There came a sturm und drang-y time in the nation when the old myths, tales, and dreams no longer applied for 99 percent of the people.

And so, the great mass of people gnashed their remaining teeth and cried out for help, pleading and beseeching into all corners of the land, seeking a new champion to set things right -- to have new stories constructed, which would then help the People survive their overly restrained and heavily-regulated lives at the hands of a cruel and unjust emperor, called the President.

And so, the people went straight to the well which was poisoning them, which was Unrestrained, Celebratory, Cutthroat Capitalism, and drew from that well a well-dunked champion who had arcane knowledge of chants and spells, and who also had some tips on how best to drink from the well's wooden bucket without anyone catching on, or having to pay the evil emperor for the right to do so.

So far, the conversation about real extremism in America has been underwhelming, ranging on the low side of things, pinging in the ones and twos on the Overall Awareness Meter.

Such is the reward when focusing the energies and efforts of all hands, and all eyes, on the ugly, snarling surface issues espoused by extremists.  If you trick people into noticing only the incoherent policies and speeches made by your candidate right now, however crazed or crass they may be, you can get these same people to blow past the lowest-gravity spots where previously inconceivable thoughts and verbalizations really start to bubble and bake.

Such is the alluring quicksand of true lunacy.  Some practiced candidates are able to sound a bit whacky, and others even more than a smidge crazy -- but it takes clinically-approved sociopaths and psychotics to master the crowd-speak of madness, to pull off the snake-charmer act combining snake-charming, talking in tongues, and hypnotizing the masses.

Wonderful.  We've managed to get through another set of political conventions.

Frankly, this is tantamount to celebrating a fleeting victory over jaundice,  a temporary flare-up of malaria, or an ongoing resurgence in hemorrhoids.

If I didn't know better -- and I'm not sure that I do, not anymore -- I'd say someone slipped some blotter-paper acid, or mind-warping alien spores, into my preventively-medicated, yeast-enhanced beverage.

Of course, it could also be that the candidates themselves have divvied up the hallucinatory goods, right before each one got off their respective Gravy Trains, for their respective stops at Podiumville.

The best book I've read in quite a while is a nonexistent one called Scorched-Earth Realpolitik Cookbook:  Cajun-Style Political Elexting and Black-Eyed Peace for the Rest of Us, by Pfisher Pranx, a renowned, well-respected, award-winning author whom I made up only a few seconds ago, while typing this sentence.

The alternate title of the book, I just now realized, is:  Or: 183,429 Better Ways to Elect a President.

This fictitious book is from Keisterville Publishing, a company which fails to pass the real-company sniff test.

• (Full disclosure:  However, this is true except in an accidentally oblique, and quite eerily coincidental sense, way out in pretty-much-still-real Pennsylvania, where Keisterville actually exists. This is a coincidence for which I deeply apologize discovering, and then mentioning, after first selecting my own fake company's name, liking it, and then Googling it at the last second to make sure there wasn't a real publishing company named that, thereby accidentally setting up myself and others for a lethal, 60-kiloton mega-legal blast.  Sorry, Keisterville -- about, uh, everything -- and hello there, Keisterville Publishing.)

In this book which exists in some alternate reality not our own, there is also featured The Best Music Video Which Doesn't Really Exist.  Two of them, in fact.  (This is an incredible accomplishment, I have to say, having an old-fashioned paper-and-pressed-board book, with the ability to project a full, room-sized high-def hologram with rich colors and 10-point sound, simply from within the book's pages and binding and vocally activated with individual password... amazing!)

Wait -- I should probably start again.

Here's the thing: Since the Laws of Legitimate Political Reality have been totally gutted, abandoned, and forever revoked by the Lame, Hamstrung, and Hungover Lower Deities of Self Governance with whom we Humans have saddled ourselves in a cruel trick of Fate and our own brain-dead decision-making attempts, the common civic reality we once all shared has been shattered and suspended. The common good, and common sense, have all been devastated and obliterated by far-right-wing psychoses, propaganda, and personal Ponzi pyramids.

We're just about back to monosyllabic grunting, if you haven't noticed.

It's been threatening to get out of hand for some decades, and it's finally happened: Every news report -- global, national, local, and personal -- is competing for that rarest of all awards, the Golden MacArthur Oscar Genius Emmy Grant Globe Prize in Massive Surreality.

Life is now like being overdosed on an iffy batch of blotter paper acid, spending the day in a Salvador Dali exhibition featuring peyote hors d'oeuvres and really good wine, then moving right on into a Federico Fellini film fest boasting magic mushroom tapas and too many flavors of seat-side, delivered tequilas and mandatory, last-shot worm-eating ultimatums.  With curry.  And that really hot, yellow Chinese-dragon-mustard that attacks every moist membrane in, on, and around your body.

Yes:  The whole Reality business jumped the tracks some time ago, when The Incoming News shot off the rails at the same time as my health track slipped the surly bonds of Earth and took flight, winging me into the uncertainty of the ER wing. Again, some more.  One more once.

It all gets jumbled together, as most disaster victims will tell you: There are some inexplicable events, then comes perception and a beginning recounting of horrors -- peripheral and central -- as if everything was experienced in a waking dream...

Somewhere in there, at the end, after therapy involving hand-wringing, chin-scratching, wall-bashing, pillow-scrunching, and quite a bit of Kleenex use, there is a final uncomprehending shrug aimed at the universe at large, and a muttered, superstitious incantation of Hell, I dunno, and then, there is some serious drinking (and/or bathing in) some alcohol to be done.

The story of our combative, snake-oiled times:  There are antidotes, and there are antidotes.

Well, we also have vaccines to help us skirt -- or brace for -- the worst of what the world can chuck at us.  There are all sorts of ways to avoid focus on one thing and pull attention onto another, as flashy magicians, petty pick-pockets, and pokerfaced charlatans all know.

But there are always ingenious methods to pull us back from permanently swallowing The Really Big Lies, too:  truth serum, hypnotic therapy, anti-psychotic medications, cult deprogramming methodologies, and so on.  Sometimes, even logic comes bubbling up to the surface in the drowning and airless front lines of public thought and reason, but not often.

Usually, we ask fire to fight fire, and ramp up to meet the lathering blather of the moment.  But, really, we are free to choose our own weapons in any exchange of ideas, or in any attempt to highlight the utter nonsense of arguments presented to us as reasoned and reasonable notions.

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• Yes:  The arrow chosen from the quiver depends on the nature of the foe, as well as the nature of the archer.  The nature of tool selection also depends upon the archer being somewhat conscious:   Back-fires seldom start themselves in helpful spots, no more than games of pin-the-tail-on-the-non-denominational-animal help locate murderers.
• Circumstances hardly ever favor long-term extremes of any kind.  (That all things in moderation quote you may have been fed along the path of life is not only a preface to healthy living precepts by our founders -- it's a principle of the universe, and is supported by that noticeable bulge in the bell curve of nearly any measure.)

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