It’s strange. With all of the craziness that’s been swirling around this country during 2020, the emblematic picture that I’ll retain isn’t the frothing mobs spewing COVID germs at Trump rallies, or Trump making claims about a rigged election, claims so unsubstantial that “baseless claims” has become a single word on most news programs with credible journalists.

Instead, the picture that I’ll hold in my head as a symbol of where this country has gone is a guy in north Georgia, standing on the side of a highway with others, holding a Jon Ossoff for Senate sign. Someone pulls up in a car, snatches the sign out of his hand, and beats him. The picture shows the man bleeding from cuts on his face and head.

That’s what we’ve come to.

Naively, I thought that the delusional dimension inhabited by Trump was a thinly populated one. Just Trump and those who had no visible means of support other than to keep sucking up to him. But I was wrong. That alternative dimension has a population of some 70,000,000, most of whom are immune to evidence, norms, traditions, and common sense.

Hillary Clinton was wrong. More than half the truly Trumpers are deplorable. They’ve chosen to try to tear our country apart rather than admit that they lost.

Despite having court case after case thrown out because of a deficiency of anything other than their whining that they had won.

Despite recounts in several states that simply proved the original count was essentially correct.

Despite Republican judges and election officials standing up—often to their own peril—for the validity of the election processes.

As someone said on Quora yesterday, he couldn’t believe that Trump didn’t win because there was no way Biden got that many votes. His circular logic was that Trump must have won because Trump must have won.

Today the Electors in most of the states will meet and cast the votes that they are pledged to cast for the President of the United States. In a sane and rational world, this would be the end of the clown show that Trump and his minions have visited upon this country. Trump would do what every other president in modern times has done and try to make the transition as orderly and efficient as possible.

But this isn’t a sane and rational world. This is the world that Trump built, full of delusion, hate, deceit, and lies. This is the world where a guy holding a sign on a street in North Georgia can be beaten just because he espouses an opinion different from the one who beat him.

The first presidential election in which I had a somewhat informed opinion was the Eisenhower/Stevenson race in 1952. I was for Eisenhower because I thought a former general had a better chance of getting us out of Korea. He also got us the Interstate Highway System. I have closely followed every presidential election since then, voting in almost all of them. I’ve watched the system work as we went from Democrat to Republican to Democrat. At times, they did things that I thought were useful; at other times, they did things that I thought were terrible. (I thought that we became a third-world country the day we crossed into Iraq with a phony reason for a real war.)

However, whatever the president or the party, there was some respect shown for our centuries-old traditions. We were not lawless. Now, unless the party of the truly Trumpers has a sudden attack of good sense, we are indeed lawless. Witness the people gathering in Washington, listening to a felon calling for martial law, a conspiracy theorist and admitted liar stirring the pot, and cheering as Trump does a flyover in Marine One.

In the middle of the fifties, there was a song by the Platters. The first line was, “When the twilight is gone...” It didn’t have anything to do with politics, but it seems to now. The title of the song was “My Prayer.” I wonder if this country still has a prayer.