I wrote recently about not writing about politics, but I have been reminded this morning that such avoidance is more easily vowed than accomplished — and not because I’m tempted to crawl back into those fetid waters, but rather because the waters keep rising and contaminating the previously safe, dry ground.

Example: yesterday President Trump gave a bland, vacuous speech about Western values, the achievements of the West, blah blah blah — the kind of speech that politicians give all the time and that could have been given (with very few modifications) by Barack Obama — and now, as Rod Dreher points out, leftish people are freaking out over the secret alt-right dog-whistly meanings of the speech. Which means that if I want to comment here about the book I am currently reading, those comments — and probably the book itself — will be understood within the context of this ever-spreading and increasingly idiotic partisan wrangling.

Near the end of the post, Rod writes, “If standing against this kind of liberal insanity means I have to stand with Donald Trump, well, okay, I’ll stand with Donald Trump. I won’t like it, but at least Donald Trump doesn’t hate his own civilization.” Y’all know I love Rod, but I’m going to part company with him on this one. Donald Trump indeed does hate his civilization — or, more accurately, he despises it. He just doesn’t say he does. Like pitch, he defiles what he touches, and people obsessed by his every word, people whose hatred of him controls their minds, simply spread the defilement. It does not seem to occur to Trump’s most vocal denouncers that they are aiding and abetting his lust to own the world’s mindspace — and so helping him clinch his biggest real estate deal ever. His haters are his unpaid apprentices.

I will not choose between Trump and his haters. There are better ways to live, and the vital questions raised by the complex history (and even more complex inheritance) of the Western world extend far beyond this moment in electoral politics. Therefore “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one I have never asked to be a part of.” But exclusion from the narrative is much more easily wished-for than achieved.