Recently I can’t shake the image of a cat heaving up a hairball. It’s a head-to-tail, coast-to-coast undertaking, the cat’s whole body rhythmically contracting with the effort to separate itself from its indigestible residue—very much like the stinky stuff that plugs the trap under the bathroom sink. The cat’s straining, undulating, Massachusetts-to-California heaving, mouth gaping like San Francisco Bay, is painful to watch. But then there’s the satisfactory relief when the ugly mess is finally expelled. The cat turns her back, without the slightest nod to hairball ownership, and walks away. The process is kind of like a birth in reverse. Kittens, though, are cute and imply a future. The hairball is a thing we want to put behind us, relegate to the unacknowledged compost of history.

The image I really can’t shake is of Trump as our hairball and that we are in the paroxysms of heaving him up—and out. It ain’t pretty. He and his snarled mess of acidic bigotry, pomposity and cruelty have festered too long in the gut of this nation. And when we see clearly what we’ve expelled in all its dishonesty and corruption, even the MAGA folks won’t want to look back. Sure, political anthropologists will exhaustively excavate the discharge with their long noses and magnifying glasses: we have to know and own our history so we don’t repeat it. But just imagine the relief! We’ve been suffering this hairball for too long—calling it President, obsessed with its gaseous exhalations, pretending that having a waste product as leader is in some way rational. 

The good news is that the whole world now sees that having a hairball in the White House (sounds like a joke!) is a catastrophe. For the planet. It’s been a hairball with immense power and connivance. A narcissistic, mean, racist hairball. A hairball that wants to own everything. A hairball that would destroy the world for profit. A hairball dictator that hates the pluralistic values of democracy and hates the equality of law. 

I’m ready to praise the cat that walks away. Scratch its ears.