Throughout the last four years, the armed forces of American political commentators inveighed against a return of the barbarians — those who crashed through the gate eight years ago and, ever since their ensuing exile, threatened to do so again.
In that pursuit, Tuesday they were successful. Having again crashed through and torn down the main gate, their next pursuit is the destruction of all other gates still intact — for the barbarians will not tolerate any remaining institutional barriers to their total, i.e., totalitarian, power.
Now, also again, American commentators are gathering their forces, inveighing against the barbarians' fait accompli, and arming themselves with fresh adjectives to lob furiously at the occupying enemy.
In short, America's more refined political commentators will refight the last war in the same manner with which they lost the last war.
They would of course reject all suggestions of playing on the barbarians' level and with the same weapons. Which is to say, playing dirty. It's something they just don't do, something they won't do. The civilized commentariat plays cricket, not dirty.
But what of the civilized citizenry? Might they be willing to get down and dirty? How could otherwise virtuous citizens play the unplayed game? How could they counter the barbarians now in control yet with a silent voice that would deafen and drown out the stentorian heathens?
That may seem an impossible challenge. But there is a way. And, turns out, it's actually quite simple, in addition to being the dirtiest of tricks and yet the very finest of old-school American patriotism, something the U.S. is presently, and desperately, short of.
All that is needed are citizens still in possession of their wits, an appreciation of the very highest irony and a boiling-mad need to express the most accurate perception of America under Trumpism.
From there, it involves only this: the hanging of a five-feet-in-length, three-feet-in-width Fourth Reich flag from their windows — something commonly done by good, patriotic Germans in their earlier, Third version of Trumpism. This American version would be equally patriotic, though in a radically different way.
It would show the Trumpers that they got what they wanted — a fiercely ugly authoritarianism; its flag, a symbol of Trumpism's highest of costs: the end of the globe's most historic republic.
There are nearly 70 million Americans who acted on Tuesday against the barbarians. They are the civilized citizenry, and together they could pull this lowest, dirtiest, most righteous of all political tricks.
Imagine 70 million Nazi flags hanging from American windows every 14th of June, the birthday of this former republic's führer (also my first wife's: coincidence? I think not); every 4th of July; every Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
Those who screwed over America on 5 November need reminders of what they have wrought. What better, more visible way than this? — even though, obviously, the this will never happen. I propose it only as a kind of reverie; nice thought but utterly unreal.
Unreal, undoable, un-happen-able, because the civilized never play on the barbarians' level. Although their refusal is virtuous indeed, it also carries two extraordinarily pernicious effects: It delays virtue's victories, and it abets the barbarians' return.