In the room where you watch football, what you call your "man cave," there's a painting on the wall.

Well, it's not really a painting. It's one of those pictures that looks like a painting. You bought it out of an online catalogue that sells cheese, summer sausage, fleece shirts that look like plaid flannel, and night-lights in the shape of white-winged angels.

The picture is of actor Rober Duvall as Texas Ranger Gus McCrae in a miniseries called "Lonesome Dove."

It was a great miniseries, a "tale of the Old West," as older movie reviewers sometimes write.

And the picture is who you really are, or at least who you'd have been if you hadn't been born in suburban Buffalo in 1967.

And you're sitting under the picture and your kid Nate comes home from school, and he says that he's been noticing another kid on his basketball team.

"I was looking at him in the locker room," Nate says. "I've never done this before, looked at another guy, but I noticed his butt is like a pile of muscle."

"Love is love," you say. "You're my son and I love you."

You're a good dad.

"You know, I've been noticing this girl in my class," Nate says. "She's Black and she wants to be a rapper, and you should see the dump truck on her. I mean, you can't miss it."

"Love is love," you say to your son. "You're my son and I love you."

And you're almost 50. You know the original man rules. Eyes up at the urinal.

If you compliment another man's body, you say, "You been workin' out?" or "Nice left hook."

Even better is "way to hustle" when you're playing softball.

And you were born in the suburbs. Black people lived in the city, far away. It's not like they were displaying their big sexy pumpkins to you all the time.

It was a simpler time, like back there in Lonesome Dove, when a man was alone with this pistol most of the time. Nobody was doing the YMCA dance out there on the prairie, and if they did do it, they didn't do it for long.

Who knows where the kids get this stuff? Rap videos? Drag queens at the library? "Brokeback Mountain"? The president? Tik Tok?

Your old man broke his back pouring red-hot steel. You're a heavy equipment operator.

Your kid wants to a be a realtor and Instagram influencer. The sad thing is, he'll probably out-earn you, and he won't have a man cave with a cowboy picture on the wall. His house will have one of those two-story-high "great rooms" with a big gold chandelier you gotta lower down on a rope to clean.

It's dusk in America. Nothing is gaudy. Nothing can't be said. The very things you hired Donald Trump to roll back are the things he pushes forward, the message being that, if you have enough money and power, everything belongs to you. You can only collect money for so long before you want to collect power, and you can only collect power for so long before you want to collect souls.

Did you really think Trump was gonna let you keep your backwater, middle-class life and your big pickup truck, and your stupid little beliefs and your meaningless Jesus? Did you really think there was anything that didn't belong to money?

And the lonesomest thing is, you may just be dug out of this collapsed coal mine by the people you hate the most: the snowflakes, the weepers at No Kings protests, the girls with blue hair and the boys in dresses.

If they don't dig you out, be prepared to give more of your life and hope and thought and beliefs to the people up there at the top of the pyramid. Send 'em your kids if you have to, either as teen trophies or as soldiers with eyes bright for the sands of Iran.

The cowboy on the wall has lonesome eyes.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paper back from Anazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Photo credit: Cemrecan Yurtman at Unsplash