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.

Donald Trump’s July 13 visit to Windsor Castle hit some turbulence. He’d been invited to join Queen Elizabeth’s ceremonial inspection of the Coldstream Guards, and all he had to do was walk this way, as he must’ve heard Steven Tyler advise at some point in his life. The Queen, in her cornflower-blue brocade coat and matching hat, walked at a pace suitable for a 92-year-old. Trump plowed ahead of her and then abruptly stopped, which cut off her path, forcing her to sidestep around him like he was a tiki totem pole.

Walking ahead of the Queen is not great statesmanship. Neither is failing to bow upon introduction (although few Americans expect their president to bow to anyone but Vladimir Putin). Trump managed to tick off the British public in just 60 minutes at the castle, but he also seemed distracted by the guards and their big hats, comporting himself, as one royal commentator described, as if “wandering up and down a golf course.” To me, his look seemed one of rumination, most likely caused by his stymied attempts to get a military parade in the nation’s capital for the Fourth of July.

In December 2016, the gilt lobby of Trump Tower became the visual center of American power. Cameras followed the comings and goings of middle-aged and older white guys amid a large plainclothes security detail. A surprising number of the men in Donald Trump’s orbit—longtime cronies, legal counsel, crony-legal counsel hybrids, along with Secret Service and ancillary bodyguards—wore overcoats . . . long overcoats with the wide, drooping shoulders of the early 1990s. Klatches of these coats seemed to linger in every alcove, creating a mood that even the camera crews in North Face jackets could not dilute.

Though I found that overcoat lobby scene as ominous as the impending presidency, it was also hilarious, like a Sidney Lumet shoot that got lost in time. I remember the mental scrolling through lots of memes—gangsters or Gotham or any Marvel/DC Comics dystopia—that all seemed too self-serious. It’s taken me a while to finally hit upon the right one: the decadent metropolis in The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s Oscar-nominated animated comedy.