(This is the last appearance of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the logo on much of my political writing, until the midterm elections. He needs a rest, and so do I).

“Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.” – G.K. Chesterton.

Many people in America are furious with the Republican Party for winking and hiding as the worst attack on our democratic processes in our country’s history raged under their very noses.

I have a special gripe with them, apart from the obvious. Their behavior bordered on the treasonous, and I don’t think people will soon forget it.

They are cruel. Trump is a sadist.

I learned first hand this summer just how frightened many good people were of them and our President. He seemed to hate more than half of his people and gave them the finger every chance he had. The Republican Party enabled this cruelty., but he absolutely wallowed in it.

The GOP didn’t care that Trump frightened people. They didn’t care at all.

Joe Biden was officially elected President today, and Congress will ratify him in the next month. The iron wall of rage and denial is starting to crack.

We need some time off from fear and anger; I know I do. Having read your e-mails all summer, I  think many of you think so too. And many of you aren’t ready to let go of it.

I was surprised to read my friend Eve Marko’s blog post today in which she sounded gloomy and angry about where the country has been and where it is heading.

“What pisses me off in Joe Biden,” she wrote, ” is that he’s too nice in the face of this unfolding disaster—and yes, even though he’ll win, this is a disaster, and it continues to unfold, openly and actively; it ain’t going anywhere. People have learned and are learning that there are ways to discredit or go around elections and that you can do it at no cost. No one is pointing the finger at you; no one is castigating your name for the ages. I don’t think this is just Biden’s persona; it’s also a strategy for how he wishes to move forward.”

It is a great gift to be Eve’s friend. She is an intellectual in the strat of Hannah Arendt; her mind along is a great gift to me of friends. She is a Zen master and teacher, and Eve is rarely angry or gloomy.

But I’m not pissed at Joe Biden. When he first declared he was running, I thought he was a joke,  our own Don Quixote, a three-time loser. And an old man past his prime.

I don’t think any of those things anymore.

The Zen spirit appeals to the American mind, says the Lion’s Roar blog; it is a “stripped-down, determined, uncompromising, cut-to-the-chase, meditation-based Buddhism that takes no interest in doctrinal refinements. Not relying on scripture, doctrine, or ritual, Zen is verified by personal experience and is passed on from master to disciple, hand to hand, ineffably, through hard, intimate training.”

Sounds mesmerizing.

But you don’t have to be a saint to be a Zen Master any more than you have to be a saint to do good. She does an awful lot of good. Sometimes, you have to get pissed.

In her post, Eve reveals much foreboding about the future.

“Ahead of us is one of those highway crashes that end holiday hopes for many people. If not in 2020 or 2021, then in 2024 or 2028, but not too far in the future. You have to be blind not to see it. Maybe we need that crash, I think to myself in despondent moments. Maybe that’s the only way we’ll get rid of an Electoral College system that had its origins in racism and protecting slavery.”

I seldom disagree with Eve Marko; she is a lot smarter than I am and a lot wiser. I listen to what she says.

But we’re not on the same page tonight. I don’t see the future the way she does. In fact, I don’t really see the future at all. I don’t believe I can ever define the future by the present; it rarely happens.

I think in her pique at the Republican’s outrageous sedition; she looks away from the idea that Donald Trump may have done almost as much good as harm. Black Lives Matter would be almost nothing without him. The millions of suburban women who brought him down in Georgia and elsewhere would not be paying so much attention to politics; Me Too would have been “what, who?” without his inspiration.

As a political writer, one of the big lessons I learned was that in politics, the future is never – absolutely never – what people expected of it.  Nobody can predict the future, or ever has, not reliably.

In the years leading up to World War II, Congress and the American people were almost violently opposed to joining that conflict.

A year or so later, four million soldiers were in uniform and built a tank every other minute. No one foresaw that, just as no one foresaw Trump.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I need a break from worry and anger. It’s not human nature to stay angry and aggrieved day after day, year after year.

I believe the Republicans will pay for what I can only describe as perfidy and sedition. They have taken a sledgehammer to the idea that they can govern responsibly. They have lost the trust and faith of the people in the middle.

The first sign of change is the suggestion that an awful lot of people in Georgia are shocked by what they have seen unfold in their own state – leaders being ridiculed, gangs of thugs in trucks riding around threatening poll counters, thousands of death threats via e-mail, the President coming unhinged on TV every day.

As he so repeatedly and foolishly is wont to do, the very time he needs the Governor of Georgia the most, he trashes him as a fraud and a loser. Let’s see if that works for him.

I think The Republicans will be held accountable for this treachery by history, surely not by me, sooner rather than later.

Ever since he declared for President, Biden has been scolded for his passivity, his focus on real issues, and his gentleness in the midst of so much savagery. They laughed at him for staying in the basement; they goaded him to get nasty during the debates. They don’t understand why he doesn’t take every piece of bait tossed his way.

To me, he is doing just what he should be doing – making Trump and his Republican fellators look bad without saying a word about them. Let Trump get his own headlines.

While Trump fiddles on Yahoo, Biden is focused on vaccines – precisely where he is doing just what he should be doing. Raging at Trump is like throwing peas at an elephant. That’s what he wants, not what he fears.

If Biden gets those 100 million vaccines out to 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of office, as he has promised to do, he will be off to a great start, possibly reminding a lot of frustrated and alienated voters that government is still good for something. Yelling at Trump and his followers has accomplished nothing in four years except make Trump stronger and more powerful.

Trump has cast a spell on millions of people, and it may take another witch before the spell can be undone.

Attention and disruption is his oxygen. If nobody pays attention, he will shrivel up and blow away, like the leaves on an oak tree.

I don’t believe most of his followers are lost to democracy; I believe they are disappointed by it and feel abandoned by a corrupt and old political system. People want something different. Decency is different than Trump.

Nobody knows what will happen if that ethos really changes, instead of just faking it, as Democrats have been doing for generations now.

The Republican Party stinks pretty badly right now. Their challenge is to show the country that they are capable of governing as well as disrupting government. I’m eager to see what Georgia tells us about that.

I hope Biden stays off Donald Trump’s Crazy Train and ignores the one-note critics, whose only message is to fight. Am I the only one who thinks this hasn’t worked out for his party?

This pressure to get tough goes nowhere except to feed Donald Trump’s battered soul. If Dracula can’t live without blood, then Trump can’t live without attention.

I’m retiring the Screamer after this post, he’s done us proud, but it’s time to cool down, even if it’s just for a few days.

The Republicans cannot take over our country, even if they can slow it down and stymy our better angels. Our country is big, big enough for aroused women, fired-up kids, determined Black Americans, Latinos, and those suburban wives we’ve heard so much about.

They aren’t going anywhere.

They couldn’t stop them in Georgia; they can’t stop them everywhere else.  Their universe is changing.

All summer, I quarreled with the worriers, even accusing them of being the new bed-wetters. I apologized for that; I hadn’t yet grasped how much fear and unease Trump called in people.

It is both traumatic and counter-productive. And addicting. Believe me, some parts of you will miss the daily fix of outrage.

I don’t see it the way Eve sees it and the way so many others see it.

Losing is not the same as winning.

Trump lost the election, and he lost the fight to overturn the election even more badly.  He didn’t even get to finish his precious wall, and Mexico didn’t pay for a dollar of it.

His incompetence and missteps over the virus will haunt him throughout history, as will the ghosts of the many people his vanity and stupidity ended up killing.

He made his cause a laughing stock; he made the once-proud Republican party into an extremist crackpot fringe. Republican and conservative judges worldwide – including on his precious Supreme Court – spanked him and spanked him.

The message of the election to the Democrats was to stay in the center, don’t get pushed too far to the left. And what was the message to the Republican Party: thanks for being closer to the center, we want you right there.

But they aren’t right there. They have veered much farther to the right than the Democrats ever thought of veering to the left. They’ve tilted right off of the cliff with their fraud claims. Trump-inspired millions of more people to hate him than to love him. That is no formula for success.

My sense of what is coming:  Because of Trump’s fumbling and bumbling, the Democrats now have a good shot at winning the Georgia Primary. That would well be his legacy.

If the candidates can shut their mouths about defunding the police, they are in a good position to send a message to Trump and his Republican allies.

Biden has persuaded me to trust him, not second guess him.

While 300,000 Americans have no died from the coronavirus, Biden talks mostly about distributing vaccines, firing up the economy again, and reversing some of Trump’s most grievous sins against human beings and Mother Earth.

Trump will suggest he has future political ambitions but will not pursue them. He will be gone on January 20, loudly but clearly. He doesn’t have the balls to stage a coo.

This is Trump’s twisted genius – always getting other people to bail him out, never being held responsible for what he does. He’s doing nothing now but tweet, and he’s getting the reward by hundreds of millions to do it.

Why would he want to give actually to work for it?

Biden seems to have acquired some genius too. He just isn’t biting.

I can’t say our future is rosy and pain-free. I relish the idea of someone other than Trump occupying the White House. I will relish it if it lasts a month, a year, or four. I am getting off the Trump Crazy Train. No worry, not gloom for me.

They have to earn their way back into my heart; I’m not letting them in again for free.

And I can’t resist quoting the Buddha. He doesn’t do much gloom. “No one can escape death and unhappiness,” he wrote. “If people expect only happiness in life, they will be disappointed.”

Things are not always the way we want them to be, but we can learn to understand them.