I’ve been writing political opinion nonstop for 20 years. As of today I’m done.

Life was different when the Philadelphia Inquirer gifted me a column in January 2004. Both major parties believed in the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, and traditional democratic values. It was beyond unthinkable that either side would condone a plotted coup and morph into a criminal cult.

We opinion journalists are not so naive as to believe what we write can change the world. But we generally do hope what we write can perhaps make the world just a wee bit better on any given day by offering some grist for those who have the capacity to think. This was true of the America I loved in my younger life, but I no longer recognize the America we’re stuck with. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I recognize it all too well – and that, having reached that conclusion, I’ve hit the wall on how to write about it. In the quality time I have left, I won’t expend precious brain cells inveighing in vain about the MAGA dark age.

Hence my personal decision to shift gears.

Early next year, for those who care, I’ll resurface on Substack, the online home for writers. My “newsletter” (Substack lingo) will be light on politics and heavy on other interests: books, movies, baseball, Boomer music, streaming TV, trips, memories, whatever strikes my fancy. I don’t assume there will be many readers (who cares what I think about some Netflix show?), but tapping a keyboard is in my DNA. To tweak a line from the French philosopher Rene Descartes, I write therefore I am.

Roughly 75 million of us are wrestling with how to recalibrate and soldier on, how to attain and sustain equilibrium in a land turned upside down, a land that has left us, in the words of St. Paul the Apostle, “at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in deceit.”

I’m busy grieving the loss of the all-American verities I once took for granted. I was raised to believe that the rule of law was good. That criminality was bad. That decency was good. That racism was bad. That empathy was good. That misogyny was bad. That veracity was good. That education was good and ignorance was bad. That telling the truth was good and serial lying was bad.

But clearly I’m out of sync with the times. The will of the people – don’t get me started about those people – have flipped the script and told us who we really are.

Many factors have brought us to this pitiable abyss, but what concerns me most is the epidemic of ignorance. Half the electorate (the winning half) rejects factual reality; an October poll, conducted by Ipsos, said that “Americans who have correct information on current political issues” strongly favored Kamala Harris; the ill-informed, stoked by the metastasizing MAGA “media,” strongly favored Trump. That’s how it works in Hungary, where Viktor Orban has dismantled democracy by building his own disinformation domain.

Predictability is the death of creativity. I should know. My standard column, these last nine years, has started with a lament (Look what Trump is saying/doing!) and ended with a warning (If voters don’t wake up, things will get worse!). Writing about Trump is an enervating exercise, like circling a cul de sac with no avenue of escape. It deadens the mind and sucks out the soul.

My colleagues in the commentariat are doing their best right now – spotlighting Trump’s new roster of freaks and pervs, the “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence is the best guarantee of their loyalty” (Hannah Arendt’s description of totalitarian toadies) – and I’ll likely read them with interest. I surely don’t envy their task.

The high purpose of political journalism is to speak truth to power, but half the electorate has sanctioned oligarchical power. Truth is now is just another “narrative” competing in vain for the attention of the inattentive.

This dispatch from a seasoned journalist says it all: “Often in a home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard or read. Sometimes (I) was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions (I) was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts had become what (their leader), with cynical disregard for the truth, said they were.”

Sound familiar? That was American correspondent William Shirer, reporting from Germany during the 1930s. Anyone who’s still in denial about what awaits us should be indicted for failure of imagination.

So I’m bailing until I reboot. Steely Dan sang, “When Black Friday comes / I’m gonna dig myself a hole / Gonna lay down in it ’til I satisfy my soul.” Our Black Friday is now at hand. I need not add my wee voice to the plethora of opinion writers who are rightly seething anew over the latest Trumpist turns of the screw. Starting in January, my Substack newsletter will be titled “Subject to Change,” and, post by post, it certainly will. That’s how I hope to cope.

I suspect that you too are determined to navigate the coming storm by nurturing what makes you happy, what satisfies your soul. As the self-help guru Kamal Ravikant says, “Love yourself like your life depends on it.” I now join you in that quest.

Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]