Here’s how this plays out:

Nothing changes.

The Memo has been Released, it’s being used as toilet paper by anyone not in the Treason Tank, and none of that matters. It might as well be a blank Doctor Who psychic card, open to whatever interpretation an enterprising traitor wishes to give it. Does it provide grounds to fire Rod Rosenstein and get at Robert Mueller? Sure, why not? Nobody ever took it seriously, starting with its authors. The Memo exists as a propaganda tool.

But you already knew this. A year in, we have achieved Groundhog Day, and we know how this plays out. It already has. Many times.

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A year in, you get used to it.

It doesn’t become normal. It doesn’t become accepted. But it does become expected, like a chronic condition. It’s just there. It’s always there. And you learn to deal with it.

Our government is not legitimate.

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One of the great shames of our unfortunate era is that amidst the horror, the suffering, the mendacity, the sheer chaos of it all, we have not found the time to appreciate perhaps the greatest political sex scandal ever to grace Our Exceptional Republic.

Let us now rectify that.

Longtime prisoners of this audience may recall our contemporary fascination with Stormy Daniels, a spunky dame who took on David Vitter in Louisiana, and whose c.v. was heavy on the v. It was a tribute to our robust democracy that a strong-willed woman, with nothing but the clothes off her backside, could aspire to one of the highest offices in the land.

And there we left her, forever emblazoned upon our fertile memory, until a week ago, when she returned for a curtain call in the national spotlight. For her service to America was not finished, her page in history not yet complete.

Stormy Daniels had fucked Donald Trump, and a universe was born.

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As the news broke, the news that wasn’t news, the news everyone already knew, the news that dog bites man, CNN’s White House correspondent walked up to the camera and delivered it to the nation as gravely as Cronkite announcing Dallas.

“I think, Wolf, what we have to come to grips with, and I almost have to think back to the day we were at Trump Tower, when the President was commenting on Charlottesville, and he was saying that there were very fine people on both sides, saying that there were very fine people among the white supremacists and the Nazis, is that the President of the United States just seems to have a problem here, Wolf, in this area. And we can tiptoe around it, we can dance around it, and not really put our finger on it, but the President seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color. From other parts of the world.”

The flash, apparently official: President Trump is racist.

No shithole, Sherlock.

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Did we actually have a week off from him?

We think we did. Pretty sure, come to think of it. That week between the holidays, when he wasn’t incessantly demanding our attention.

Felt great! And man, did we pay for it when he got back.

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We grew up in a time of great dystopian movies. Beginning with Dr. Strangelove and ending around Brazil, there’s a twenty-year run of gloom that perfectly syncs with our formative years. We may joke about still waiting for flying cars, but the future we anticipated was found in the theater, not in cartoons.

The wallpaper of our childhood was Vietnam and Nixon; gas shortages taught us that conditions could turn on a dime. Speaking of which, comic books cost twelve cents when we started buying them; they were a quarter when we stopped paying attention.

And yet we never felt as hopeless as we do today.

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It started innocently enough. A week ago, after bewailing the state of Our Exceptional Republic, we felt like zoning out on some fine filmed entertainment offered by our preferred streaming service. Maybe one of those comic-book movies we hadn’t gotten to watching yet?

We didn’t get very far.

The opening credits were one of the most joyous things we’ve seen since the Snoopy Dance — and we first saw the Snoopy Dance fifty years ago. The face was total bliss, the body (trunk?) a mass of expression.

We had to stop. And play it again. And again. And again.

We’ve been playing it again all week.

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