And part of me says, "You've finally opted out of the conversation altogether, and would prefer to sit in the corner and shit yourself, so we're going to ignore you while we fix the mess you made." And somebody said, "This is what the Democrats want: for birthers and deathers to shit themselves and act appalling, so that independents will flee left." And that was almost culpable, in fact: that the left would use that rhetoric knowing it would whip the useful idiots of the right into a hateful terrified frenzy. But then I remembered that we're adults, and no amount of rhetoric or editing can make somebody bring a gun to an appearance of the president. So now, I don't know. I've always touted the fact of a single America -- that Jason Stackhouse is your brother, that Luke and Steve and Sarah are your blood -- to justify my compassion, my conservative tendencies, to say that what we all have in common is so much greater than what we might not have in common. But this week has been hard, and I'm sorry.

The reason I was so excited about this show last summer was that it was literally about getting a front row seat in a culture in the midst of great, impossible, terrible and wonderful change. The Great Revelation created the Fellowship of the Sun; the roots of the Fellowship created the Great Revelation. But making that statement in the months before the election, knowing I was about to get a hot black president, was a much more self-satisfied statement than it is now. It's also about being front-row for somebody else's apocalypse. Bon Temps is scary. Dallas is scary. The whole world these people knew self-destructed two years ago, and they have only begun to go crazy about that. The vampires owed them better. We owe them better.

The Justice card says everything flips over, but that doesn't mean we can't be kind to the ones caught in the middle. The difficulty of that -- the harder it is to love them, while they express their trauma in the language they know -- has the same diameter as our own capability for compassion. It's not hate the Fellowship is expressing: It's fear. It's the bleeding childhood screams of the Bon Temps zombies, when Sam ran from the sacrifice: the stark raving existential pain of learning that the world has broken. Somebody said once that the whole memory of Eden, the Fall and everything after, comes to us not genetically but from the first time you cried out for your mother, and she wasn't there. It's a rip in the world, a deformity of nature. Nobody ever chose to be a villain.