~ ~ ~



Then he’s accused of hating white people. Then he’s accused of fostering a presidency under which white people will be attacked and beaten. Then it’s claimed he’s setting up death tribunals that will condemn old people to termination. Then he’s compared to fascist dictators, then people bring guns to events where he speaks, then a widely-read blogger calls for a military coup, then a minister in Arizona calls from the pulpit for the president’s death. A popular website runs a poll asking respondents whether he should be assassinated.

Following such a linear progression, Zan asks himself in the dark two hundred feet below the surface of the English Channel, what else could be next? Or, put another way, what possibly could not be next? A new source of dread invades Zan amid all his other more prosaic trepidations. While this has been a country of murder since Zan was a teenager, and though Zan has lived through other assassinations and seen the country find a way to go on, he’s uncertain whether this time the country could endure such a thing: Too much history attends this presidency. However much anyone resists it, this president is too much the asterisk of the dream’s last four hundred years; he wears asterisks like a crown of thorns. Zan feels vested like he hasn’t before — no doubt, he thinks in the dark, to an extent that’s unhealthy, politically and any other way. But he isn’t the only one so vested and then there are those vested in the man’s fall — so should the unspoken thing happen, then how does a country that has invested so much stand it? Or does the very improbability of his rise suggest that he’s fated to be martyred.


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