I like flying out of the Atlanta airport. I go through screening and the TSA lady scouts through my briefcase and

wipes my shoes with a cloth to detect explosive fragments. Then she says, you're good to go,

sweetheart. First, I'm a suspected terrorist, and then I'm a close personal friend. I did two shows

in Georgia a few weeks ago after the election, at both of which I walked out on stage, and I said,

it's been a hard week for us Marxist communists,

but there's a song I want you to sing,

which is often played triumphantly by brass bands,

but it's not about triumph, so much as survival.

The fact that after the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air,

the flag was still flying, and I hum the note, a G-note, and a thousand people stood and sang it majestically, a cappella, with four-part harmony

on the land of the free and the brave.

Some ushers told me the audience was at least half Republican. It was very moving. What they did in the

election was shameful, but at least they're capable of human feeling, and they sang gorgeously.

The next morning, a woman came over to me in the dining room of the hotel and said she had

flown from Houston to see the show the night before, and she'd enjoyed it, and we fell

into conversation.

She'd grown up in Vicksburg in the 60s, and she discovered early on that she had an affinity for math, and she studied it in college, and she rose to a point where she was often the lone woman in the room. She remembered some of her professors

hinting that she'd gone into math in order to find a good husband. But her love of math was

based on a love of logic, that there are clear lines between true and false that truth can be

proven and her sorrow about the election was that falsehood had won and would wield enormous power.

Trump had exploited fear and resentment and bigotry to exploit divisiveness to win the day.

And she remembered how in the Vicksburg of her childhood, the church ladies of town, black and white

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