Most of us have a long history of seeing seatback videos or printed illustrations of what to do if the plane you are traveling in experiences a sudden drop in cabin pressure. Usually it’s a mother logically securing her own breathing device before affixing a dangling oxygen mask onto the child beside her. Before March, I doubt anyone watched those videos with anger, thinking “No airline is gonna make me put on a mask!”

As the life-giving conduit of oxygen, masks have long represented protection amid catastrophe. Infantrymen in World War I lived in mortal dread of the shout for “Gas!” Gas masks became the symbolic escape hatch of battlefield carnage well beyond the next world war. Scuba divers and snorkelers, astronauts in Ad Astra—they all seem to “get” the importance of masks. And of course the masks that protect people from contamination on both sides of a medical procedure. From the perspective of science, it’s complete logic, this effort to prevent possible death. It’s hard to imagine politicization.

In a speech at Notre Dame Law School last October, Bill Barr, the U.S. Attorney General, made clear that his conservative Catholicism and definition of democracy were one and the same. Like Republican fundamentalists since the Reagan era, Barr decried “moral relativism” as the cause of every social ill, insisting that the Constitution’s framers believed that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”

Leaving aside the question of what Barr means by “free government,” his thinking leaves aside a lot of people in this country. In 2019, Gallup polling found that 21% of Americans had no religion. That’s one in five people whom Barr considers incompatible with free government. I’m sure many in Barr’s audience were hardline conservative Catholics, and I’m sure that the “religious people” he thinks the framers had in mind were not Jews, Muslims, and Hindus.

A recent House Financial Services Committee hearing provided a brief moment of clarity in regard to both Mark Zuckerberg and America’s cultural quagmire. As the Facebook founder answered questions about political advertising and his proposed cryptocurrency, a congressman’s comparison of Zuckerberg to Donald Trump provoked a reaction that went viral.

Zuckerberg’s physical façade is a billboard when it comes to communicating this important point: rarely has he had to put up with anything that’s made him squirm. His forehead, in particular, suggests the Great White Plains of upper-middle-class access to things like high-performance front-load washers. Whatever nasty CSI was unfolding among the world’s demimonde, Mark Zuckerberg—just laundered and encased by central air—continued clacking code on a taut keyboard.

I’ve thought quite a bit about Greek and Roman mythology since the advent of MAGA and Trumpism. So much of our gaming and franchise entertainment culture is saturated with violent and sometimes misogynistic characters drawn from all kinds of mythology. But the actual stories surrounding the Greek-to-Roman gods are often devoid of the football-spiking and crotch-grabbing moments favored by the bro-sphere. When I learned a few of the stories in high school, autocracy was something that happened in olden times or else in bad countries. I wondered how these freakish, depraved, and cartoonishly single-minded gods could inspire awe when people had to have seen that they were simply jerks with power. The answer was always with them: they were primitive, with an average life expectancy of 28; we are modern, living longer by the second. As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine fear and ignorance being as palpable as weather.

Three years of Trump’s America have changed my assumptions about every previous era—from the near past to ancient worlds. I am now willing to consider the malevolence of Trump and his cronies as mythic. This is not to give any individual actor classical stature as antagonist; they are irredeemably shills. Whereas Nixon’s conspirators got the Shakespeare treatment during Watergate, Trump’s flunkies cannot break the cartoon barrier. The obsequiously manic Rudy Guiliani getting wound up by Laura Ingraham is like Slim Pickens riding the Strangelove bomb. Bill Barr, the Attorney General, alternates between Droopy Dog catatonia and—because of those glasses—Blue Meanie Chief. The entire cabinet you imagine as Minions ready to spring from inside Melania’s red trees.

At the end of last year, Bruce Springsteen’s long Broadway run concluded with a Netflix special and a soundtrack album. One of the recordings, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” an old song from 1999, was released a week before the midterms, presumably to inspire people to vote. “This train,” as Bruce sings, is carrying everything—“saints and sinners,” “losers and winners.” Dreams, faith, freedom . . . wheels a singin’: check, check, and check.

Why trains? Why are Americans still fixated on trains when so few of us ride them? Springsteen is not singing about the socialist high-speed rails of Europe and Asia but the kind of train that carried FDR’s coffin around the country, the kind that nineteenth-century populists like William Jennings Bryan campaigned from. “Big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams”—that seems to get to people across the political divide. But then it could also be the sunlit fields part that does it. Budweiser’s Superbowl commercial pushed every button with an ear-flapping dog, a wagon full of beer, and a team of Clydesdales cutting through wheat fields and a windfarm to the tune of Bob Dylan.

Breakfast in America, an album by the British band Supertramp, hit America 40 years ago this month. Though it was Los Angeles to which the band had emigrated, the mythic landscape depicted on the album jacket is New York Harbor viewed a from an airplane window. Lady Liberty is a smiling diner waitress (the actress Kate Murtagh) holding a voluptuous glass of orange juice on a small tray; her other hand holds a menu. In the background, the island of Manhattan is depicted with diner dishes and service-ware—salt and pepper shakers, coffeepots, egg cartons, ketchup squirt bottles, napkin dispensers, stackable mugs, syrup pitchers, ashtrays, pourable sugar jars, even Aunt Gemima—all of it ghostly white. The aloft orange juice is directly in front of a Twin Towers made of stacked mini cereal boxes.

All ten songs on that album are good. There’s something especially sly about the oompah-band-meets-snake-charmer title track: “Take a look at my girlfriend (girlfriend) she’s the only one I got” (boom-boom-boom). Breakfast in America was the only rock sheet music I bought for the piano outside two volumes of Beatlemania. I succumbed because I wanted to play “Take the Long Way Home,” a sad song about a middle-aged guy regretting his life, thinking what he might’ve been if he had had more time. I liked the way it sounded, and I can’t tell you why this album made more of an impression on my teenage mind than ELO or Queen or Pink Floyd.

Back on September 4, CNN photographer Khalil Abdallah was in the right place at the right time to capture lightning striking the White House. Lightning strikes near the Capitol are not uncommon. The 550-foot Washington Monument—the world’s tallest freestanding structure when it was completed in 1884—takes a hit at least once a year; the White House, less frequently. I was struck by Abdallah’s tweeted photo because the lightning striking at the very center of the presidential residence reminded me of The Tower tarot card.

One of the most popular tarot decks, known as Rider-Waite, depicts a burning tower being struck by lightning or fire from the sky, its top section dislodged and crumbling, and a man and a woman falling toward earth as tongues of fire rain down. The standard tarot deck contains suits of swords, wands, cups, and coins (or pentacles), but also a separate suit of elaborately depicted figures named “trumps,” short for “triumphs” (trionfi in Italian). Trionfi/Trumps was a 15th-century Italian card game that took images from allegorically themed carnival parades depicting the ups and downs of Fortune’s Wheel (success, reversal, and downfall).

He yelled to the rafters for nearly 45 minutes, sneered his way into bawling. He contorted his face into pitiable, kabuki-like expressions to show he could not possibly have sexually assaulted any woman because he has known so many who were “awesome.” He argued that he wasn’t an alcoholic by repeatedly professing his love for beer. He spent ten minutes rambling about his boyhood practice of keeping calendars, arguing that this showed he could never have assaulted a woman. He arrogantly interrupted the Democratic senators and rarely attempted to answer their questions. He sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee with his arms crossed, like the boy in the backseat not getting his way.

The confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh initially showed us a man widely described as the guy from college everybody knew or knew of—the fraternity bro who seemed sanguine and academically mediocre when sober and a red-faced, jacked-up maniac when drunk. Oh, how well we knew this type—preppie from a well-to-do family who might go to law school or for an MBA and be passed along on a current of hereditary privilege and connections. But then Christine Blasey Ford came before the Senate Judiciary Committee to allege that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during a college party, and Kavanaugh’s own testimony later in the day was nothing like what we’d expect from that guy we knew in college.

There’s a character in Muriel Spark’s novel The Comforters whose function of sowing pain and discord is so entwined with her identity that she simply disappears when she’s alone. Her name is Mrs. Georgina Hogg, and when she doesn’t have access to other people to torment, she has no existence. Spark’s novel is from 1957, so obviously a very online Georgina Hogg of today might find an audience to offend at any hour.

Since Donald Trump unleashed his 24/7 narcissistic insecurity on Americans, I’ve thought that during those one or two hours of the day when he puts down his phone and is cut off from the world, he, like Georgina Hogg, must also disappear. Trump seems to have no existential function without a digital audience or a full-bodied one of at least one. It’s hard to imagine him sleeping let alone dreaming. That would deprive him of his words.