On Saturday night we found ourselves at the emergency veterinary clinic with the boogie-woogie beagle boy called Roscoe.
He is an all-American dog, so I'll extend him HIPAA rights and not go into detail about his malady. Suffice to say he was doing much better. All we needed was for somebody who knew what he was doing to remove the IV catheter with which the vet had sent him home earlier in the day.
The Scoe-Scoe--that's what I call him sometimes--was sufficiently recovered to make an uninvited affectionate overture toward the elderly and ailing female dachshund lying wrapped in a blanket on the floor near us.
The old girl snapped at our boogie-woogie beagle boy, who retreated as I asked, "Roscoe, what did you do--go all Donald Trump on her?"
The waiting room was filled with white Arkansans with their ailing pets. Let me repeat: white Arkansans. That's another way to say Trump voters, by nearly three in four, and I was the one.
And there I was making a quip in the big middle of them about the man they'd sanctioned overwhelmingly Tuesday.
Fortunately, I was ignored by a couple of people, probably unheard by the rest and beaten up by no one.
The point I'm seeking to get to is that our presidential election every four years is a rare taking of our cultural temperature. Its outcome influences and maybe even dictates conversations and attitudes. It thrusts on us prevailing references, even a prevailing ethos.
President-elect Donald Trump had been caught on tape saying he likes to grab women in their private regions. A dozen or so women had come forward to say he'd made unwanted advances toward them. Otherwise Trump had talked resentfully, insultingly and intolerantly about Latinos and Muslims.
He had mocked a disabled reporter. He had been embraced by the Ku Klux Klan. He'd encouraged his rally-goers to "knock the crap" out of protesters. He had generally ridiculed the political correctness by which we'd tried as a society to be more sensitive to, and tolerant of, each other.
Then he'd won, by a light-years' margin in Arkansas.
The effect of that was for America to say--or at least imply--that the behavior in which he'd engaged, or of which he'd been accused, was now at least tacitly accepted if not overtly the election-licensed prevailing attitude and behavior for a brand-new American day.
Some people are scared. The effect and seriousness they sense far exceed Roscoe's friskiness and my smart mouth.
There is no reason to name names. In fact, there is compelling reason not to, which is the point.
A friend says his wife is nearly inconsolable because she believes the election outcome gave new license to sexism, intolerance, meanness, even violence.
He says she won't let her kids watch the news. He says she tells the children never to dare to talk about politics at school, for it is no longer safe.
We see evidence of that in election-inspired bullying and violence last week at schools in Arkansas and nationwide.
Do you want to see what the prevailing cultural signals are? Look at kids. They pick them up faster and are less inhibited about revealing them.
There are reports of election-emboldened males bullying females even at our most esteemed colleges, where apparently higher education is no longer all that high.
Arab women wearing scarves have been derided and told to go back where they came from.
A woman who is a lawyer and executive says her 34-year-old daughter, active in the workplace, has begun to rethink the respectfulness and security she had previously assumed for herself.
She said her daughter wonders, for the first time, if men hold the view of her equality that she had previously taken for granted. She now suspects that maybe those are Trumpian brains and that what's going on inside them amounts to vulgarity, objectification and derision.
On the morning after the election at the LifeQuest class I lead, a woman met me in the hall and said, as her eyes became moist: "We just have to be strong."
Then she said, "I have a gay son, and I fear for him." Then she cried.
The worst thing that could happen would be for benign Trump voters to scoff at those kinds of fears as if they weren't warranted.
The best thing would be for Trump himself to rise in office to simple decency, to go at least to a mid-range when his voters go low.
That's the first and probably transcendent test of his worthiness and of his presidency.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/15/2016