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.