There's an Aphorism for Everything, Including This

Well, we believed all along the president would have to exceed the margin of fraud. We just didn't realize there's no such thing.  Any lead, no matter how great, falls within the margin of Democrat fraud.  

Nevertheless,

Defeats are never definitive when they are accepted with good humor.

Moreover,

With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.

Humor and (terrestrial) pessimism, to which I would add dignity. For 

Today the conservative is merely a passenger who suffers shipwreck with dignity.

Let us extend our hand across the aisle, and in a magnanimous gesture of good will, assure our Democrat friend that

we do not share his ideas because we understand them and that he does not share ours because he does not understand them.

Technically his ideas aren't even real anyway, for

Evil only has the reality of the good that it annuls.

Moreover,

Evil promises what it cannot deliver. Good delivers what it does not know how to promise.

Which is why the leftist can never be truly happy, for

In the intelligent man, faith is the only remedy for anguish. The fool is cured by “reason,” “progress,” alcohol, and work.

As we all know by now,  the Raccoon is never at home in this world, since this world is merely the stage of a journey. In this coontext,

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world

Here's one that even -- okay, especially -- I must remember, being that I tend toward stoicism, disillusionment, cynicism, and frivolous wisenheimerism -- to 

live the militancy of Christianity with the good humor of the guerrilla fighter, not with the glumness of the entrenched garrison.

 We all have televisions. We see with our own eyes that

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.

Between us and this mob -- besides our weapons -- is none other than Cocaine Mitch, who must remember that

Politics is not the art of imposing the best solutions, but of blocking the worst.

This doesn't mean we can't be disgusted, for indeed

 

God is the transcendental condition of our disgust.

I want to say this is "literally" true, but that's redundant.  Dis-gust is simply the recognition that something is present that shouldn't be present (or absent that shouldn't be absent).   For example, that pineapple should not be on a pizza, but pepperoni should be.  Simple teleology, really.

Now, as we've discussed before, there are trials and there are chastisements, and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.  Which is this?  Are we being chastised?  Or is this an opportunity for... growth, or something? Well, 

God sometimes prunes our branches like an impatient gardener.

And in fact,

Souls that Christianity does not prune never mature.

C'mon, man! Who is as worthless as a man who hasn't suffered for the sake of truth and virtue?  Without the trial there would be no heroes, only metrosexual soy boys and other Biden voters.

Yes, the left is absurd. How does one respond to absurdity?  Surely not with reason. You'll both get dirty, except the pig will like it.  Instead, bear in mind that

The opposite of the absurd is not the reasonable, but the happy.

Remember too that

Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes.

To not recognize this is to set oneself up for a spectacularly undignified collapse -- as we saw every day with the spectacularly undignified left over the past four years.   If you feel as they do, you will behave as they do, and they behave as they do because of misplaced and displaced hope which they imagine will solve their personal problems.  Eight year olds, Dude.

I'm not saying to stop fighting.  Rather, to just do so in the spirit of Karma Yoga, which is to say, for its own sake -- for the sake of truth, love, beauty, and all the rest.  Not only is this enough, it is a freaking privilege.  For most of history and in most nations even today, doing so is asking for the hemlock.

Here are a couple of important meta-historical considerations: that 

Everything in history begins before where we think it begins and ends after where we think it ends.

And

Determining what is the cause and what is the effect tends to be an insoluble problem in history.

Don't be fooled by that dissolute and pathological liar, Time, first cousin of that bald old cheater, Death.   According to Petey, things are already conceived and quickening in the womb of being that won't become manifest for years and decades.  

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.

Forest and trees. Temporal succession is a lot of trees.  The forest can never be seen from within time, only from outside and above.  (Let's not even talk about those fake forests that fall under the heading of "ideology.")

More generally, God is the supreme ironist.  He does not play dice with the cosmos; rather, with your expectations and presumptions. Irony, as in, for example, sin and redemption, or death and resurrection.  As Joyce put it, Phall if you but will, rise you must:

Such is the complexity of every historical event that we can always fear that from a good an evil might be born and always hope that from an evil a good might be born.

Yes, those four years were filled with joyful vengeance and precious liberal tears, but were just a passing day in the larger scheming of things. For 

History is a succession of nights and days. Of short days and long nights.

Today's bottom line -- well, frankly, there is no bottom line because each of the above could qualify as one -- but above all else, remember that

The truth does not share the defeat of its defenders.

Come to think of it, I believe this is one of the lessons of spiritual crucifixion and cross-bearing more generally.  No, not some masochistic notion of martyrdom, but rather, that 

Resignation must not be an exercise in stoicism but a surrender into divine hands.

We're not done.  More of the same tomorrow.  (Aphorisms courtesy of Sr. Nicolás Gómez Dávila.)