So, what’s the point?

We know how the Senate trial’s gonna end — we’ve always known how it would end — and while there may be a few twists along the way, the conclusion is not in doubt.

So why bother? What’s the point?

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It’s pointless, really. Everybody knows that. The last British monarch to exercise significant power — even then, slight and declining — was Queen Victoria. The British Empire, once counting a quarter of the world’s population as its subjects, has been whittled back down to the UK itself, and there’s no telling whether that will hold together after Brexit. The monarchy is just a show, now, available on Netflix.

What? Why, yes, of course we watched it. We’ve watched that movie as well, twice. Got up in the middle of the night to watch the wedding — sardonically, mind you. Happened to stumble onto CNN when the Paris news was breaking, and there went that weekend.

No excuses. We can’t help paying attention.

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“If you’re old,” the tweet requested Thursday night, “please attach a link to your 2003 take on the invasion of Iraq to your 2020 take on Iran.”

We are old, but we wouldn’t be blogging for another five years, so we have no links to offer.

But we remember.

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A decade is an arbitrary unit of time, but there’s usually a story you can tell about it, at least through the 20th century and into the 21st. And had Hillary Clinton won the Electoral College, perhaps we could have coherent thoughts about the 2010s as well.

Instead, Donald Trump descended the Escalator to Hell on June 16, 2015, pretty neatly cleaving the story in half.

If you ignore Death Panels, anyway.

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Impeachment was always going to go down in flames. We knew that going in. It would pass the House, die in the Senate. Some argued that the certain futility made the exercise pointless, perhaps even prone to backfire.

Our attitude has been: Go down fighting.

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We’re not ready for this.

Collectively. As a species.

We’re not ready for what’s coming. We’re not going to be ready until it’s too late, except it already is, it’s already happening, we’re doing nothing about it, and by the time we do something, we should have done it ten years ago, or forty, back when we could have done something about it, back when we first knew about it.

Only we first knew about it sixty years ago. Or seventy, ten years from now.

The world is melting. And we’re just going to let it. We can’t help ourselves.

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Back when all this began, when the aliens invaded and the timeline shifted and the world spun off its axis, we started wondering what life was like in Weimar Germany, knowing what’s coming and being unable to stop it.

We haven’t wondered that lately. Now it’s more like 1860 America.

We’re not alone, obviously. You probably have some excitable friends assuming the worst, and really, who can blame them? What’s to stop all those (white) people from acting out the moment they no longer get their way? What’s to stop politicians from preying on their fears the way they’ve been doing for, oh, let’s say fifty years now?

What’s to stop the next Civil War?

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