…understanding America’s political self-immolation is impossible even when it’s one’s full-time job, and it all moves so fast all the time on the way to getting nowhere—ever.

And who has time for that when one’s power is out and one has no heat and when it’s really cold, and when there are air raids—multiple times per day—that one has to decide whether to take shelter from or to ignore? And who has time for that when it’s another country’s internal affairs and one has so little ability to affect it anyway? And who has time for that when it’s the ultimate moving target and nothing Trump says today, positive or negative, will govern tomorrow?

And let’s face it, it’s all so profoundly dumb.

There is something humbling—one might even say humiliating—about showing one’s face in a country whose problems are mostly externally inflicted and which struggles daily in a military sense to defend its right to determine its own fate, coming from a country which indisputably holds its own fate in its own hands yet which inflicts needless harms upon itself seemingly for fun.