Impeachment Inquiry

The problem with the national politicial situation isn't so much the intransigence between Democrats and Republicans, it's that the national political situaton is now unbelievable from all political viewpoints.

There was once in the US, not that long ago, the popular, consensual left/right way of looking at the world--everything's for us--and the unpopular--everything's against us--with the Republicans occupying the everything's for us position and the Democrats the everything's against us position. It was agreed between the two parties that every few years, no less than four years and no more than eight, these positions would be switched, with the Democrats occupying the everything's for us position and Republicans the everything's against us position so that a narrative might be maintained that we the people are living in a functioning democracy.

The narrative sustained the nation for many years, through wars, depressions and recessions, moon landings, red tides, the lengthening of the Major League Baseball seaon, right up to the time of the school shootings; then the narrative started to sound like the voice of a Senator from Kentucky and a former Congressman from Georgia. Both gentlemen promoted the wresting of control from the common sense of the people and giving it instead to The Supreme Court, Fox News, Citibank, et.al. in the guise of bestowing upon the states more rights than the federal government. And many of us bought it, tuning into our preferred channels of news distribution, comparing the voice of Obama to the voice of Trump, the opinion section of The New York Times to Breitbart News, listening to the galaxy of internet content offering free pizza and beer to anyone believing in the conspiracy theory de jour...so that both Democrats and Republicans became confused, addled, addicted, susceptible to being disbelievers in the institutional narrative far often than they become believers.

The narrative's now fully distended, a balloon that's been filled up far beyond its legal capacity but one that just keeps expanding despite the consumer warning on the cellophane bag the balloons come packaged in.

Balloon, such a beautiful word! So beautiful it sounds Greek.

What would the Greeks do now? Keep pushing clear thinking as a path to actual culture? Culture has always been a dream, (or has it?), since the Greeks dropped it on us and the Romans went on to make something different.