A few months ago I subscribed to the New York Times.  I have no regrets.  I receive the Sunday edition only.  It suffices for a weeks worth of reading.  A variety of subjects are treated in depth, with a purity and precision of language that rivals the best prose that I have read anywhere.  The quality of purity and precision came to mind yesterday.  I exited the local Jewel store at dusk.  In the distance the sky glowed a crystaline dream-sickle orange, to pink, then to a light blue.  Suspended  high was a finger nail-shaped moon.  Perfection. 

• 

Here is a snippet of an article by Nitsuh Abebe which treats a topic that I’ve been thinking of lately.  I have wondered if the election of the President which we presently have is because we have become a “grifter” people, a society of cheats and cons?  Is this an aberration or a sign of the times?  If you like what you read, I have included the link at the conclusion of the paragraph.  By all means go to the the Times website and finish the article.  Or better yet, become a subscriber.

Why Are We Suddenly Surrounded by ‘Grift’?
           By Nitsuh Abebe
           Dec. 4, 2018

The two most jarring events in the past decade of American life both had the whiff of a grand con about them. One was the crisis of 2008, after which a lot of ordinary Americans turned their attention to the financial-services industry and discovered something that looked, on the surface, uncannily like a classic bilking: There was a lot of hard-to-follow shifting about of who owned what and who owed what to whom, and in the end a lot of people found that their retirement savings had vanished. The other was the election of Donald Trump, who has always been fairly open about his talent for old-school hucksterism. To the very end, many people were convinced his entire campaign had been a long-game self-promotional exercise — a man wandering past real estate, casinos, reality television, mail-order steaks and wealth-building seminars to arrive at right-wing politics as a high-quality grift.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/magazine/why-are-we-suddenly-surrounded-by-grift.htm