This is pretty much it, I would say: This is the moment we have long feared — or, from another point of view, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. If you think you know what I mean by “this” being “it,” you’re probably right. This is the moment to bust out clichés and make them sound authentic, the moment for “Which side are you on?” or “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” to stop sounding like antique rhetoric out of earnest postwar melodrama.
Of course the moment has been more of a long, drawn-out process, and the premise that “it” can’t happen here has been slowly and gradually degraded and negated, somewhat the way Hannibal Lecter (“the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” as President Trump likes to say) keeps you alive and doped up on happy pills while he eats your brain. Still, though: Wasn’t there something like a moment for you? There certainly was for me.
