No, of course not. It could never happen here…

You are absolutely right. I don’t know what I was thinking. “He” could never rise to power here. We should not utter his name. To do so is to rave. To do so is to make light of all of those poor, semitic souls that fell under his awful, goose-stepping shadow. To do so is to somehow diminish his horrific, mocking and ruthless creation of the “other” that gave the angry mob a face and a shape upon which to trace their hate and their malice.

No, we should not whisper his name or make any sputtering, hyperbolic comparisons of a similar ilk. Let the memories of such evil remain veiled and ominous in their seeming historical singularity

We have too many proud and impervious democratic institutions that will prevent it from ever happening here. We have seen too much to ever make the same mistakes that all of those foolish, ignorant Germans made all of those fading and dusty years ago.

We are the ones that defeated that madman. We are the ones that vanquished fascism. We are immune to such things here in this shining city on the hill.

We are civilized. We are an enlightened and advanced society.

We could never subjugate and utterly ruin the indigenous people in a land that we invaded, calling it the “New-Land,” calling it New-England, calling it New-York, and claiming that we had “discovered” it, as if it were empty and baron of all life or culture when we arrived. As if there was not a thriving and vibrant nation of people already living here for thousands of years.

We could never torture and kill those people, and strip them of their beliefs and their heritage and then force them to walk across the country by the thousands only to cast them out and curse those of them that survived to live on a land that they had never known or desired.

We could never enslave another race of people, certain of our genetic and cultural superiority. We could never sell them like cattle and kill them with impunity, labeling them as three-fifths of a human being and enshrining such cruel dictates in our foundational documents.

We could never split a nation in two in defense of such an evil institution, and then murder a President that gave his life to save us from ourselves.

We would never turn away an entire ship full of innocents (a ship ironically named the St Louis) who were simply trying to escape the murderous regime that was bent on their annihilation, and then watch with indifference as they sailed back to their doom.

We could never imprison our fellow citizens simply because they shared an ethnic heritage with the nation that attacked us. We would never strip them of their possessions and their humanity without any rational or legal pretext for doing so.

We could never hang a young black man from a tree simply for speaking to one of our white women. We would never gather and laugh beneath that strange fruit as it hung above us, twisting in the wind.

Because we are exceptional.

We are one people and the enemies of freedom and democracy could never play us for fools. They could never exploit our differences and turn us against each other simply by pressing on a wound that had never really healed. They could never set us at each others throats and then sit back and laugh as we do all of the damage to ourselves that they had never been able to do to us from the outside.

Because we are too smart for that and we would sense the danger immediately and do whatever we needed to do to repel that threat, as one nation. The fabric of our union is too strong to be torn by such meager and obvious means.

We would never allow ourselves to be deceived and enthralled by a lying, conniving lunatic that defiled and ruined everything that he ever touched. We would never give license and agency to a man that represented only the worst in ourselves and served only to amplify that dark emptiness within us. We would never cheer as he ridiculed and maligned those within our country that disagreed with him and were guilty only of being of a different ethnicity or subscribing to a different religion than us.

We would never elect such a monster to the highest office in our land and watch and even revel in his flouting of our laws and emulate his sneering disregard for our most prized traditions and symbols of freedom.

Surely the democratic institutions that fell one after another throughout the world could never fail here.

Here, we are righteous and safe in the armor of our Democracy.

Here, on this land, no weed of fascism can take root.

Here in this fair and cool place no fires can rage, consuming our homes and our lives.

Here in this sanctified land there is no plague to take our loved ones by the hundreds and by the thousands. Here, we do not know that another thousand will be gone tomorrow.

Here, we are miraculously made “GREAT AGAIN” by a capering fool of a man that has never known greatness in any form and in fact knows only avarice and hate and contempt for anything that is kind or welcoming of the pursuits that our founding principles gave voice to.

Here we are secure in our retrograde perfection.

Here, the center will hold. Here things will not fall apart. There is no rough beast, it’s hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem, to be born.

But tyrants are not born, they are made. They are fostered and grown in the fumbling and festering darkness of our own disbelief and lack of imagination.

If we choose not to acknowledge that which history has held forth for us to recognize, and it is left there, trembling under the great weight of our willful ignorance, then the bill will come due and an awful price will be paid.

If we choose not to see, and be chastened and humbled by the dark potential of our own barbarity and depravity, made manifest by a bloated and gilded buffoon, then that history will have taught us nothing.

And soon, if we are not very careful, it will teach us nothing…again.