As of this writing with me the Mentor, tomorrow's going to be the anniversary of the 1/6 riots.  The Heir's commemorating a day beforehand by truly wondering whether we necessarily "lost" democracy that day.  He thinks about all the times there are Union Addresses, and there's always one designated absentee who gets to hide out in an undisclosed location until maybe about 24 hours after, and then we get to find out who that is.  The Heir wants to research this one, but he gets the impression that this is a tradition that goes back to the Cold War, but he's not sure when.  He doesn't think today's Millennials fully appreciate the anxiety of the 80s over the possibility of a nuclear war, but that was what he thinks people were concerned about when they designated an absentee.  He also gets the impression that this tradition still continued after the Cold War was over, and regained new importance during the Age Of Terror.  After we killed Osama bin Laden, it appears as though we *still* continued this tradition to this very day.  Biden's due to do a Union Address, and it's anyone's guess as to how they'll manage that whole absentee practice in light of 1/6.  So the Heir's 60% sure that they must have had a designated absentee (or at least one) when they did the formalization of the election results, so whether it was a nuclear war or a terror attack, that person at worst would run the country somehow.  Speaking of the 80s, that was when the Heir thinks we should have been the *most* worried about democracy, and yet we appeared the *least* concerned, as we seemed to have reelected the same people over and over again without even a thought to the job they're doing.  The Heir's wondering...

"...How was *that* democratic???"