This huge and confusing thing we call the United States of America is in the midst of a major epochal reality check, not your usual, garden-variety recession. The roots of today's crises go back at least 60 years or more.
Politics in such a crisis state is naturally volatile, swinging this way, then that way, affected by fear and pride and all the usual human emotions. Like the stock market, electoral politics operates with rapid, shifting en-mass movements like a school of little fish into which one throws a rock.
At times like these, it's interesting to look at what's not being said the large elephants in the room going unrecognized. To talk about these things would take courage, self-awareness and humility, like the hard stuff shrinks and counselors try to get troubled patients to look at.
In our current climate of fear, courage is too often translated into military bravery and the capacity to do violence, and humility is virtually against the law, on par with being a "socialist," a "communist" or a "terrorist." Or else humility is seen as what the Tea Party has just done to the Democrats, which is humiliation.
So now we have the Tea Party Election. Right wing politicos and pundits are feeling their oats and talking like they've just won the Civil War, but this time the South won.
What we tend to forget in these moments, exactly what Barack Obama's overrated ascendancy to power two years ago has proved, political delusion is a temporary and vulnerable condition.
In this back-slapping, self-congratulatory right-wing moment, let's not forget that an unforeseen rock or incident can send a school of little fish off again in a completely different direction.
Hopefully and this seems to be a long-shot President Obama will not read the midterm election as a call to cave in to the likes of ex-bartender John Boehner and the snake Mitch McConnell. Hopefully it will not incline the White House to pull a Bill Clinton and become "Republican lite" for the remainder of his term, although many think he's there already.
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