When I woke up this morning to the still shocking word of the new reality – I did imagine he would have been gone by now – it all seemed almost dreamy, even cinematic. I thought the Nominee Presumptive would be back to his next TV show  – Campaign, in which aspiring presidential candidates get booted for failing to defend themselves against insult, and they must leap, shamed,  from the top of the great castle in New York  in disgrace while the host shouts:  “You’re Suspended!.”

I thought he would be back on the golf course at Mar-A-Largo with Melania, brooding in our new  San Simeon (apologies to Mr. Hearst, I was once briefly an editor of a Hearst Newspaper, and have a bit of experience with deranged billionaires), the tycoon already dreading the inevitable fall after the unexpected rise.

Tycoons know that the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting what you want.

What a movie this year will make.  Christopher Walken as Trump!.

We open with Mar-A-Largo shrouded in mist, a ghostly single figure walking along the ninth hole, trailed by a platoon of Secret Service agents, protesters shouting in the distance, a stunned country staring into their Iphones in fear and disbelief.

It seems the masses have risen up, grabbed their torches, and torched the system that has been oppressing them for so long. Only the man they have chosen is the system, that is the irony and the plot. In seeking a rebel, they chose The Man. And that is the timeless story of the masses, it seems. The rich always end up screwing the poor, in one way or the other.  That story never seems to change.

Or maybe I’m in the wrong movie, perhaps that is Frankenstein. Or maybe that is the same movie.

Mary Shelly wrote this story a long time ago. “I have love in me the likes of which you could scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other,” warns the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein.

I loved Citizen Kane, a great study of power, lust and celebrity. If Melania were a bit more tormented, this one might even be better, plot wise.  Hearst always wanted to run for President, but there was too much scandal in his life, and before the age of the Reality Show, scandal was thought to be a disadvantage for aspiring politicians. We loved the myth that they were above it all.

Our new Kane boasts about his scandals, he does not hide from them.

I do practice transparency and believe in it. Free is the man or woman who are so open about their lives, they know neither fear or shame. They have nothing to hide.

Briefly, I had this idea of writing a satirical fantasy about Bedlam-A-Largo,  building a wall around the chickens, banning sheep who do not submit to being herded, negotiating better deals with the donkeys – more work for their hay and cookies. Donkeys have made fools of us for years, they always outsmart us when it comes to negotiating.

But it didn’t seem all that funny to me when I tried to write it. That is the thing about writing, what is in your head comes out of your fingers.

I kept thinking of my grandmother Minnie, a woman who loved me dearly, an immigrant who fled one country for her life and was chased out of several others, what kept her going, what saved her life,  was her dream of getting to America, the one place she had ever known, where she didn’t have to fear being tracked down and killed for who she was, or for who people feared she was. She would have understood the meaning of mobs pointing fingers at people because of their faith and driving them off.  When I think of Minnie Cohen, the morning news was not funny, and my satirical balloon fizzled.

For you, grandma, I will get political this year.

I will fight for your dream, and for all of the other Minnie’s clinging to rafts and passing their children over fences. Some things are almost as important as jobs and money.

Instead of writing about the farm animals in their new regime,  I picked up my H.L. Mencken and read about democracy.  In a chapter in Notes On Democracy called “Last Words,” Mencken wrote that one of the merits of democracy is that it is the most charming form of government ever devised by man.

The reasons are not hard to find.

Fear, he wrote is the currency of demagogues, “the professors of mob psychology..they make it the cornerstone of their exact and puissant science.”

Democracy, he wrote, “is based upon propositions that are palpably not true – and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always more immensely fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what it is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all of the great emergencies of life,  to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth.”

The myth of democracy, he wrote, is that we citizens are all noble savages at heart, inexorably coming to the wise and just decisions. That is not always true or possible. Is is not a great system, he argued, just the best one around. Better to dance around the pyres of demagogues than rush through the streets killing people, as so often happens in so many places. Democracy, he wrote, is a self-limiting disease, it is also  self-devouring.

Democracy has, he wrote presciently,  a curious distrust of itself, a tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain.

“Learn from me,” cautioned the monster, “if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

The founders worried about this, Jefferson wanted the vote to stay in the hands of wealthy farmers, the framers feared the mob, they were suspicious of the masses. Mobs are almost always creepy. It is not a pretty system, it is just the best system.

“Is rascality at the very heart of it?,” Mencken asked. “Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive.

Sleep well, grandma, we will continue to survive.