All signs point to Rome. With the Democratic Party resurrection, lifted by the joy and excitement of Kamala Harris, the gloom was gone. We have to be grateful for the fact that in the face of trailing polls, it dawned on them that the existential threat of Donald Trump trumped any and all arguments to the contrary. But act the underdog as good strategy. The younger disaffected wing is returning, so the pundits say. Less or nothing is taken for granted. Fate is in our hands. Harris was more than ready to step up.

It all sounds very Pollyannish, but illustrates how circumstances can alter our feelings of despair. We have to believe. Trump is now tilting at windmills, but Don Quixote is down at the tavern. He was chasing an ideal, Trump is chasing his navel. Quixote had a heart; you-know-who obliterates, has only self-pity. But none of this is news. The news is about us, how we think and act.

Our survival is determined by our creative abilities and freedoms. But principle determines how we use of them. Art without self-defined principles and technique is a mess, not art. Seeing the world through the lens of art expands our ability to be compassionate, pursue a search that expands and glorifies. Sometimes it’s messy, sometimes neat, but it’s always a challenge. We are better, wiser, more inclusive because of it.

That said, politics and art have always been strange bedfellows. Each with its own values and priorities. Artists know that in art lies salvation, whereas politicians appropriate art when convenient or useful. Remember socialist art? It was shackled to ideas. Irony was removed and replaced with certainty.

Technology is replacing irony, which becomes superfluous. Irony shines a light on our actions; suddenly we’re more aware of ourselves and our circumstances. Technology focuses on order, solutions, and constructs. Even the creative aspects seem sterile compared to the warmth or confusion of human perceptions and errors. We learn from them. They are always real. The more technology and its catalyzing power takes over culture, the more desensitized we become often to our own best interests.

Materially we’ve advanced, physically we’re struggling, and psychologically we’ve become more insular in spite of electronic connection.

There’s something tangible about being in person rather than online. It’s easy for people online to voice opinions without a person next to them who may immediately disagree or have other views. We’re separate in a fundamental way. It’s the communications themselves that have changed. A lot of this is very positive when used in a conscious manner. A lot gets done. We’re in a hurry anyway. People who can are traveling much more and more exposed to wider cultures. We’re in the information age.

Yet it’s allowed figures like Trump and J.D.Vance to devour our sensibilities. They are disposable effigies of basic instincts surviving by any means, and their public, already numbed by media and hyperbole, have given up mental participation in favor of the mountebank act in the sideshow. There, they always sold something useless to cure insomnia, or heartache, twisting the subconscious into frenzied acceptance.

Why do we follow things that are not serving our best interests? Remember the old strip Lil’ Abner? Al Capp was a social satirist at heart with hillbilly characters that framed the world around a central everyman of the hills. We loved the strange take on a side of American culture we were out of touch with mostly. Moonbeam McSwine, Daisy Mae, Joe Bptfsplk chased by a raincloud, and Nightmare Alice. But Capp went after the hippies’ antiwar movement and made gratuitous mockery of “Phony Joanie” Baez.

The black and white world of the 20th century has no analogy in the fractured uncertainties of today. We’ve been left to our own devices, and that means that the rules become fungible in people’s minds. The rules-based order is being dismantled with ideologues like Steve Bannon and Co. “Creative Destruction” a la Project 2025, which obliterates the progress of the last 50 years. Trump hasn’t “read” it, so he says. The French say n’amporte quoi — or it doesn’t matter what. That should be their slogan. Forget the small print. Why read any print? Just keep waving.

But times have changed. Daylight shines through. I think the country is slowly waking up to the chaos and is fed up with it, impatient as the looming threat of a second Trump presidency lingers. Trumpists all long to cast off the lines and let their fantasies drift out to sea; there’s an area of no thought just over the horizon. Kamala tells us who we are, have been, and what we could be.

Shelburne Falls resident Alan Harris and family support all things positive. Fifty-one years going strong together.