It was almost as if an evil wind, sent by some Merlin alchemist to conquer us, has been blowing over the country, leaving a fever in its wake these past four years.

Today, the wind seemed to blow the wind away, and with it, some of the fever.

Today I got a peek at that kindler and gentler nation, so many of us have been hoping for and waiting for.

I was shocked to find myself crying a half dozen times at the discovery that our precious democracy was far from ruined (and when Lady Gaga sang the National Anthem, and when the Marine Band first played Hail To The Chief).

If anything, the last four years have revived the promise, if not yet the reality, of America.

You could almost see hope rising like a mist over the ceremony and the country.

The inauguration was stirring at times and quietly defiant. There was no mistaking the way our frazzled democracy came roaring back from January 6.

Our Better Angels woke up; they were dancing on the capitol steps.

The message was clear. We are here; we are back, we will keep trying.

And another message was clear.

Donald Trump was the greatest failure and disgrace in Presidential history. I don’t care what the delusional members of the Republican Party say.

Truth wins. Reality wins. The center held.

We all have a choice. We can say how horrible it was, we almost lost our democracy. or we can say, how wonderful, we didn’t let that happen.

The traitors who stormed the capitol thinking they had God and justice behind them didn’t show their cowardly, twisted selves anywhere near Washington today, despite much bluster and many threats – not a single one.

Like their President, they failed in every possible way.

People who care – and most Americans – will never permit this to happen again.

I was very proud of my country today. We are only two weeks from January 6. Still, Joseph Biden’s inauguration – on those very same steps in that very same temple of democracy where the riots began – might as well have been in another world.

I had to keep reminding myself that this was the very same place where that awful riot happened. I also cried when  I saw Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman escorting Kamala Harris down the capitol steps.

We love our heroes in America, and it is a blessing to have found one amidst all those cowardly and vile politicians.

It’s only one day, and one can never foresee the future, but like so many people, I felt lighter today, more hopeful, and more grounded and relieved.

It’s all right. We survived.

I’m not sure what the alchemy was, but Trump has a genius for frightening and disturbing people. He sucked up all the air in every room he was in, and in much of the country.

We have to learn to breathe normally again.

The more I read, the more I keep coming back to the idea of addiction in the digital era as helping us understand what happened.

I was reading about how doctors treat cult survivors. Internet Addiction Disorder is now a recognized form of addiction and mental illness; it affects impulse control and judgment.

The first thing, say the doctors, is to call people who worship cults “survivors,” not patriots or victims or criminals. I’m learning to see Trump as a torturer in the new way that modern technology can be used to induce pain, victimization, and hatred, and yes, addiction.

Lots of people like Biden, but few people love him in the way Trump supporters worship him and believe his every lie. I imagine in a year or so, we may be talking about Trump Survivors.

Of course, lots of Trump supporters just liked his policies and gift for distraction; that doesn’t make them all addicts. The people rioting in the capitol had the air of addicts or cultists in a fever; they lost perspective and a sense of reality.

Often seen among those kinds of addicts are mind-control techniques that involve combinations of extreme abuse and “brainwashing.”  For example, “psychic driving” is defined by psychologist Ellen Lacter (who runs www.endritualabuse.org) as taped or electronic, or digital messages that are played non-stop daily for long periods of time.

Think of the tens of thousands of tweets Trump sent out, almost always more than once a day. People get addicted to soap operas on TV, why, not Trump’s angry and disturbing tweets?

There is some evidence that lies that are repeated day after day, many times a day, for weeks and months on end qualify as “psychic driving.” Thus the lie about the November election became a reality, an addiction all of its own.

When the rioters explained that they had to try to kill people and destroy property because “My President told me to,” they resemble those zombies in the movies whose brains are being controlled.

I voted for Biden, I would never dream of storming a government building and threatening people if he asked me too.

The nature of the addiction is a kind of trance, in which people doing great wrong to themselves and others believe they are doing great good.

I think of the rioters who took selfies and videos of themselves and put them up on social media for the FBI to find easily.

Values and morals can be inverted by “psychic driving,” perhaps the best explanation I’ve yet seen for what Trump did to the weakest and most vulnerable of his supporters.

The people who stormed the capitol with their MAGA hats and weapons talked like addicts, their manic focus and inability to reason or accept reality a symptom of so many serious addictions.

After four years of Trump, it was shocking yesterday to see the idea of America as a liberal democracy once more, dedicated to equality, social justice, environmental reform, new and good jobs,  and helping the poor stated as goals of a President in a new administration.

I’m not sure President Trump ever mentioned the poor, other than to call homeless people “disgusting” and bad for real estate sales. Does this administration have one single thing in common with the last one?

What a schizophrenic country we are.

How could a country that elected Donald Trump just four years ago elect Joseph Biden in 2020? It’s discordant and confusing. We are not only divided, but we are also baffled.

I was happy; I felt a little dizzy. Historians say these radically different strains have always been present in American life.

This is nothing new; it’s just that social media and digital technology have made it so much easier to lie and for people to accept lies rather than seek out the truth.

A beautiful and radically different vision from Trump’s was offered in Washington Wednesday, that mystical idea of a kinder, gentler nation.

I believe this is an attainable dream; this is the future I see and have seen all year to the doubt of many skeptics – a better, not perfect country.

We are coming to see that we have no right to call ourselves great, but it is still possible we may get there.  And very often, we do great good.

We seem to have a President who wants to get there. That is quite a change.

Biden’s tone was accepting and honest. Nothing about him suggested that everything was okay or that change would be easy.

It was like spirituality – sometimes the journey is more important than actually arriving. The truly spiritual people know we never really get there. Like our country, we need to keep trying.

We are not perfect, as the wonderful young poet Amanda Gorman said in the poem she read aloud at the end of the inauguration.

We are not perfect, she wrote. We are “unfinished.”

It almost felt like a fantasy.

After years of enduring Trump’s tweets, I turned on a cable news channel Tuesday evening to see the President-elect hosting a beautiful memorial service in Washington Tuesday night for the 400,000 Americans who died from the coronavirus.

I realized it was the very first time that I saw a high government official memorialize the pandemic dead; for much of the year, we seemed able to put them out of sight and mind, many of us, certainly the leaders of the government.

I can’t remember Trump even mentioning the virus dead, excepting in a glancing and superficial way.

The memorial ceremony was simple, beautiful, and appropriate. An African-American nurse from Chicago, a singer, sang Amazing Grace. It was beautiful. I cried hearing that as well.

The inauguration and the memorial was also a bit eerie.  Was this the same country whose leaders insisted that the virus was not serious and would go away?

The problem is that when Donald Trump and his supporters suggest making American great again, the truth is that in a diverse country like America, founded in compromise and forced to make deals with the Devil to survive, it’s impossible to be totally “great,” it can only be good in many ways and seeking to get better.

America has its own creation myth, it usually leaves out the unpleasant details – like slavery.

Being “great” means there are no problems you have to work on or solve.

It is a conceit that helps to blind the country from the problems it has always had until they explode, as they did in 2016 and 2020. Trump’s promise turned out to be just another lie.

I liked the tone of humility and self-awareness in President Biden’s speech; I never heard that from Trump or his supporters. If we think of America as great – which is what most of us were taught – then why should we work to face its problems and fix them?

Nobody lied at the Covid-19 memorial.

Nobody attacked anyone. There was nothing for a panel to fight about cable news; there were no implications beyond what we saw.

My stomach did not drop down into my belly; I was not upset, puzzled, or angry. I didn’t wonder what was really happening.

I wonder if we aren’t all trauma victims.

The memorial ceremony was normal and touching, just what we should be doing when 400,000 people die. Nobody bragged about what a good job they were doing; there was no need for fact-checking or rebuttal. Or cheap and false excuses.

Or clearly incompetent and unqualified people making stupid pronouncements.

There was no reason to be offended by Tuesday’s service; it was sensitive and real.

In fact, ever since Donald Trump’s favorite communications system, Twitter, was taken from him in the past couple of weeks, I haven’t received a single death threat or hate message when I mention or write about politics.

The very air seems to be less fraught and charged. It actually seems easier to breathe, can that be true?

The evil wind seemed to have blown itself away, at least for the moment. Having a lot of power in politics is very different from having none.

I cried at least a half dozen times watching the inauguration ceremony; it seemed affirming to me, stirring at times. Trump turned me into a patriot relatively late in life. I thank him for that.

The capitol’s leading Machiavelli and professional assassin, Mitch McConnell,  is now gunning for Donald Trump, not so much because it is the right thing to do, but because he has to cut the monster’s head off now while there are still some elements of the Republican Party intact and before Trump can recover from his disastrous finale.

McConnell is an institutionalist, well into his seventies. I imagine he would prefer his legacy be that he saved the Republican Party rather than helping to destroy it.

If McConnell fails, the Republican Party will fall apart, it will become an extremist fringe organization way too far off the charts for moderate and suburban and independent voters.

I’d say the odds of an impeachment conviction in the Senate have gone up.

Unless you count President Trump catching the coronavirus, there are few miracles in politics.

President Biden has a rugged job ahead of him. But the ceremony had a beautifully American kind of pageantry to it, not too little, not too much.

We can’t do it as the British do it, but our rituals and ceremonies evoke tradition and strength and the idea of people coming together, even if they don’t much like one another, or maybe because they don’t like each other.

The Republican Party’s leadership seems to have decided not to leap over the white nationalist edge just yet; they showed up in substantial numbers to help inaugurate the candidate, many of them still insist he stole the election.

Lady Gaga blew my socks off with her defiant and spirited interpretation of the National Anthem.  Her version seemed to be saying. “We are still here, and we are strong!”

The unprecedented security armada was sad and frightening, but it also showed that the Boogalo or Proud Boys and QAnon movements are never going to take over our government.

The capitol looked like the safest place on earth yesterday.

Get ready for movies and book deals stemming from the assault on the capitol and its defense.

That’s what happens to American extremists.

Christian crowd-sourcing sites are already sending thousands of dollars to the rioters for legal fees. This is America, a mad land in so many ways. Christianity is not always what Christ intended.

I could almost hear the millions of sighs of relief as Trump finally flew away and into the Florida sunset, threatening to come back. He’s unbalanced, but he’s not that stupid. He is not coming back, not for long.

The Poet Gorman, a 22-year-old with a speech impediment recommended to the inaugural committee by Dr. Jill Biden, overcame her speech problem with a beautifully delivered poem full of alliteration and internal rhyme.

Her poem evoked some amazing dialogue and rhythms from  “Hamilton,” a play she loved.

An aide told the New York Times that Trump was upset that Biden got bigger stars than he got for his inauguration. He’s going to have a rough few months.

From Gorman’s poem:

“In the end, ” wrote Susan Glasser in the New Yorker, “Trump was everything his haters feared—a chaos candidate, in the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos President.

An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord, railed against a “deep state” within his own government, praised autocrats and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets.

He leaves office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval ratings in presidential history.  

A liar on an unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post, culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election that he decisively lost.”

It’s true; he really is gone, he got on a plane, demanded some a 21 gun salute, and sailed off into the Florida diaspora. I can hear the evil wind whistling through the palm trees.

I like to think of today as a rebirth for my country; I heard those first, very wonderful, baby cries that come just after birth.

Maybe this time.