Okay.  Amuse ourselves at such a thing as that National Review article — which I admit isn’t so bad as “bad angst poetry”, but it is… I don’t know what the point is.

We get overstatements on Obama’s 2008 speech rhetoric and then to…

It is not surprising to find people mistaking a man for a corn god, they have doing that since the beginning of time.
I don’t know who confused Obama for a corn god.  I’ll take the man’s word for it.
It is surprising to find them so insensible to their own natures, so snugly settled in their own complacencies, that they are unconscious of how much primitive darkness lies concealed beneath the fragile surface of their civilized selves .
I’d have to accept the premise of the corn god concept in order to accept this.
The same impulses that are exalted  the shaman and the witch doctor, the prophet, and the priest, king… etc.  oracles of Gallup, etc.  Nate Silver, blah de blah.
There’s a “speak for yourself” aspect to his blah de blah on opinion polls, which article after article in this magazine point over toward, and are… generally true… or truish… for trendlines and such.  As for Nate Silver… this became a conservative creed this season —  “Damned you Nate Silver”, and…
I have sometimes caught myself taking seriously even the artfully contrived hogwash of Nate Silver, who solemnly asserted the other day that President Obama has a “70.4 percent” chance of winning on November 6.  The prescision of the decimal point is a nice touch.
Doesn’t come by accident, though.  It’s a poll of polls and history put through a blender.  No, you ought not run around claiming it with… such precision.
We are less remote from our primitive ancestors than we like to think, and in some respects more deficient in self-knowledge.  The ghosts and goblins that haunted our forebears — the evil spirits they feared would lead them into temptation — were only aspects of their own natures that they personified as distinct beings.  In
Okay.  Follow this to the end and we get the statement that they knew their limits, and the voting public that brought us Obama doesn’t, and thus… his liberal policies and stuff… and his unawareness that raising the top marginal rate will destroy the corn seed and not raise any person’s standards of living … this may be the only policy statement in the article, and by and by at any rate…

According to a statistic published in the Telegraph, 26 percent of British workers have been diagnosed with depression.  The statistic is questionable.  When someone is said to be depressed today, it very often means only that he believes he ought to b e happier than mortal beings ordinarily are.  AE Houseman said that “the state of mankind always had been and always would be a state of just tolerable discomfort”.  But in an age of inflated expectations, what is normal has ceased to accord with what is tolerable.

Hm.  Follow the logic and we can proceed with any number of implications.

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