“……what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man over strains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.”

—Excerpt Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse  p. 188

This morning another cold front, thunder and more rain.  The rain has come day after day, without enough respite to allow a proper planting of my garden.  Not unlike life, which keeps coming, without commercial breaks or a half time intermission for snacks and entertainment.  The game must be played full on, and if you are not on the field, you could be called in at any time, by fate.

The email exchange of yesterday still echoes in my mind.  Are not we all seeming normal, amenable to chit-chat around a cup of coffee, maybe even telling the story yet again, of something that happened that explains our rage, our hatred….  Telling it one more time does not help, except to just pass the time.  Everyone knows this, though it is seldom said out loud, which would be a rough, impolite denouement that we are all madmen sipping coffee.

On a superficial level we Americans appear normal most of the time, going about our business, individuals that we are, not too involved in anyone else’s business.  As long as we are middle class, with a house and a yard, and a job –our dependency upon others is a matter of our ability to spend, to pay for what we need.

Thus one is left with vertiginous bewilderment, when friends, acquaintances with whom one has spent hours of companionable conversation, reveal full- throated support for the carnival-barker, con-man who has been elected president.  The antecedent circumstances of the 2016 election are well known.  No one forgets the general dismay at a moribund, dysfunctioning government that continues to reward the political class, and their patrons the uber-wealthy.  And how this dismay was translated into a cynical hatred for the female candidate.  Scapegoating the woman has always been convenient.  Remember Eve.  So, with an indeterminate amount of Russian help, we elected the other candidate.  He was after all unlike any candidate that had ever run before.  He was really different.

And so here we are.

Madmen.