That's Just It

Rebecca Solnit wrote about the duality of America for the Guardian. 

Using her able way with words, she provided a number of contradictory pairs that will sound familiar to any fair-minded reader. That was her point in writing, but this was my favorite sentence in the piece:

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. 

That's just it: we are being ruled by a catastrophic crime scene. Governed is the wrong verb, because I have come to define that word as meaning something other than "imposition of one will over others."