Many of my readers care about politics. So, when the battle for the American Presidency that was supposed to have been the coronation of America’s first queen waged, I observed and wrote. Since then, oddly enough, my Australian colleagues—whose nation seemingly has more to hope or fear for from a loose-cannon American presidency than America—as well as Chicago Area correspondent Jeremy Bentham, have tracked the inevitable downfall of this so-called capitalist nation’s first businessman head-of-state. Meanwhile my mind has remained in the primal clouds, where I like to store it for retrieval as a detached oracle of the anomalous.

Yesterday—for it is 5/17/17—I was reading the editorial notes to a fantasy story set in Dark Ages Europe as my dear Aunt Madeline viewed a soap opera at 120 decibels.

“This regularly scheduled program” was then interrupted in a grave manner by a network News Anchor, declaring that President Trump had breached national security in some way that would have scarce raised an eyebrow during the Cold War. I looked up and over, as the presidential news conference was replayed and saw a shrunken man, a man 20 pounds south of his patriarchal bloat, cheeks drawn with worry where jowls once hung with worth, a harried, morally hunted visage of a man who had once towered above the puppets he batted about the world stage, a man who now hung from his puppet strings like aged meat rather than dangle with vapid dignity and turn on cue as had his predecessor.

The man who I had scorned for decades as an example of what was wrong with modern aspirations, stood before me with the look of the only hostage in a years’ long siege who had not developed empathy for his captors, yet remined in their power, and his unheeded pleas for understanding, repeated with the unscripted repetition of a boy who meant to successfully shoulder a man’s burden and had broken some rare curio on his matriarch’s sitting room, caused in me the upwelling of pity. There I stood, a man, a citizen of the Nation of Need and Greed, making less money in a year than the man being invalidated on the world’s largest stage spent on his evening meal and all I could feel was pity.

And so I arrived at my understanding of what Donald Trump is, a Usurper in a puppet play, whose rude entry upon the stage did not in the least prepare him for the sham of marionette dignity that is the American Presidency. There he danced like hung meat on a hook, pretty string puppets flitting and masked all about, the deposed king among the actors in an obscene play, wondering at the vanished dream that had buoyed him on his way.

Of all the things that the cankerous nation of my birth has unwittingly done for me, I never thought that caring about such a blustering being would be among them.