Dysfunctional Politics--or the Waukesha County Bus

This brief 'graf from G K Chesterton is instructive, and it also speaks to those (on WISN Radio, folks) who curse the Wauksha County subsidization of a bus which allows people from Milwaukee to earn a living in Waukesha County.

THE lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is a man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision. Hence the more clearly we see the world divided into Saxons and non-Saxons, into our splendid selves and the rest, the more certain we may be that we are slowly and quietly going mad. The more plain and satisfying our state appears, the more we may know that we are living in an unreal world.

For the real world is not satisfying. The more clear become the colours and facts of Anglo-Saxon superiority, the more surely we may know we are in a dream. For the real world is not clear or plain.

The real world is full of bracing bewilderments and brutal surprises. Comfort is the blessing and the curse of the English, and of Americans of the Pogram type also. With them it is a loud comfort, a wild comfort, a screaming and capering comfort; but comfort at bottom still.

For there is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

---From an Essay on Charles Dickens

Worth remembering.