A modest proposal: in honor of this one, January 6th of every subsequent presidential inauguration year should be declared a National Day of Irony.

We all think we know irony when we see it, but it’s not so easy to define. Dictionary definitions tend to focus on irony in speech, where it’s often indistinguishable from sarcasm, as in “I just can’t wait for my next colonoscopy.”

In art forms like novels or plays, dramatic irony arises when a character behaves in the expectation of certain outcomes that we know full well will be disappointed. Tragic irony arises when good deeds or good character that deserve reward are instead greeted with punishment. Or, conversely, when evil triumphs.

Irony in its most powerful and tragic form is retrospective, as when an event unfolding in the present is so completely at odds with our knowledge of the past that it defies not only what we think is the natural order of things, but our sense of right, wrong, and justice. It’s when fate is faithless, and history becomes hypocrisy.

The woman who tried to prevent that outcome had the duty to preside over it, in the very place that was desecrated four years ago in an effort to thwart the duty she today fulfilled.

The throng of thugs who committed the desecration now expect to be pardoned by the man who denied the legitimacy of the process that confers on him that power.

But perhaps the greatest irony of this National Day of Irony is that the American electorate that was so disrespected by the events of four years ago chose to re-elect the man who precipitated them.

Irony is of course too weak a word for the sense of all of that. But when words fail, memory must suffice.