“Sixties Sense” out. Book based on the blog with sixteen additional essays to come out by March. Thank you for reading.

“A Republic, if you can keep it.” – Benjamin Franklin, on what the coming American constitutional government would be.

An appropriate theme for the final post for this blog on the ‘60s is the need to stave off the potential defeat of most of the good the ‘60s engendered and all it stands for.

So it’s also appropriate that this post borrow a line from the first song ever written by the longest-lived (and greatest over all subsequent decades) ‘60s rock-and-roll band. The Rolling Stones still play “The Last Time” live, in part as a tease that this may be the last concert they’ll ever play. They know that last concert is coming, if it hasn’t already come. But the one thing they may have never figured on was that the hinge of history would swing in such a way that America, the source of their inspiration and their music and their success, might vote to potentially end everything the Stones have represented.

Rebel energy. Bad-itude but with compassion and love (as in some of the great rock love songs). Urbanity in every respect. Whites and African Americans working and living and loving with inevitable friction but peacefully together, as in Chess Records and Chicago blues. Diversity (of influences and of artists they admired and welcomed as warm-up acts for their shows, above all African American). Not much specific political dissent (except perhaps for the tune “Sweet Neo Con”) but their own kind of stand for peace and nonconformity (“Gimme Shelter,” “Street Fighting Man”). And of course sexuality – even for the non-super-rich.

All now threatened by one spray-tanned menace to the country and the planet.

And it’s not as if we haven’t had fair warning about Donald Trump. With his dominance of Twitter and our other 24/7 media, and with that media’s belated but by now relentless covering of his cons and his frauds and his erratic fulminations and his constant abuse of women, we are all potentially the man in the old joke who, during a hurricane, refused to obey the police order to evacuate, then didn’t get in the boat, then, as the waters rose to his roof, waved off the chopper, always saying God would save him. After drowning, meeting God at the Pearly Gates, and asking why he wasn’t saved, he got the reply: I sent the cops, the boat, the chopper . . .

In one of my photo albums is a picture of me standing on top of the Berlin Wall, while below people chip at the Wall to get their bits of Soviet empire history and Red Army caps are sold as souvenirs. It all seems immortal until it’s Disneyland. As one of the great modern successor bands to the Stones, Radiohead, once sang, “We are standing on the edge.”

What kind of edge? This kind of talk was alarmist until Trump broke down in the last debate and revealed his last “winning” strategy: disdain the need to concede. And that’s the biggest threat to the nation’s sanity and comity since the dual assassinations and “police riot” Democratic convention of 1968, not to mention Bush-Gore 2000. Depending on who’s asked, it’s either a major obstacle for the administration to come, or potentially a full-blown constitutional crisis.

As a result of that Trump is, for this news cycle, way down. But he’s not out, especially not with Wikileaks and Putin leaking (and disinformationally altering) all the damaging emails they can about Hillary Clinton and her inner circle. And Trump’s now full-on fascist – as in Protocols of the Elders of Zion – rhetoric that an international cabal of bankers is behind the Clinton campaign and rigging the election is not only unacceptable and unforgivable but also frightening in the way it almost guarantees massive turnout among his followers. The threat and the edge remain, and will after the election, when Trump and his money and his backers and supporters will keep putting out their poisonous message.

So even if, as most probably will be the case, Trump is election night’s biggest loser, it’s important that he and his followers be thoroughly repudiated as a lesson to the current Republican Party, which allowed its long and honorable history to be hijacked and allowed Trump to become its “temporary spokesman,” to use Hubert Humphrey’s old phrase about Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 (who, it should be added, after his landslide presidential loss went on to become a great senator, a history I doubt Trump will repeat). Trump needs to be roundly defeated as a signal to the world. As President Obama stated, it needs to be not a bare plurality, but a solid Clinton anti-Trump victory.

If you’re somehow still voting for Trump – and many of the “older generation” supposedly will, and, baby boomers, that’s not our dead or ninety-year-old parents anymore – and you’re not heeding all the warnings about what he is and who is behind him and what he represents, here’s what you may be voting for, given what Trump may or may not believe of his own rhetoric and ‘policies’:

A deportation of Latinos and other undocumented residents disruptive and cruel in principle and which, if even partially carried out, could start serious economic and psychological damage, even unrest, in previously quiet neighborhoods. Repressive measures against peaceful American Muslims that will probably turn quite a few of them into radicalized American Muslims, which is why ISIS loves Trump. For-profit prisons on the increase (Trump supports them) along with mass incarceration. An infiltration of powerful branches of our government by a racist “alt-right” – screw the euphemism, neo-Nazi – movement.

A Justice Department that will no longer investigate corrupt or broken-bad police forces and no longer attempt to protect the Voting Rights Act. A potential end from a Trump Supreme Court to women’s rights of reproductive choice. A “jobs program” based on trade wars. A “brain drain” (to use the ‘60s term) of scientists and cultural figures away from America.

Ominous “negotiability” views regarding the national debt that may — along with America not earning its debt by being a hegemonic stabilizer and arbitrator — result in capital flight from the dollar as a safe currency and soaring interest rates. A probable recession. Tax-starvation of the federal government to make Wall Street a more tax-free investment center (like the City of London, its rival), with higher fees for investment banks and less government services for the rest of us, and with any tax cuts geared toward the super-rich.

A return to predatory healthcare. Disruption in a military ordered to commit war crimes like waterboarding. A foreign policy based on a “pivot” to Putin as our ally and possibly against Europe and NATO, with potentially disastrous international consequences.

If any millennials are reading this, and you still plan to vote for Trump or disdain Hillary Clinton — to the young woman on television who said she still couldn’t “process” Bernie Sanders’s defeat and the other who said she’s confident she’ll see a woman president so she’ll wait for a better one, please think about what the four-year wait will be like.

Think about the awful formative events of your generation: 9/11, Katrina, the economic crash. That’s what you’re voting or non-voting for: not specifically, but in the form of incoherent government, breakdown of government services, rash and impulsive and blinkered foreign and domestic policy, and economic mafiocracy. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders’ attempts to relieve students of awful college debts? With them powerless in a Trump administration, you can, as we say in New York, fageddaboutit.

And we’re not even talking about the damage one of Trump’s irrational off-the-cuff remarks might cause (as they’re causing now). Or his uncontrollable supporters. Or the effect of fact-free government, since we all know feeding facts to Trump is like feeding the wrong food to a dog; it will merely get vomited up an hour later in unrecognizable form.

And we’ll all face a possible awful choice that a President Trump could set in motion: do we want planetary civilization to waste away due to climate crisis denial, or fall apart more quickly due to a more aggressive view of nuclear weapons?

To all principled conservative Republicans who loathe both Trump and Clinton and will abstain from voting for either . . . understood, though I wish you’d change your mind (it is a secret ballot). No, it’s the non-Republicans who have the main chance to give aid and comfort to Trump and his followers. Put bluntly, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are no longer acceptable choices, especially since Johnson has proven himself a geopolitical moron and his philosophy would have opposed almost every federal government program that has improved our lives and will continue to do so, and Dr. Stein (no relation), with her vague promises to end student debt and “stop climate change,” has proven to be full of shit.

For this is a vote to, as Senator Bernie Sanders, after his gracious concession, has insisted, and Laura Nyro once sang, “Save the people, save the children, save the country now.” And make no mistake, while Clinton may have won the first Presidential debate, tied the irrelevant second, and emerged the only conceivable choice in the third, she’s not out of the woods yet.

It may be true that the media is finally down on Trump, but it still gives short shrift to Clinton’s reasoned arguments in favor of bringing up the email scandal and broadcasting Trump’s ratings-friendly bombast. It’s also true that every time Clinton gives a lawyerly defense of her email fiasco, it’s as if she’s got her words, but is deaf to the music: the rhythm of “I can’t recall…I did as I was advised…” which is the Watergate beat we’ve had in our heads since the 1970s. She should just say she answered questions for fifteen hours on Benghazi and answered questions for many other hours to the FBI, I made a terrible mistake and will institute cutting-edge cyberprocedures for the State Department when President, let’s move on. She should say that every time. Like Bernie Sanders said: enough of your damn emails.

Then there’s the potential for voter suppression and even voting machine hacking in districts likely to go for Clinton. There’s also the possibility that a depressed turnout will come from a depressed electorate, while Trump’s followers will make sure to vote, and may also try to exert vigilante pressure on some non-Trump voting districts (although I don’t think they’ll be volunteering to go into the inner cities). But the main question is whether Hillary Clinton can, to borrow language from the ‘60s and William Blake’s “New Jerusalem,” raise her consciousness to the level of “mental fight” required for this struggle.

As a lawyer, she seems to think she’s a d.a. presenting an open-and-shut case, when she’s really the defense attorney pleading at the eleventh hour for the continued life and freedom of her client: the federal government of the United States. Because, and let’s reference ’60s artists here, the line from Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”? “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” – that’s what they want to do to your client, Madame Secretary. Not just shrink the federal government so it can be drowned in a bathtub, to use Grover Norquist’s phrase, but hollow it out and gleefully chaoticize and nihilize it to death.

Or what about the Grateful Dead line “Going to hell in a bucket/But I sure am enjoying the ride.” Madame Secretary, if you can’t get beyond attacking Trump’s obvious lies and flaws and craziness and convince the public of the lethality of Trump’s ignorance and how he might violate and permanently damage the rules and standards of our constitutional republic in a way that could potentially usurp it and blow it all to hell; if you can’t concisely emphasize in your speeches, especially to younger voters, some sort of big ideas and inspirations for the future, some sort of policy solutions for changing our energy profile and regulating Wall Street banks and fixing healthcare and stimulating more job growth and bringing about not an emptily “great” but a better America; if you can’t, as E.M. Forster said, “only connect,” and make voters realize this is the make-or-break moment for our constitutional republic and if you can’t reach out and plead, plead for your world and our world, then a misguided squeaker majority may take that Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride, and Obama (in a scene I can’t imagine) will have to hand the world’s worst landlord the keys to the White House. It could still happen.

Fortunately, Clinton is at last showing signs of rising to the challenge, now that, with Trump’s “If non-elected, I may not non-serve” speech, and the determination of his Breitbart-led followers to keep going after the election (Mr. Trump, you will indeed be a puppet, though not of Putin), the threat Trump represents is clear. And despite Clinton’s past mistakes and misstatements, such as her admission in a hacked email that she crafts public statements in a slippery fashion (unlike any politician before her, of course), and her vote in the Senate to give President Bush potential power to conduct the Iraq war, which Trump publicly agreed with, between tits-and-ass chats, in the studio of Howard Stern — notwithstanding all that, at least if it’s Hillary Clinton who gets the keys to the White House, she’s learned from the mistakes and she knows how it all works. At least she’s a public servant leading a broad coalition as opposed to a demagogue leading an all-in-the-family know-nothing cabal responsible to no one. At least, as a colleague of mine said, she won’t break anything.

So it’s first of all up to us voters who remember the ‘60s to bear in mind not just what we’re voting for but – if we vote for Trump or don’t vote for Clinton – what we’re voting against.

The Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and all their vision and values from “Masters of War” to “All You Need Is Love.” The Who. The Dead, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane. Jimi Hendrix. Frank Zappa and Lou Reed. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali. Every demonstration against war and for civil rights in our generation. The environmental movement, the feminist movement, the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement. Europe and possibly ever having another enjoyable travel experience there (but maybe you’ll like Moscow in the morning). Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Bill Bradley, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. William Sloane Coffin, the Berrigan brothers, Caesar Chavez, Vaclav Havel, and every great human rights dissenter and activist we’ve known here and abroad. Philip Roth and E.L. Doctorow. Paul Newman and Marlon Brando. Dr. Strangelove, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider. Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, and Sidney Lumet. Marshall McLuhan and Paddy Chayefsky (who both, in Understanding Media and Network, warned us). The Kennedys and the Rockefellers. LBJ (at his best), Nixon (even him at his best), and yes, Goldwater and Buckley and Reagan at their best.

Not to mention all those who carried the music and hope of the ‘60s forward, like Stevie Wonder and Prince. Bruce, Bowie, Chrissie Hynde, Talking Heads, Sting, Public Enemy, St. Vincent, and Kendrick Lamar. Martin Scorsese. The Reverend Barber and Moral Mondays and Black Lives Matter. President Barack Obama.

And to all those who will vote to save the country and protect our constitutional republic, to quote that corny but resonant Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young line, teach your children well. Teach them if they’re old enough to vote they are totally responsible for the consequences of their actions. And not registering to vote now that you can do it through Twitter, through Twitter, and not voting to stop Trump is an action and a very consequential one.

Finally, what are we voting for? Those lists above, and the hope President Hillary Clinton will join them.

Vote as if it’s your last time. We don’t know.