The most profound irony of human existence is that our basic nature, our evolutionary mandate to follow the course of our life-path in some unique, individualistic journey, alternatively manifests, for most of us, in melting into the anonymity of a tribe or gang or cult or religion.  The few who resist, whose drive and voices remain strong, become the, (the following metaphor is apologetically deemed racist), Chiefs to the masses of eager-to-please Indians.  The psychology could be as simple as most people not wanting to do the heavy lifting that comes with the responsibility of self-determination, but the sheep/shepherd, (maybe I should have just gone with that to begin with), relationship is as old as human history.  I can almost understand being enamored by the kindliest of flock leaders, but the tyrants…what’s up with that?  Hold any of them up to even the dimmest light and Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, al-Assad, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Amin, Hussein, Putin, the Korean Kims, Erdogan, Xi and Trump offer their minions merely a validation of their worst fears.  The only upside to falling in lockstep with such heinous gutter trash is the rollicking group chant of incendiary, nationalistic slogans and the freedom to openly hate everyone not in your group, especially Jews, black, browns, yellows…and Jews.  Only the tyrants benefit from their dictatorial behavior which usually ends in a violent succession, (Lenin to Stalin, Mao to Deng to Xi, Kim to Kim to Kim), leaving their charges worse off and in utter disarray until embracing some new horror.  The relatively few oases of calm, the various experiments in democratic governance dotted across the globe have been increasingly losing the shoulder devil/angel battle with a decades-long rise of nationalism.  We, the United States of America, were supposed to be different.  Our carefully-crafted tricameral system of checks and balances makes us dictator proof, right?  Yet, holy fucking crap, right before our eyes, a bogeyman has insinuated himself into the depths of the American Dream and created a nightmare of unfathomable proportion.  He has bastardized the powers of his office with ineptitude and greed, cravenly buried his head in the sand in the face of a deadly pandemic, bolstered the racial intolerance of our roiling melting pot and has now ordered “his” soldiers into the streets to beat, tear gas and illegally arrest citizens who dare to stand up to his nonsense.  Our rules give us but two remedies:  Impeachment, (evil won that one); and election.  Logic, polling and belief in the greater good would tend to lean toward his resounding defeat in the November election.  If you love freedom, if you believe in democracy, if tyranny is not your thing, be prepared for option three.