotry?

How can the American people, who lived through the Cold War, be content with a president who not only routinely puts the interests of Russia ahead of our own, but with the knowledge that only a month or two ago Russian state television ran a segment mockingly suggesting that he is a Russian agent?

How can the world be laughing at us, while we remain in denial about it?

Yet here we are. Three years into the Trump administration, Mattis and Tillotson and Casey and McMaster and the other "grownups" are gone, driven back into private life by the realization that not only does Donald Trump have no idea what he's doing, but that he's so consumed by his ego that he is incapable of listening to those who know what he does not and with whom he has surrounded himself theoretically so that they might advise him.  His aides speak off the record of ignoring his orders, often issued amid irrational tantrums, not only to protect the country from him but also to protect him from himself.

Is Donald Trump an accident, a fluke inflicted on the American people against their will by an archaic constitutional aberration- the Electoral College- and a random accident of geography and demographics? Or has the nation truly lost its mind, and perhaps its soul?

Inauguration Day, it has been said, is the one day when American Presidents (and their speechwriters) summon all of their rhetorical skills to heal the wounds and bruises of an election campaign and to create at least a momentary illusion of national unity. We have, it is true, had presidents before who have spoken the language of unity while using a strategy of division to achieve certain specific political goals. But our current president is probably the first to divide us, not to obtain some policy objective, but for no other reason than his own personal glory and advantage.

What sort of message will we hear 11 months, 22 hours, and 32 minutes from now? Will our national nightmare will be over? Will we have willed ourselves back into the light?  Will we awaken from a weird dream in which, after the manner of dreams, the rules of common sense and reality have been suspended, to find that we are still a nation of people with profound disagreements but who share the same common values and goals and a common identity as always?

Or will we find that the nightmare is actually a new reality from which we cannot awaken, one in which "truth" has come to mean that which in the darkest corners of our hearts we want to believe, and in which we have lost the ability to perceive, to intelligently choose, and so to govern ourselves?

Will a president who refuses to release his income tax returns, refuses to cooperate with investigations into the affairs of his administration, and even now is seeking to prevent witnesses from testifying at his impeachment trial and to keep the American people as much in the dark as possible, who abhors accountability and sees whistleblowers as traitors and "spies," govern the nation for four more years knowing that this time he cannot be held accountable to the American people when they are over, with the people who actually know what they're doing driven out of his administration, free to run amok?

It doesn't seem to be in the cards that the president inaugurated a year from today will be anyone remotely to my personal liking. At best- and I see this as a remote possibility- a Republican party reeling from defeat will awaken, and find its true self again, and repudiate nativism and isolationism and protectionism and tribalism and take back its place as a counterbalance and alternative to an increasingly radical and irresponsible Democratic party still deep within its own fever dream. Perhaps, a year from today, the Republican party will be ready to repudiate Donald Trump and all the ugly things he stands for.

More likely, we will have a new president with whose domestic and social agenda I will in many ways profoundly disagree, but one with at least a reasonable understanding of history and of the world, and a realistic view of America's place in it. I hold out hope that the world will stop laughing at us a year from today, and start looking to us once more for leadership in building a world whose values are more similar to ours than to those of the Chinese or the Russians. Perhaps then those whose values are most similar to mine will begin once again to engage the new president and his or her supports in dialog, to persuade and compromise and build consensus, to heal divisions rather than widen them,  and to see those with whom we disagree certainly as opponents, but also as partners, and never as enemies.

Or will the morning of January 20, 2021 dawn on a world in which we have listened to our fears rather than to our ideals, in which all hope of our finding ourselves, our common dreams, and our common identity has vanished, and we remain torn asunder by a narcissist's lust for personal glory at the cost of literally everything else?  Will first light on that day illumine an America no longer willing or able to govern itself, and looking as so many have in the past to an authoritarian leader to do our thinking for us?

It seems very odd to me that the most consequential election of my life should turn out to be one in which I will be unable to wholeheartedly embrace either candidate. But I honestly believe that it will provide the acid test of whether or not we will ever again be what I was raised to think that America is all about. It is said that when the Founding Fathers emerged with the final draft of the Constitution, someone asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government the new nation would have. He supposedly replied, "A republic- if you can keep it."

A year from today, I think we will know whether or not we're going to be able to keep it- and whether, really, we want to. I believe that January 20, 2021, will be the most consequential day in our nation's history since March 4, 1789, when the Constitution took effect.

It will be the day on which we either awaken from a four-year-long nightmare to the dream that was born that day or from that dream into the reality that we no longer believe in it.