The Republican National Convention is over now, and Friday's dawn sunrise is dappling the green of the trees. We watched last night's grim spectacle the way vultures who lurk at the end of dangerous runways watch incoming airplanes, waiting for the crash and the feast to follow. Is Donald going to run wild? Will flesh be torn from ligament and bone?

It did not play out that way. Donald Trump managed to get through an hour and 15 minutes of speaking without freaking out. In fact, he gave what many will unfortunately interpret as the speech of his life. It was a terrifying, blatantly racist, xenophobic, dystopian Emperor Palpatine imitation that described how we're all going to die screaming any minute now, but he stuck to the script and didn't spit acid like a bad car battery.

This was no small thing, mind you. Trump had just watched his wife get slagged in the public prints over a plagiarized portion of her speech. Then came Ted Cruz. Trump had dogged Cruz's wife over her looks, accused Cruz's father of having a hand in the Kennedy assassination, and called Cruz himself a liar time and time again. Cruz crouched in the tall grass like a puma, and when his chance for revenge came, he cut Trump's throat on prime-time TV with the flick of a claw by refusing to endorse him, smiling past his fangs all the while. This was a dead-bang sniper shot from 2,000 feet out. Pence who? Donald who? It was all Ted on the networks after that number, a masterfully turned dish served ice cold....

That we have reached a place where success is defined by a candidate's ability to restrain his inner Berserker and speak in complete sentences is truly remarkable. Instead of "Believe me folks it's going to be great when we build that wall and the Mexicans pay for it because they're all scary and I'm so rich you have no idea believe me because I just like to grab and grab which will make America great again," we got a stolid Teleprompter discourse on the end of everything (or the threat of the end of everything white) in these United States.