All of this just seems too unreal to take seriously

See this is why I try to stay focused on the local doings nowadays.  All that requires a person to wrap one's mind around is exploding cranes, sewer cars, weekly boil orders, the occasional jaguar rampage, you know, normal stuff.  The national politics, on the other hand, I am convinced is not real. How can anyone take any of this seriously?

Everyone is foreign scum these days. Democrats spent three years trying to prove Donald Trump is a Russian pawn. Mitch McConnell is “Moscow Mitch.” Third party candidates are a Russian plot. The Bernie Sanders movement is not just a wasteland of racist and misogynist “Bros,” but — according to intelligence agencies and mainstream pundits alike — the beneficiary of an ambitious Russian plot to “stoke the divide” within the Democratic Party. The Joe Rogan independents attracted to the mild antiwar message of Tulsi Gabbard are likewise traitors and dupes for the Kremlin.

If you’re keeping score, that’s pretty much the whole spectrum of American political thought, excepting MSNBC Democrats. What a coincidence!

But people do. People take all of this bizarre Tom Clancy novel stuff constructed by cable news fantasists to be the actual meat of our national political debate.  Meanwhile poor people all over this country are living isolated lives. Left behind by a hostile ownership class, Americans find themselves without adequate housing, medical care, or any sustainable means of supporting themselves. And yet our politics is dominated by the nightly MSNBC hunt for imaginary Russian sleeper agents. Whenever I feel obliged to say anything about it at all what I want to say is it depresses and exhausts me.

Please just let me drive straight into the nearest flooded out underpass.  That, I can understand.