I don’t care if he’s actually crazy. I don’t care about his latest outrage. I don’t care that our country is under threat on all sides, including the inside, because of him.

I do care about all that, of course, and much more, but I refuse to spend any more time worrying about it. It’s exhausting. Who can keep up with the lies and the crimes and the runaway stupidity of this ugly charade? The obsessing and the rage always end up at the same place anyway, so why don’t we just cut to the chase?

We’ve got to get rid of this guy. Asap. I don’t want to hear the reasons he should go, or what he’s done, or what he might do. All that is already baked into that one, simple conclusion. There is no need to talk about the why anymore, only the how.

So let’s get to it. His death, of course, would be the quickest way out. I am not for assassination, however. If someone killed him, it would be worse for the country than he is. That leaves us with the option of death from natural causes. Considering his bloated, unhealthy look and his rapidly decaying mental state, that could actually happen — and soon. His increasingly erratic behavior in the face of the Mueller probe even suggests the possibility of an exploding aneurysm that would end the whole matter very quickly. We’re not looking for him to suffer, after all, just for an end to our own pain.

The idea of divine intervention is another interesting alternative. It isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine God finally getting fed up with all the bullshit and stepping in to end it. He wouldn’t necessarily have to go with a lightning bolt. A runaway bread truck would work just as well. Or a tiny, violent tornado in the oval office. He could even keep His fingerprints off the caper entirely by just having the President go extinct. That said, I would never actually pray for the death of another human being. I am open to a little light hoping, though.

There is also a chance that the President might save us all a lot of heartache and just commit suicide. He certainly doesn’t look happy in his new line of work, and he could be overcome by crushing despair. I wouldn’t invest too much hope in this option, however. He is too animated by revenge and greed and ego gratification to leave the field before he was done.

I’ve heard the suggestion that he might just quit the Presidency and declare victory claiming he was forced out by the media and Hillary and the FBI. That would certainly comport with his tendency to create alternative realities, but I just don’t see it happening unless he really starts to feel the heat. That heat might come in the form of legal jeopardy for Junior and Jared, but we’re not there yet.

By the way, if you’re counting on the Mueller investigation to save the republic, please consider the possibility that it might come up empty. Even if he can prove indictable offenses of the worst possible kind, Republican cravenness could carry the day and they would then refuse to impeach and convict. It would be appalling, shocking, and unacceptable…but what else is new?

Impeachment resulting in conviction would be the ideal outcome, of course. The idea of our system working well enough to rid itself of this blight would be a great ending to this sad chapter of history. The only problem with this feel-good solution, as I have said, is that it would require Republican votes in the House and the Senate. Right now, I don’t see that happening.

There could be a bright side to such dereliction, however. Even though it would prolong our suffering under the crook-in-chief, when his fall finally did come it would bring with it the collapse of the Republican Party itself. That would almost be worth the wait.

But I’m not greedy. He should just go…now.

Yes, I save my receipts. Most of them, anyway…especially if you count the ones I find in my coat pocket. Sometimes, I don’t throw these away until the next time I wear that coat. And sometimes, not even then. If that is not saving, what is?

I know some people who save all their receipts and preserve them neatly in a special drawer or a little box that is always in the same place no matter what. That’s very admirable, I’m sure, but to me this is not so much saving as hoarding, and it speaks of someone who cannot let go of even the most trivial possessions. I don’t really want to know what perverse personal need is being filled by this obsession, but I question the assumption that such people are “well-organized.”

I wonder…when these people go out for a dinner, do they actually keep the “customer copy?” I’ll bet they do — even though they’ve eaten the dinner and looked at the bill and added it all up three times, just to be sure. They probably even keep that other slip that restaurants give you (whatever it is) and put it in their special place in a nice neat pile with all the other little pieces of paper.

I do recognize, in a broader sense, the need to save one’s receipts. You might need some help remembering exactly what product or service you purchased or who sold it to you or how much you paid. Any mature, grown-up adult who has reached his majority might reasonably need to have this data on file. Such information is also helpful for enforcing guarantees or qualifying for refunds. I heartily endorse this modest level of anality.

A word of warning to young people, however: no matter how careful you have been in maintaining your filing system — no matter how particular you have been in keeping those documents safe and ready to secure some important benefit — no matter how anal your attention to stuffing them into that tattered folder that you refuse to replace…the one you actually need will not be there.

And that is sad. Sad because all that focus and care that you devoted to saving your receipts ended up being for naught. What is sadder still, though, is the thought of all those other receipts — the ones that were successfully preserved — who will never be called upon to fulfill their destiny. They have waited dutifully in that file, sometimes for many years, looking to the moment when they are that proof of purchase that saves the day.

But no. Though they have remained steadfastly legible and in chronological order with all their forgotten companions, their day in the sun will never come. Their destiny is to remain in that folder — unread and untouched — until they are no longer relevant.

But I will continue to save them even then. I feel as though I owe them that much at least — even if it’s in the breast pocket of that old windbreaker in the back of my closet.

Remember the Moral Majority? I do, and you know what? I miss those guys!

They were, of course, birthed under the fundamentalist guidance of Jerry Falwell back in the late 70s, and they were a force on the national political scene for over a decade, working for Republican candidates like Ronald Reagan and Poppy Bush. I don’t honestly miss Jerry himself so much as the morality thing.

Granted, the brand of morality they were pitching wasn‘t my usual cup of probity. Their agenda included such imperatives as school prayer, pro-life (before birth at least), and the squelching of homosexuality in all its manifestations. Farther down the list, however, buried underneath such towering Christian values as opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and those despicable Strategic Arms Limitation talks, was a firm belief in the concept of “decency.” On that subject, at least, I confess some solidarity with the Moral Majority.

I suppose that the exact parameters of decency would have to be pretty broadly drawn for us to find common ground, but I feel confident that we could at least see eye to eye when it comes to child molesting. It is behavior that can ruin lives as surely as a devastating physical injury, perhaps even more so. It is ugly, it is detestable, it is immoral.

The Moral Majority, as an organization, no longer exists. I’d like to think, though, that its belief in simple human decency is still out there. Including in Alabama. Republican leaders in The Yellowhammer State are shamelessly backing Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate despite the allegations of nine women that he is a predator and a child molester. You might expect that from politicians, but I was surprised to see that a good number of local church leaders are also supporting him. Many “have no reason to disbelieve” his accusers, but they still encourage their flocks to vote for the man who preyed on little girls.

It is my hope that the normal people in Alabama still value decency above craven political advantage. Indeed, I am counting on a moral majority of them to come forward and reject the unrepentant moral ugliness of Roy Moore.

It may be a faint hope. Church and politics are deeply intertwined in Alabama. Jerry Falwell, Jr. his father’s successor as head of Liberty University, says that he believes Roy Moore’s account over the women’s. My guess is that Jerry Sr., if he could speak from beyond the grave, would probably agree. Their followers, though, are free to decide for themselves. Let them vote their own morality over party loyalty and spare us all the shame of a child abuser in the U.S. Senate.

The truth has been taking its lumps recently. As recently as the late 90s there seemed to be a consensus, at least in this country, about what was a fact, what was conjecture, and what was total bullshit. Those days are gone now, and made-up stuff competes in the same league with provable truth for believability. Maybe it was always a phantom, this consensus, but if it ever existed, that tacit agreement ended with the advent of the Information Age. How ironic.

Huntley, Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite, who used to dispense versions of reality that had been researched by people whose job depended on getting it right, are long gone. They have been replaced by anyone with a a computer. Some of those people are trustworthy (ahem) but many offer nothing more than suspicions of truth that are decorated with shiny objects spun from pure imagination. And yet, a lot of our fellow citizens choose to accept these fevered hypotheticals as gospel.

How do we explain why these people — many of them well-educated — come to believe assertions for which there is no good proof? Assertions, in fact, that are easily disproven? How did these folks find their ways into this alternate “reality?” Are they fated to be gullible or do they choose to be? What, exactly, is their trip?

People who live in the provable reality are understandably concerned about these questions. For one thing, people who inhabit that alternate universe actually vote in this one. Their decisions, in and out of politics, directly effect us — mostly for the worse.

There have been attempts to answer these questions. Last spring, there was a flurry of articles about the The Authoritarian Personality. Psychologists have been looking at this phenomenon for decades, but it has resurfaced as a popular topic over the last year. The mind in question there was not mind of the authoritarian himself, but of his followers. Among their attributes is a tendency to accept whatever they are told by their leaders. They don’t even look for proof. In fact, they prefer the simplicity offered by utter acceptance of authority. Often, they prefer superstition over observable fact because mystical explanations do not require proof.

This analysis rings true, but we are still left to ask, Why? What makes people be this way, in spite of the obvious danger to their own well-being? How did the poor schmucks of the People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate ever get to the point of absolute, unquestioning obedience?

Another analysis that’s popped up over the last year points to distinctions between conservatives and liberals, not just as as matter of politics, but across the cultural board. On the right (so the theory goes) faith and intuition are given a standing above actual evidence. These “conclusions” are not mere errors of judgment, but illusions. Perception itself is influenced by a need for consistency and order. Anything that disturbs that state is rejected — not because it’s wrong, but because it’s upsetting to the status quo. And that would mean chaos.

That’s why it’s been such a hard road for truth. It can make a dent in the chaos, but it takes time and patience and work to pull it off. Make-believe, by comparison, has it easy.

Until the rent comes due, that is. And the rent has to be paid in this universe.