It’s like a queasy elephant hovering over the nation, with each citizen choosing whether to see it, not see it, say something, or just continue to carry water for the sacred national cause of making sure we police one another for bad thoughts, (“anti-semitism”) even when they’re not even our own. It makes it a schizophrenic experience to be an American, finally reduced to not knowing anything much except which kind of shame and filth is attached to which set of beliefs about anything that happened to us. That’s why we love “small talk,” which, after Covid, became simply not talking at all. All thinking, all studying history, and all talking is now trip-wired to make you lose people on all sides, and feel again, faintly dirty.