A little poison now and then:
that makes pleasant dreams.
And much poison in the end,
for a pleasant death.

I cannot purge my mind of yesterday’s main news event. Trump hosted a spectacle in the outdoor Rose Garden, announcing a list of new tariffs that are to be applied to every trading partner. The tariffs were jaw-dropping in severity. A sign displaying the percentage amount of tariff for the target countries, featured a font, that was small, illegible to many in the audience. The flawed signage, was a clue pointing to the twisted math used to derive this draconian stifling of commerce between nations. The president laughed about the illegible font.

We are not laughing. Each of us will soon to feel the weight of higher prices, rising unemployment, and predictable isolation imposed by the rest of the world. World-wide recession is the widespread prediction.

For more detail have a look at Heather Cox Richardson’s report. CLICK HERE.

---

Are you wondering what happened to the rope-dancer, the high wire walker of which Nietzsche wrote? The “main act” has been delayed by Zarathustra’s appeal to the townspeople. Now our rope-dancer steps out on the rope to perform. This is how his dangerous passage, on the rope suspended between two towers begins. And this is what happens to him.

For meanwhile the tight-rope walker had begun his performance:
he had come out from a little door,
and was walking along the rope
which was stretched between two towers,
so that it hung above the market-place and the people.

When he was exactly in the middle,
the little door opened once more,
and a fellow, dressed like a clown or a buffoon,
jumped out and walked rapidly after the first one.

“Go on, lamefoot,”
he cried in a frightful voice,
“go on, lazybones, intruder, paleface,
or I shall tickle you with my heel!
What are you doing here between the towers?
In the tower is where you belong.

You should be locked up there;
you block the way for one better than yourself!”

— And with every word he came nearer and nearer.
However when he was but a step behind,
a terrible thing happened
which made every mouth silent and every eye fixed

— he uttered a yell like a devil,
and jumped over the man who was in his way.
This man, when he thus saw his rival win,
lost both his head and his footing on the rope,
threw away his pole,
and he plunged even faster
downward into the depth,
a whirlpool of arms and legs.

The market-place and the people
were like the sea in a storm:
they rushed apart and over one another,

especially where the body was to hit the ground.

Zarathustra, however, remained standing,
and just beside him fell the body,
badly injured and disfigured,
but not yet dead.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, Prologue no. 6

Who is our hapless performer on the wire, who does he represent? And who do you think is the clownish interloper who causes the lapse in concentration, the fatal fall?

The one on-the-wire, is you and I my friend. The malevolent clown who appears, is the one now occupying the White House.