7.23.2026 – watchman, what’s left of

watchman, what’s left of
the night, morning is coming …
but also the night

Adapted from the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21 where we read …

“Watchman, what is left of the night?
Watchman, what is left of the night?”
The watchman replies,
“Morning is coming, but also the night.
you would ask, then ask;
and come back yet again.”

This passage was in my morning reading before I got the Guardian opinion piece, Three speeches on a single day signaled a dying American democracy by Robert B Shpiner who wrote:

The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in Washington. It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record. And the country, running to the loudest of them, never examined the one most likely to kill.

In critical care we distinguish the mechanism of death from its cause. The mechanism was a Thursday. The cause was chronic, progressive and untreated.

Mr. Shpiner points to a speech made by the deputy chief of staff of that man in office to the US State Dept. Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, where he said:

He called “leftwing political terrorism” a “fatal cancer of civilization”.

He said that its politics, left to run its course, “always becomes a gulag”.

He said antifa demonstrators are “all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism”, that “their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred”, and he asked why there is “not one normal-looking person among them”.

I MUST INTERJECT – this deputy chief of staff asked why there is “not one normal-looking person among them”. REALLY?

REALLY???

But I digress.

He said that when the leftist protests that his rights are being violated, those appeals “must fall on deaf ears”.

He urged the assembled governments to be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization”.

And he described the work already under way in six verbs: “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute”.

Mr. Shpiner closes with:

In 40 years of intensive care, I have pronounced death many times. The criteria are strict because the declaration is irreversible, and so we are taught to be certain before we speak. I have also, more than once, seen a rhythm return after the room had gone quiet, when someone refused to stop compressions on schedule. This notice is filed in the knowledge that pronouncements can be premature. It is filed in the fear that this one is not.

Watchman, what is left of the night?”

The watchman replies,

“Morning is coming, but also the night.

You would ask, then ask; and come back yet again.”

For so long the mid terms have been promised as our morning in America.

“Morning is coming, but also the night.

The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in Washington. It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record.