The End Of The World Is Nigh! - The Desperate, Incredulous, Humiliated Left Craves Doomsday

She did it again, his wife had, this time with a doozie - inviting to dinner another woman who still, in the face of a humiliating electoral Democratic defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, soldiered on, flapping away about her grandchildren living under the yoke of the Devil in a country of foulness, ordure, and the remains of black people. She was unstoppable. 

'You've got to stop inviting these people' her husband said. 

'This cretin' the dinner guest howled. 'This maniacal evil, this unconscionable, infectious....'  Here she stopped, gurgling and bubbling, unable to form her words and complete her curse.  Her eyes were wild, her lips flecked with dry spittle, her chest heaving with breathless anger....'This...' and here she resorted to the infantile things her mother used to say about the Polish pharmacist who had overcharged her. 'This masher, this cad, this horrible, horrible man'. 

Her invective didn't match the bald, stooped, druggist who could barely reach the phials on the top shelf and who compounded God knows what for unsuspecting customers and was simply an old Jew who resisted retirement like the plague and had lost interest in women decades ago.  

'Zackin', she said, 'That's it, Zackin, Amos Zackin, the crook', she went on channeling her poor mother who couldn't make heads or tails of the world especially of Dwight D. Eisenhower, went apoplectic with rage at the plight of 'the little man' and how he would be crushed by the bootheels of capitalism.  

'Donald Trump and his jackbooted Gestapo will engineer another Kristallnacht', the dinner guest said. 'Just you wait.  The SS will come barging in here and drag you off to Utah or someplace, chain you like a dog, throw you scraps until you waste away, down to skin and bones in your befouled, tattered rags'.

The husband had to admit the dinner guest could turn a phrase, mixing metaphors, twisting and turning the language until it came out in a marvelously hysterical phrasing which she punctuated with a bang of her fist; but he wished she would eat some more of the mashed potatoes which turned out gummier than usual and made speech a bit difficult.

Finally in complete desperation between the salad and cheese and dessert, the woman raised her eyes to the ceiling, and howled.   'The end is nigh', she moaned in agony and supplication. 

Supplication to what, the husband wondered, since the woman had long subscribed to an unremitting secularism, and had marched to Selma in a strange reprise of the Freedom Riders of the Sixties, to rail against Biblical fundamentalism, to demand a woman's right to choose, a man's opportunity to go queer, and in general to toss religion aside in one fell swoop of the mop. 

'There is no God', she hollered from her Escalade at the marchers for The Restoration of Religion, sent to Washington by preachers who promised Je-sus' second coming.  'Be prepared', she had heard from the pulpit of her own Southern Baptist church years ago, and now she knew what Reverend Pickens J. Hardy meant.  The Apocalypse was near, the Devil was in the White House, and the end of the world was at hand. 

The irony of her secular hysteria was lost on her, of course, so committed was she to ridding the country of this spawn of the devil, so much like the streetcorner preachers of her youth hollering about Doomsday and eternal fire and damnation. 

Now this woman was not alone in her apoplexy.  The entire East Coast it seemed was in mourning after the resounding Trump victory of November 5th.  The rending of garments, gnashing of teeth, and beating of breasts was universal.  Harvard felt it necessary to give students time to process their feelings, recharge their moral engines, and return energized and ready to do the work of a generation.

The husband, a professor at the local university in a non-degree program which attracted retired residents who prided themselves on their mental edge and devouring curiosity and to a man were as deeply dyed in progressive wool as humanly possible, put out milk and cookies for them.

'It's the least I could do', he said to his students, stifling a laugh at this collection of hugging, commiserating alte kockers who took him seriously and thought he was one of them, misreading his intentions entirely and thanking him for his concern. 

It was hard for him to live in this insular redoubt of received progressive wisdom.  It would be hard for anyone to keep their mouths shut for months on end, risking cat shit dumped on the porch, the silent treatment, and the smirks of self-satisfaction everywhere. 

'Isn't it just terrible?', said a woman in the Whole Foods checkout line to a random neighbor, and by the time the neighbor had bagged and paid, the two women had bonded - in misery, yes, but in the kind of solidarity that Kamala Harris had proposed, a communitarian sisterhood of good intentions.  They wanted to hug each other, but a certain propriety restrained them.  'Keep your chin up', the older woman said. 

The dinner wore on with the dinner guest showing no signs of fatigue even when the husband hurried dessert.  Still rattling on as she helped carry dirty dishes to the kitchen, the woman was increasingly febrile, and finally in a moment of pure misery, having been forced for the first time in her life to listen to the husband's defiant defense of conservatism, she broke down, sobbing and looking desperately for comfort. 

'There, there', the wife said, putting her arms around her guest. 

A protest had been organized for the next day by Women for Equal Justice, a pseudo-feminist group who felt particularly aggrieved by the re-ascendency of Donald Trump.  The man wasn't even in his Oval Office chair and the women felt the need to express their protest.  The dinner guest had planned to attend with her granddaughter but to her chagrin and horrendous disappointment, the young girl had come out for Trump.  He had made inroads into her crowd which was fed up with black this, black that, cross-dressing and a non-stop historical revisionism which made them sick. 

'Jumping ship felt good, very good', she had told her grandmother, so the dinner guest planned to go alone; but her breakdown at the table, a moment of inconsolable misery was too much. She hoped that Armageddon would come sooner rather than later, and burn the motherfuckers off the face of the earth. 

And so it was that yet another dinner spoiled by hysteria came to close.  The invited guest needed help out the door and down the walkway, and was seen crying at the steering wheel under the streetlamp before she turned on the ignition.  Doomsday, she thought. Yes, Doomsday.