Wake up, America!

Coffee's on, March winds are blowin' like stink, and every Republican senator in Congress has now betrayed you by denying you at least three times before the rooster crowed. You now live in a fascist oligarchy.

It's enough to make you gag on that cranberry-orange scone, isn't it?

Now don't panic. Wrap this towel around you, have another sip of coffee and take a breath. We're not the oldest nation, or the smartest, and maybe not the best by any rational measure, but we've come through a lot of bad stuff and we will weather this too.

Remember Korea? Vietnam? Iraq? Not our finest moments. And it isn't a small thing that we've re-elected a traitorous, lying resident-in-chief who arrived on Day One hell-bent for revenge after the Entire Republican Party decided to overlook his treachery when presented with two opportunities to impeach.

Still, that revenge thing surprised you?

Well, it's hard for me to imagine how. But you know, we all have games to attend and movies to watch and pickleball tournaments to organize. While we were livin' the life, a rodent chewed through the tent and ate all our Oreos. Gobbled up all our public data. Dared us to stand in his way.

The "richest man in the world," they say, is somehow above reproach because he has no need for money. Or maybe the power he thinks he has is not very satisfying after all, so now he wants to just go around toying with us. And our money. And all our cherished institutions. So he bought a president, contributed so much to political campaigns that he effectively owns the guy.

I don't know the richest man in the world. Maybe he was one of those kids, growing up as he did in proudly apartheid South Africa, who tortured fireflies by tearing off their wings (Do they have fireflies in South Africa?). That's the impression he's made on me.

So let's get this straight, and please tell me the truth. Did you cast your vote knowing that an unelected megalomaniac would summon a small army of nerds and commit raids on American institutions like the National Park Service, the U.S. Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service? USAID? The Department of JUSTICE?

Did you say it was cool to lay off federal employees with thousands of years of combined experience and knowledge of how we run everything, how we fund and fuel the engines of commerce and industry and compassion in the United States of America?

You've read the news. You authorized that?

I don't think you did.

Neither did the Republican-dominated Congress, though they now sit on their hands and fail to show the slightest concern, wielding their majority status with the same dignity and grace as a chimpanzee flinging his dung. They could stop this vile malignant narcissist and his flying monkeys, and they've been asked to do so, but they won't.

Because … immigration? … vengeance? Or perhaps they're bought and paid for by the invisible and menacing oligarchy empowered by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, which effectively outlawed restrictions on independent political spending by corporations and unions, bizarrely granting First Amendment rights of free speech to non-living entities. Most of us call those entities "corporations."

Please take no offense at these questions. I don't understand why you aren't asking them too. I don't get the lack of concern about how government and society works when it does work? And mostly (spoiler alert), it works far better than the hate-infused pundits claim. I've been watching it work for my entire long life and, not to put too fine a point on it, we did give you a free public education. We did have vaccines that kept you from getting the worst childhood diseases – measles, mumps, polio, influenza, smallpox – you know, the ones that killed or crippled millions back when your grandparents were making out in a car or a carriage that isn't safe to drive on the road anymore.

Oh yeah, we did roads too. The most obvious, the most expensive and the most endlessly useful to all of us was the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. You just call it the interstate. It's everywhere!

It takes money to maintain that vast network of roads. Your money and mine. But the richest guy in the world probably knows better how to fix the stuff he's breaking, right? Yeah, right.

Have you seen that thing he calls a truck? Have you seen how much that sucker costs as it repeatedly fails to do what any truck made in America, Japan, Canada, Germany or Sweden can do? Sorry. I ain't buyin' the idea that he's an altruistic genius.

All the name-calling and all the blame-baiting are just details to distract us from what this guy thinks we should really be doing, and that's hating each other. How did we get fooled so easily?

I know, I know. There was the pickleball, and if you didn't play along or play through, or whatever tickles a pickleball aficionado, you'd forfeit the whole game to that guy who lives over on the West Side and taunts you with his Very Different Lifestyle. You hate that guy.

Why do you hate that guy?

And why do you hate America? What did we do to you? What poison did we hide in your school lunch as you marched the long road from kindergarten to senior prom? Was it the fluoride in the water that protected your teeth from looking like a pith-helmeted British colonizer in the generation of empire led by the Great Nations of Europe?

You want to make America look like that again?

No, I really want to know. Because it's not Congress that has the power, though they very much think they do. It's you.

Now get up and do something about it. Get mad now. Raise some hell now.

Hell surely awaits us all if we don't.

Jeff Seager is a native West Virginian who returned to the state in 1991 after a long absence and against stern advice to the contrary. He lives in South Charleston, where he awaits the invasion of the MAGA horde with an arsenal of marshmallows to slow their progress up the steep steps of his hillside home.