I'm Still Not Convinced

      Current events -- recent events, since, say, 2015 or so -- continue to leave me wondering if it's not all some long, detailed and horrible hallucination I'm having to live through.  Or perhaps I'm dead and the next life is particularly cruel.  It's too awful to be real.

      Of course, this is an inevitable consequence of living in an age of powerful social media and cult-of-personality leaders.  The run-up to WW II gave us plenty of hard times and Mussolini, FDR, Stalin, Hitler and Churchill, each one larger-than-life, each one living in his own legend.  Modern mass and social media are to the media and following those men had as an H-bomb is to a stick of dynamite -- and a giant personality that defines "truth" as "whatever best suits him at the moment" is even more corrosive now than it has ever been.

      Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump in particular are a "Shiri's Scissor" to Western Civilization.  I don't know what's going to be left when the snipping slows and stops.  I suspect nobody's going to like it much, even the people who are eagerly anticipating sweeping change.