It was downright ugly and degrading. It was the opposite of the imagined heroism and high-minded fantasies that children usually associate with the achievement of great things donning a cape and waving a sabre in a romp around the backyard saving the human race.

Images and fantasies of greatness, quite the norm for the youthful acquisition of self esteem and dedication to higher purposes, are filled with concepts and feeling states of nobility and virtue winning the hearts of the beloved masses and special people.

So how many of the thousands who plowed into our national Capitol on January 6 did it with similar heroic thoughts and grand music in their heads? How many of them thought this was their date with a glorious destiny?

Alas, what a comedown it was in fact. There they were, dirty, nasty, foul-mouthed and smelly, belching foul obscenities, mindless chants evoking evil consequences, unthinkable things like beheadings and lynchings, while stomping through surroundings that strangely resembled everything your childhood fantasies saw as the backdrop to your own glories.

Yes, the contrast between the beautiful walls, floors and ceilings of the Capitol building around you and the hairy, stinking, raggedy ugly mouthed minions you found yourself shouting with was totally surreal.

You found yourself pressed against young, uniformed officers of the law, mimicking others around you flailing against them, those young heroes who looked so much like you envisioned yourself as a boy hero in your backyard.

Briefly, your mind stepped outside of itself and asked, “What the hell is
going on here? Why am I here? Why as a patriot of the good am I not on the other side of this fight?” But there was too little time for thought.

Bang! You are hit on the head and are rendered dizzy. No time left. You retreat with all those around you, fleeing outside and meander. A week later back home somewhere near Denver, you are arrested and charged. And hundreds more.

Indeed, there were masterminds who organized the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Eventually it will come to light that there was a complicated tangle of elements involved, and we will find that among them were surely the nation’s strategic enemies, the Russians and Chinese, and maybe more.

Good counterintelligence operations, like those of the Russians who worked aggressively for many years to set up the conditions for the January 6 riot, have as among their signatures an undetectable component, a plausible deniability that makes it hard to identify its source.

But you ask any expert on cults and they will tell you that the Trump operation was almost a perfect case. Last weekend in Orlando, you will see the assemblage of what one pundit called a “Star Wars Bar” of misfits and losers, reverted to “We Love You!” chants while their cult star was on the stage.

This was the kind of adoration that Trump loves and he reacted to that chant with a lengthy riff on how he’s the only president ever who had people say that to them. In reality, these lunatics were the inner circle of Trump’s wannabe cult.

Can you imagine, this scenario just over a month ago represented what was running our country?

That event in Orlando also made it clear that the Trump phenomenon was not so much the consequence of his own entertainment talents as it was a thirsty phalange of desperate wackos that a certain unsavory cacophony of amoral Wall Street elements along with anti-democratic foreign oligarchs and domestic racists and right-wing cult engineers (count among those a number of prominent evangelical conman “leaders”) combined to try a coup against our constitutional democracy. Don’t forget those on this list that have been the engineers of the assault on the free press in our land, from the architects of the Fox News operation to their willing dissemblers passing themselves off as the media in a variety of forms.

But lazy Americans are no more. They’re motivated as never before. They will revive the real American dream. Suburban housewives are now our frontline feminists. Injustices at all levels of our culture are on the way out.