So the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins…

That describes my sense of reality after reading the account of the Republican debate last night.  I did not watch.  I was tempted by shear voyeurism, but managed to resist my inclination.

The eight Republican candidates running for second place, far behind the polling numbers of former President Trump, were together on a stage in Milwaukee.  I read the New York Times and the Washington Post accounts of the exchanges between the candidates.  As I read, it seemed as if a colony of marmots were whistling to one another.  The pointless verbal fencing for second place was taking place, and in the meantime, a pre-recorded session of Trump gibbering to Tucker Carlson was broadcast.

Meanwhile the planet burns.

How is song and laughter possible now, on the precipice of tragedy?

We now confront
an as yet undiscovered country
whose boundaries nobody has surveyed yet,
something beyond all the lands and nooks of the ideal so far,
a world so overrich in what is
beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible,
and divine
that our curiosity as well as our craving
to possess it has got beside itself
–alas, now nothing will fully satisfy us any more !

…Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting,
dangerous ideal…

the ideal of a spirit who plays naively
–that is, not deliberately
but from overflowing power and abundance
—with all that was
hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine;
for whom those supreme things
that the people naturally accept
as their value standards,
signify danger, decay, debasement,
or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion;
the ideal of a human,
superhuman well-being and benevolence
that will often appear inhuman —

that the real question mark is posed for the first time,
that the destiny of the soul changes,
the hand moves forward,

the tragedy begins.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 5, Section 382 by Friedrich Nietzsche