By GORDON GLANTZ

GORDONVILLE — Had a bizarre dream the night after last.

I was face to face with an aged — and frighteningly lifelike — Charles Manson, who was seemingly representing himself as a jailhouse lawyer preparing a plea for release at age 80 (he died at 83).

It was mostly gibberish, his logic, but I humored him long enough to get a brotherly handshake and advice to “take it slow.”

“I’ll take it anyway I can get it, man,” I said, turning to walk away.

And as soon as I turned my back, he came up from behind and put the pen — the same pen he was repeatedly using to light his Chesterfield cigarette (It’s a dream, what can I say?) — and told me I should have not made the mistake of turning my back on a madman.

Prison guards quickly intervened, saving me from death, but they prison doctor told me my jugular vein was almost slit and broke the news that I had a permanent scar.

Just as I went to look at it in the mirror, I woke up.

To take my mind off the crazy dream, I flipped on the TV — “Morning Joe” on MSNBC is the morning show in our house — and this post-election craziness made me realize that my dream made more sense than it seemed,

Just swap out the current entity that calls itself your president — a diabolical nut not man enough to concede an election clearly lost — with Charles Manson.

Both are lunatics, plain and simple.

If Manson never had any followers, he just would have been an ex-con bum on a San Francisco street corner collecting spare change for below-average original songs that he thought were better than they were.

If the entity that wants to still calls himself your president didn’t have a base of largely uneducated voters feeding his massive sociopathic ego, he’d just be a below-average businessman who keeps himself afloat by screwing people over and declaring bankruptcies.

By not conceding the election, and insisting on recounts and voter fraud in only the states that went blue, “it” (one has to act like a man to be called “he”) is pretty much holding us within an inch of our jugular vein out of nothing more than selfish vanity.

I’m being overly dramatic? No, not really.

-Consider the permanent scars that will be left by holding off on COVID-19 vaccine until the administration of the president-elect, Joe Biden, tries to roll it out on a playing field that gets more tilted every day that information is withheld from the task force the next administration has assembled.

-Consider the haphazard and sudden withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, which will leave the Biden administration in an international crisis that the Orange Beast can then readily criticize.

-Consider the Civil War the entity who will call himself your ex-president will urge from his followers with Twitter nonsense, interviews and rallies reminiscent of Nazi Germany. And in this Civil War, you do realize that the entity who refuses to admit he lost the election will be playing the role of Jefferson Davis (and don’t give me this Abraham Lincoln was a Republican BS, as you only reveal your own ignorance on how the two parties changed over time).

Despite many strained and severed personal relationships over the past four years, I have maintained some with those out there with more conservative — or independent — viewpoints.

While I can respect their overall way of seeing the world, I want to know how they can — on any level — justify any of what is going on right now in their name as Republicans.

I mean, have you ever been to a restaurant and ordered something from the menu that sounded appealing, only to find it didn’t taste so good after all?

It probably happens all the time, and you freely admit you made the wrong choice, right? Why in the world is it so hard to do that here?

True, some flipped sides this time around, but the results show that too many simply doubled down on the nonsensical nonsense. The only difference was that voter turnout, particularly from people of color, was stronger.

If that is what galls you, maybe I’m giving some of you too much credit.

Because, if you can — or even try — to justify any of it, you are part of the problem at a time when we couldn’t be more desperate for solutions.

I have heard all the explanations, especially in private from people who think I somehow agree with them on some level.

None hold up.

“Not a politician.”

Uh, yeah, “it” is.

The second one declares itself a candidate for anything, even dog catcher, they are then a politician.

“Some of the Tweets are a problem, but …”

But what? You’re the POTUS. The supposed leader of the free world.

Words matter.

And I heard this one, verbatim, a few times: “Well, he doesn’t speak as well as Obama, but Obama was still an asshole.”

Doesn’t speak as well? Really?

Why not?

Both were educated in the Ivy League. The only difference is one was raised middle class and the other with a silver spoon up his ass, which translated to going to military school.

An asshole? Obama?

You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts, and I rarely — if ever — get any cogent ones to back this one up.

The best I get are a generic “well, his policies.”

Which ones?

“All of them.”

All of them?

Sorry, even a broken clock is right twice a day (an example: the entity who calls itself your president has been right in getting back to basics and backing Israel, first and foremost, in the Middle East and working from there).

When the entity who called himself your president was first “elected” into office — despite not receiving the popular vote for the first of two times — I was criticized for making such an extreme comparison between him and Hitler.

Over the last four years, and despite seeing kids in cages and white supremacists called “fine people,” I walked it back a bit.

After watching a lot of World War II documentaries on Netflix lately (yes, I’m officially an old man now), I realize I was being too lenient.

The way Hitler was pussyfooted around by his underlings (a crucial battle that turned the tide of the war on the eastern front was pretty much lost because everyone was afraid to wake him up) and blindly worshiped by his followers (leading to needless civilian deaths when the war was lost) in the public reminds me of the likes of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and all the angry white males we will be seeing soon enough in the streets with their machine guns.

Which begs the question, and the comparison to Manson and Hitler: If you blindly follow someone who leads you through the gates of hell, what does it say about you?

Think about it twice and call me in the morning (and may your dreams not be filled with Charles Manson trying to slit your throat).