C’mon, man – was it Adderall, meth, or old-fashioned bennies? There was a chemical buzz in Congress Thursday night, and while it lacked class, self-control, judiciousness, respect, and honesty, those were never in abundance even in Joe Biden’s salad days, when he forever turned Supreme Court confirmation hearings into partisan blood sport. Whether by some miracle or by better living through chemistry, both the lethargy and the maturity that old age are reputed to bring were absent.

Drug-like was the sense of an alternate reality, in which 95-plus executive orders opening up the border and initiating the chaos they even felt for a day or two in Martha’s Vineyard never existed; in which the National Guard was not just deployed on New York subways because there is now less violence than ever; in which he never seriously entertained the idea that Russia could be invaded successfully and that tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers’ lives have not been wasted in a grinding stalemate; and in which it is perfectly consistent to admit that Hamas slaughtered and raped its way to the worst anti-Semitic atrocities since Hitler but that now the time is right for forcing Israel to leave Hamas still standing and to reward its ardent supporters and admirers, the pay-for-slay Palestinian Authority, with an internationally recognized state because Hamas has deliberately and criminally made its citizens its human shields and that, too, must be reward.

Biden, who was touted as a reasonable man, who rode into office as the kindly, unifying figure who knows how to compromise, was trolling half his audience. He was clearly expecting and largely receiving the respectful deference due his office, but, as with almost all he does, he writes checks on the funds deposited by others, funds of trust and respect that he does not bother replenishing. Like the school bully, like the despots he claims to oppose but whom he emulates, he knows how to manipulate the norms, to provoke and harass while the teacher isn’t looking and then pretend to be the wronged one at just the right moment. Thus, he oh-so-bravely launched into the Supreme Court, which he could pretend to debate meaningfully only because he knew its justices would choose to sit in silence, honoring the office and the Constitution. Respect is what he requires of others, but it is asymmetrical warfare — he does not offer it back, and he takes the temporary wins of his trickery and manipulation as evidence of a fairly-won triumph of his only occasionally coherent ideas.

In the end, outside Capital City, I don’t think it was the triumph that he felt it was. It smacked of unreality, of something unsustainable without chemicals, and lots of money and real power at your disposal. That high-volume, breakneck-paced heckling on display has a different effect on those not addicted to the pursuit of money and power at nearly any cost. It is not a pleasant effect. 

Most people, in the end, evaluate things holistically. We see a personality, a character, who affects us far more than any individual point or rhetorical tactic. The whole combines into a feeling that is more, not less, than the thoughts that helped to piece the whole picture together.

In the end, we do not survive by being duped by powerful and manipulative people. We find our ways; we bide our time; we prudently preserve what we can on however small a scale we are forced into. We know that reality always catches up, and we stake our lives on it, not for ourselves alone but for our children, for our country, and for our world.

I think there were many who went to sleep deeply troubled over Biden’s performance. The day is coming, though, when these many will have their say. They will find their power, all the stronger for their faith in the deep and abiding principles at which the powerful have sneered. It is the power that liberated colonists from an overweening king, that liberated Europe from the Nazis, and that tore down the wall. 

It will overcome the mean artifice and phony reality on display last night in the heart of our democracy.