“What rough beast”

No.
No, no, no.
Seven time zones away, seven hours later in the day, we awoke to the inconceivable news.
We had gone to bed with hope that America was the America we believed in. We woke to find that we lived in a very different America.
We saw first that North Carolina, our state, had, for the third consecutive time voted for the pathological.
We saw next that Georgia had gone down the same horrible path, then Pennsylvania. We had just finished breakfast when the last of the dominoes fell.
We clicked on the Times website and read that in every state that had counted its votes, Trump had improved on his performance of 2020. How was that possible? How could memories be so short?
No memories of the insurrection? Of the pandemic and the bleach solution? No memories of the Muslim ban and all the rest?
No recent memories of the racist, misogynist, crazy talk?
No awareness of the increasing cognitive impairment and the descent into even more bizarre behavior?
If we indeed have elected this man, this fascist, this buffoon, this crazy, we do indeed deserve him.
We saw the definitive news while walking through the Archeological Museum of Heraklion, in Crete. We came across a terra cotta slouching lion, 4,000 years old, its paws stretched out in front of it.
And all I could think of were the words of Yeats—“and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”