SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

  Over in that parallel universe next door where plastic bags have disappeared and there is no road rage....Cats can be trained and wars end in a tie....the sunlight is not melting Greenland - or at least Miami is in no danger of sinking irretrievably like some forlorn Venice of the eastern Atlantic... People are moving in droves to the Dakotas - and short-wave radios are more popular than cell phones...Taxi drivers prefer classical music to anything written after 1953...Gambling still occurs but on camping trips - not in large casinos....Ice cream is still popular....Jeans are in fashion... And democracy or something like it exists - but without all the fanfare and media coverage...not as much hand-wringing and worries about impending malaise...I envision something in many respects similar to what we find here with some necessary adjustments - a still-functioning power grid, mom-and-pop convenience stores, verdant farm land, forests and reservoirs not-so-starved of water...But more of

 The over-zealous activist had a litany of complaints...beginning with the usual local thorns in everyone's side... for starters, she said, the schools are failing our children... In this enlightened age, mind you, behold the outdated curriculum,  the dog-eared books, such systemic favoritism of a dying and whitewashed canon, those incorrigible teachers and their obstinate clinging to the familiar,  a dearth of sustainable classrooms,  low morale, weather-beaten, dim, dank compromised interiors,  a broken district's unacceptable inadequate funding, a declining tax base - full of childless tax-payers who are fed up paying for other people's kids - unconscious intentional bias directed toward marginal outlier populations...a lack of understanding, a lack of sensitivity in a city distracted city by homelessness and food insecurity, rising rents, zoning restrictions, housing prices, too many condos and not enough homes, free cannabis (a boon?) and lax standards for industrial h

 "For more than a century and a half, everything that has been understood in a more intellectual sense by politics goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and he is the father of democracy because he is the father of the political spirit itself, of political humanity. I met this New Passion, then as democracy , as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness . I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of every ethos ; its aggressiveness and doctrinaire intolerance consisted - I experienced them personally - in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. "Mankind" as humanitarian internationalism: "reason" and "virtue" as the radical republic: intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the serve of social "desirability"; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a speci

 Politics today saturated with ideology....The ideologue believes in political solutions, changing the world fundamentally, overhauling the system, being on the right side of history, choosing progress, overcoming the nightmarish past... The activist mindset demands that people take sides on an infinite variety of issues - the underlying assumption being that one side contains the makings of a total solution - whereas resistance to "enlightenment and progress" augurs only backwardness and ignorance...Resistance, as such, of course can turn into a series of counter-moves with the same underlying assumptions about the omnipotence of the political...Draining the swamp is a rear-guard reaction to progressive promises. But at some point - usually in the midst of swinging wildly toward one side of the pendulum - we all bump up against the - terra incognita - the inscrutable aspect of reality - the underlying complexities which compound all political busybodies...This in itself shou