THE UNSPIN ROOM: SEASON OF LIGHT, THOUGH DIMMED, STILL SHINES

“It was Christmas in prison and the food was real good, we had turkey and pistols carved out of wood.” So sang John Prine before COVID-19 silenced him this year, completing a job begun by cancer.

An old friend succumbed around the same time. It was beginning to feel lonely at the bottom. The plague swirled around my mother but, unsurprisingly, thought better of it and gave her a wide berth. She’s still a flyweight fighter at 99, so what’s the hurry?

There’s been a run on Christmas trees. The area is lit up like Vegas, with two-story inflatable snowmen. In 1966, Tim Hardin sought a “reason to believe.” He has lots of company now. Those resistant to “the paranoid style in American politics,” as Richard J. Hofstadter penned around the same time, can’t understand how Rudy Giuliani escaped his minders; maybe he applied the same boot-black that ran from his hair to a wooden pistol? That after four years of tweets more than 74 million sentient humans favored his mendacious boss eludes mansplaining, as it takes in a surprising swath of suburban women, Latinx and other voters who bought the ticket and still hopped aboard the thrill ride. It ain’t all “Hillbilly Elegy” out there. Maybe it’s the fluoride in the water.

There’s no point sitting here decrying the sorry state of the American electorate in a year like no other.

More than 300,000 have perished in a country living through the children’s hour in a politicized bedlam. “Four minutes to twelve, and there’s a madman at the wheel,” drummer Ken Weaver wrote while the Vietnam war still raged.

Now we have an uncivil war. The unreconciled business of Reconstruction lives on in the body politic. States stitched together are coming apart at the seams.

So we sit by our trees, menorahs, gravestones, photos of the dearly departed, awakening from nights spent in the fresh-turned ground of dreams, awaiting our turn for the magic bullet of vaccination. I think back on the necrologies we ran on ABC News at the close of the year: did so-and-so make the list? That’s one Hot 100 you’d like to miss the cutoff for. No, please, you first.

Looking back over a career of trying to inject a little truth serum into the bloodstream of mass media poisoned by consolidation, I’ve seen too much self-interest on both sides of the camera, and so many good souls who only ended up on top of a trash heap.

The Dickens’ boy in me grows sentimental, and if I stand accused, I plead guilty. I want to believe, in this season of light, that we may yet, given world enough and time, claw our way out of the deep ditch we’ve dug. Even if we fall, we have to try. We cannot live without hope. Victor E. Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning” found it even in the hell of the Holocaust.

How have we come to this chapter in the book of America still being written, so far removed from humility and kindness to others, where it is largely about what we have and not what we give?

We are a prideful nation, holier than thou, built on the backs of First Americans and the abomination of slavery. “Make America Great Again,” like much else in Trump’s schlachthof, is sadly unoriginal: Reagan used the term and, like Woodrow Wilson, was celebrated despite or because of his coded appeal to racism.

Are we better than this or, like the Roman and British empires, is the American century one and done, with an ascendant China, Cyrillic trojans in our software and a withering away of our own democratic spirit? The poor polling predictions of repudiation for the toddler in chief, as well as a down-ballot sweep, didn’t come close to the election results. Unless Georgia swings like a pendulum do, the Senate will still sing along with Mitch and his Monkees, who hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. History will not be kind to this craven cadre, but they don’t appear to care. Welcome to Vichy, enjoy the waters.

And yet, and yet … something gnaws at me, a bit of underdone potato. I am always moved by the spirit of the season. I remember ice skating, presents under the tree, “The Grinch” on TV, the mailbox full of greeting cards. Almost no one sends them anymore. The postman rings twice only to drop off packages from Amazon. I can’t bring myself to delete dead friends from my iPhone’s address book.

I uncork the Heaven’s Door whiskey — if it’s good enough for Bob Dylan, it’s good enough for me — and drink to them.

Placing a simulacrum of a candle atop a bonsai tree, I enter the cave of memory and scrawl on the wall “Merry Christmas.”

Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.