In Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant 1979 movie, Apocalypse Now, rogue protagonist Col. Walter E. Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) tells the soldier sent to kill him (Martin Sheen), “As long as cold beer, hot food, rock ‘n’ roll, and all the other amenities remain expected norm, our conduct of the war will only gain impotence.”

Donald Trump’s psychosis, dementia and visible physical decline have turned the nation into the world’s largest insane asylum and is destroying the country. It’s a waste of time to try to come to terms with the third of the populace who blindly worship the Colonel Kurtz in the White House, and his spineless enablers in Congress. They must be confronted and checked through obstruction, robust legal action, political counter-action by younger leaders and even broader scale mass demonstrations.“

It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means,” says Brando’s Col. Kurtz. As long as cold beer, hot food, rock ‘n’ roll, and all the other amenities remain the expected norm, our half-hearted efforts thus far to save democracy and the rule of law will only gain impotence.Or as Tom Paine noted, “The present time is that peculiar time, which never happens to a nation but once.

”My latest in "Dispatches From Exile."