Published October 4, 2018
And it came to pass that the sons of men elected them a king, and his name was Trump.
And Trump said unto the Amerikites, Go to, we shall be great again, and shall build a great wall. We’ll be so great you’ll get tired of being great, believe me.
And the Lord came down and beheld the Amerikites and their king and he saw that nothing was restrained from him.
And the Lord said, Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language and their ideas, one from another, and the tribes of the Amerikites shall dwell in enmity and confusion, for Babel means confusion.
And so it was.
Now the Feminites and Progressivites in their multitudes were sore with Trump, and they warned him, Touch not Roe.
And it came to pass, there opened up a vacancy on the Court, and Trump named Kavanaugh.
The Deplorabites were good with that, but the Feminites and Progressivites gnashed their teeth, and they schemed against him, for that if he were sent to the Court, he might touch Roe, albeit he said it was settled law. They trusted Kavanaugh not.
Now in those days there were talk shows, and the curse of Babel fell heavily upon them, and even Stephanopoulos of ABC sat with sheepish grin as contending overtalkers yakked and yakked and cried out like needy, spoiled children, and waved their hands, and cried, “Me, me, me,” so that the words of none were heard at all, or understood, until the yakkers subsided into little puddles of spittle and wrath.
The confusion of Babel was abroad even in all the networks. Fox News proffered one language with its universe of values, and MSNBC proffered a different language and universe, and they wot not one the other. And their voices rose to different gods in different heavens.
And the tribes on Facebook and Twitter posted and tweeted, hip and thigh, to the number of six billion posts and tweets of wrath. And all were mutually uncomprehending. And they cursed and damned one another, and made of each other cartoons and devils and all manner of evil things.
For the Amerikites had become as angry children.
Now for a hundred years, almost, the American Civil Liberties Union had defended due process and the rule of law, which are the ways of grown-ups. But now the ACLU abdicated the burdens of adulthood and repudiated even its own founding thought and the rule of law, and turned against everything it had ever stood for. It ran an ad, entirely without justice, damning Kavanaugh, that he was exactly like unto Weinstein and Cosby. Such were the devolutions and betrayals in those days, and retrogressions to the ways of shame.
At Georgetown University a professor, one of the Feminites, laid down on Twitter that white men should be killed, and their corpses castrated, and fed to pigs. And Georgetown condemned her not.
There arose a great cry in restaurants where tribunes of the Deplorabites went to dinner, so that they fled before the steaks arrived, and there arose the hue of indignation even in the elevators so that Flake could not ride up and down until he listened to the spiel.
And anchors in their pundit chairs attended to such footage and nodded and said, “Heartbreaking,” hoping, as they said it, to be spared the rage of the Feminites.
So all eyes and hearts among the Amerikites became hardened with the enamel of fanaticism and the glaze of hysteria. No more was heard the Progressivites’ sweet Esperanto of Goodspeak.
All was raw political emotion now—or, worse than emotion, bitter political calculation and the spirit of a long revenge—and a state of war coalesced, and the mind’s better and subtler ways of understanding the world were set aside.
So it was that the old amiable race of Amerikites parted in their ideas and went their ways, and gloom fell upon the land, and lightning and thunder, and other aspects of the global warming and symptoms of Last Days.
All was confusion, and a gnashing of teeth, and a shaking of fists, and the clouds of civil war.
The Amerikites could not see that they peered fiercely through the wrong end of the telescope, even as they wondered withal how everything had become so small, and how the historic majesty that they had assigned to themselves and their mighty ways in the world had devolved to beer and adolescent sex grapplings at the long-ago Sodom and Gomorrah of Georgetown Prep.
And so the Amerikites revealed themselves, one to another, and it was not a pretty sight.
And the Lord looked down and beheld the Amerikites and muttered irritably to himself, and wondered, all things considered, whether it was worth shedding any more of his grace upon them.
Mr. Morrow, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is author of “Evil, an Investigation.”
