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Sanity by Majority Vote

It is brittle cold, after a storm. The sun is sharp, and the snow
traces hard shadows across the yard. The house thermostat is
not so much to control the temperature as it is to indicate our
preferences: something on our wish list.

We bought a snow blower attachment for our lawn tractor.
Even with wheel weights and tire chains, all that weight hanging
out in front makes traction something else on our wish list.
More weights for the back end are coming.

Since it is the season for wishing, I wish the temperature, politically,
were cooler, too. I don’t know what they have hanging out front,
but most of our politicians have no traction, either. You know that
cool analysis is in short supply when right-wing advocates are
unembarrassed to call themselves, “tea baggers”. Tea Baggers
and Birthers and Screamers and Proclaimers of Treason!
Buy guns, move to Idaho, talk about revolution. We have people
in public office who think the President is plotting to turn us
into a Muslim country, or into a Stalinistic gulag.

I looked up something about the psychology of conspiracy theorists.
It might be that some people are chemically disposed to lend great
significance to the trivial things most of us know is dust in a sunbeam.
Offhand comments become evidence of grand conspiracies.
Bowing too deeply is traitorous. (Those people have never stayed
in a theater long enough to see curtain calls.) It probably does mean
that some people cannot be reasoned with: they are being
reasonable, given what they see as significant.

Sanity has always been determined by a majority vote.
It is a consensus of how most people think. How most people
think is a function of what has survived the buffeting of human
experience, and what has worked best for our survival.
That, though, does very little to modulate the political process,
because on a large scale, we get a full range of human beings
in office, including a few genuinely mad people.  Not just angry
people, but conspiracy theorists, and dimwits and buffoons.

I am embarrassed by the insistence on American Exceptionalism.
That is a secular term for what used to be known as the New Israel
here in America, God’s favored nation, or the Last Best Hope of
Mankind. It is the Chosen People idea. We are no chosen people.
We might be one of the most promising accidents of human migration,
and good luck, and insularity (protected, as we long were, by
two oceans). In some ways we are better than other nations.
In some ways we are worse. We are just ordinary human beings,
related to the rest of humankind. Even our form of government
is just one of the ways of doing things.

I could wish things were as clean and sharp as the shadows
on the snow, but that would be to wish for a crystalline life
in a black and white world. We are, instead and fortunately,
a bit of a messy conglomeration that allows for people like us
to be included.

It is the holiday season; a time to celebrate our general goofiness
and goodness, and to be glad we can.  Maybe next year will bring
a little less goofiness, and a little more goodness.

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