Trump was a proud pussy-grabber, Wrightman turned out to be a quiet power-grabber. He turned this minor incident at Rogers U. into a federal case. “To protect the constitutional right to protest, one of our core freedoms,” he issued a presidential directive allowing the federal government to issue a cease and desist order to any person, business, or institution that attempted or appeared to attempt to take away or limit First Amendment rights. It was a beautiful bit of legalese, giving the government cover to use First Amendment powers to curtail First Amendment rights.

That same type of twisted logic was being applied to the most important freedoms. To guarantee the right to safely demonstrate, for example, Wrightman had limited the size of demonstrations. We were leaking civil liberties like oil from an old Dodge Dart. What bothered me was that as long as their Xbox was working, people didn’t seem to mind.

“You’re exaggerating again,” Jenny said with the usual tolerance in her voice.

She had popped up beside me. “You really think so?”

I frustrated her. Intellectually, I mean. Always did. I used to complain she was much too smart to be such an optimist. She described me as the only person she knew who worried that the sky was falling and my insurance had expired yesterday.

I reminded her about that actual building that did fall on me.

Jenny wasn’t naive. She didn’t necessarily trust Wrightman much more than I did, but at times she was willing to defend him. That was the whole “the country’s in desperate trouble” argument. She wasn’t the lone ranger: a lot of people bought into that. The country was facing potentially catastrophic economic, social, and geopolitical problems. Trump had alienated our allies and surrendered ground to our enemies, and we couldn’t even agree on whether to permit a right turn on red. What we really needed was a human superglue. “If Wrightman can bring us together,” she posited, “then I’ll accept some temporary limitations. I just don’t want to see anybody get hurt.”

We never argued about it; we defended our beliefs, we discussed, we disagreed, we cajoled, but we never argued. We also never reached any conclusions. I wondered, where do you draw the line before you end up in North Dakota? To satisfy my fears she promised that if it ever came to that, she would move there with me—but insisted we have two Franklin stoves in our cabin.

What was true was that immediately after the attacks, the country had rallied to support Wrightman. So it was not surprising that instant polls showed strong support for the Detroit raid, even if no one was quite sure what was accomplished. We sure got ’em! Got who? Them! Way to go!

The administration spent the following few days doing everything possible to link the people who died in that house to the July eleventh attacks. But that just didn’t ring true to me. Their activities were like trying to fit together pieces taken from several jigsaw puzzles: no matter how hard they tried, it just didn’t add up to the picture on the cover of the box. I collected sourced stories, rumors, even obvious fabrications. I read several foreign newspapers on the web and put them together to try to figure out which organization was pushing what story line, and from that determine what the administration wanted people to believe. Whatever was going on, what the administration wanted us to believe it was wasn’t it. They clearly wanted Americans to believe ’twas a famous victory.