TODAY

Reading Joan Didion's oeuvre in an attempt to keep my own head together, or rather to acknowledge that it has also left my body, I came upon this, still relevant today--the opening of Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

"The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

"It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold, late spring of 1967..."

We are now a country in open revolution. We are now under enemy siege. And it is the United States of America in the winter of 2016.