'Tis the time of the wild-eyed Bewilderbeast which is nearly upon us, boys and girls -- thick as broomstick'd witches on candy bags, heavy as depleted uranium foil strewn on scrawny, screw-together tannenbaums.
You know where we are, calendar-wise: It's that time of the year in which Life makes even less sense than usual, in an American post-Summer simmer and in a pre-sprung Spring. Here we are, the lull between the Equinoxes -- the seasonal gap between locked and unlocked, as Vonnegut's sense of season would have it. It is neither Fall nor Winter, more Hypnotic Lockdown than anything -- making it Hypdown or Locknotic, I suppose. Up to you.
We're in the No-Sanity Zone betwixt the tart, fictional, Slack-jawed, Sourpussed War on KrissMuss and the all-too-real, tempting jar of Trick-or-Treat Sweetmeats and Jaw-breaker Bribes.
We always worry and fear the wrong things here, in this country. Halloween has us cringing at thoughts of chain-saw killers and headless horsepersons -- but, right now, and all year long, there are headless Congresspersons taking chain-saws to national life support systems, and pulling the plug on keeping infrastructure alive.
Who knows? We might even vote another 40 or 50 times to repeal a starting effort at health care for citizens, at pointless costs of hundreds of millions of dollars. We might even focus another dozen empty and vacuous hearings, and another hundred thousand pounds of baseless rage, against women's health care. Or, maybe, Poe's pale blue eye of the Tell-Tale Heart, lately of the GOP, will descend its unseeing gaze on concerns of global climate change, and House Republicans will again chase science out of its Science Committees, hoping instead to place religion in all public classrooms, and Ten Commandment monoliths in every public space larger than a two-dollar bill.
Who knows what will happen when the ice-cold violin shrieks from Psycho start up again as marching soundtracks for the Republican faithful?
It's a strange season, all right. All quicksand and quicksilver.
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