For Biden’s inauguration, 25,000 troops were stationed in Washington, with much of the area around the Capitol and White House closed off. So much for the days of the ‘citizen president’, upon whom other citizens might drop in for a chat. Now not only is the commander-in-chief ensconced behind layers of military-style barricades, but so are the myriads of senators and congressmen, along with their staffer. Washington is a war-zone, or at least in their deluded, self-important, solipsistic minds of those now governing the nation.

Already, General Stanley McChrystal has likened Trump supporters to ‘ISIS fighters’. Pardon me? Alec Baldwin had a ‘dream’ on MLK’s birthday of hanging Trump by a noose made of used Covid masks, which he tweeted, and was not barred by beardo Jack Dorsey. And what of that elderly comedienne, whose name I cannot and don’t really want to recall, holding the mock bloodied severed head of Trump? And what of the congressmen seriously considering ‘re-education’ camps for Trump supporters?

What of dialogue, unity and all that hand-holding?

The author of the linked article wonders whether those troops will ever leave the nation’s capital – or are they the new Praetorian Guard, highly paid and fiercely loyal, protecting the vain and venal emperors?

We’re now well on the way to the dystopia envisioned by such fare as Elysium, with the elite living in inaccessible luxury (in the film, floating sky cities – in real life, gated communities with layers of protection), while the enslaved hoi polloi toil away in drudgery to provide the raw material for their effete and exotic lifestyle.

We might take some cold comfort in the ending of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, and the macabre endpoint of a similar society. But that was hundreds of thousands of years in the future. Oppression never works for anywhere near that long, before something gives.

We can only hope that it is the Prince of Peace who does so, intervening in a way we might not expect…

O, Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!

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