On Tyranny

My beloved English professor Philip Church used to say that high tragedy occupied a space that was only a hair's breadth removed from farce--that with just the slightest change in emphasis, Lear raging on the heath could become a clownish spectacle, a senile old man in the rain, babbling about ingratitude.Enter Trump, boasting about his cognitive test to Chris Wallace. He is as politically broken as anyone can be--and yet capable of so much more mischief. He is resuming his nightly monologues to convince America of his great success in managing the pandemic (risible)--and he is sending paramilitaries into American cities to provoke a spate of American carnage that he alone can fix (terrifying).In his little book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder warned that when "the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come." He also admonished us to be brave, because "if none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny."Is it really coming to that? I'm afraid it is.