A festival, a fair has always been the occasion for my happiness. I remember as a child being taken to a circus, or that feeling of excitement on a chill December evening, waiting curbside for the first sound and sight of the Christmas parade,… Such events caused me to feel happy for a while. They still do. I enjoy company with others while we anticipate the mystery, that is something never before seen or heard or tasted or felt. For a while I feel happy. Then happiness evaporates, dissipating as a low lying morning fog in the rising sun.

We walked around the Sandwich Fair. I enjoyed the sights, sounds, the aroma of cotton candy, of elephant ears, manure, of smoke from a coal burning steam locomotive! For a while I felt distinctly happy.

Sandwich Illinois, is in Dekalb County. The manner of life is agricultural, distinguished from Chicago, or even from the Fox River Valley where I live. At the fair I observed groups of extended families, almost certainly residing on farms that surround the fair grounds. The Dekalb Republican party’s tent appeared comfortably filled with men engaged in conversation. Not very far away was a booth offering Trump MAGA paraphernalia. It made sense – rural America is “Trump country.”

America is advanced, post-industrial, economically divided, entertainment-addicted, affluent, and jaded. We are a resentful society. We blame someone else for the state of our souls: women or immigrants or liberals or the media or unbelievers, etc., etc..

Politicos have a plan to make us happy, because that’s what we expect!

Do we not all have a choke hold upon happiness?

Men [women] of profound sadness
betray themselves
when they are happy:
they have a mode of seizing
upon happiness

as though they would choke and strangle it,
out of jealousy

–ah, they know only too well that
it will flee from them!

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Helen Zimmern, aphorism 279