I've got this annoying tune in my head.

When there's something strange

in the neighbourhood

Who you gonna call?

TRUMPBUSTERS!

Nah nah nah, na nananana!

Who you gonna call?

TRUMPBUSTERS!

I would say that many Americans - the ones who aren't in the Big Daddy Trump cult - have the problem of learned helplessness.

Just like the dogs in the experiment who got electrocuted no matter what they did, they've become passive and hopeless.

It seems to me that the whole of American life is an exercise in learning helplessness: health care when you don't even know how massive the bill is going to be; going to school, not knowing when some nutter might take it into his head to shoot everybody; not being able to go to the toilet till the end of your Amazon shift so you wear nappies...

Yes, they've learned that they're helpless, that neither Democrats nor Republicans nor their doctor nor their boss will pay any attention to what they want.

It's why they obsess over guns so much because guns make you feel instantly powerful.

For God's sake, it's why the whitest and worst of them turned to Trump in the first place.

Trump too makes them feel instantly powerful.

It's a difficult problem because learned helplessness makes you reluctant to go and seek out other people like you, makes it hard for you to be brave because you feel that your individual bravery won't mean anything and you don't know what collective bravery is.

Yes, you wanna call TRUMPBUSTERS to deal with Trump for you, but they're not answering the phone and their website's been taken down. Where's Captain America when you need him, where's Spiderman and Iron Man? And Superman?

They're inside us, you think, in our hearts and imaginations. But what's the good of that?

"The days have gone down in the West,

behind the hill into shadow."

But learned helplessness can be unlearned.

And spring usually follows winter.