Point of View: Mad, Damn Mad

    I don’t understand why there has been all this brouhaha having to do with deficit reduction. Simply make the people who have benefited from the fiscal handouts in the past 30 or so years pay their fair share. That’s not Communism — it’s equity.

    Mary wondered recently whether I ever got mad. Well I did, I said, especially when my tennis partner the other night called me off a ball near the net that was clearly mine, I being at the time closest to it. “First to the ball,” I said, “that’s an unwritten rule of doubles!” I was fuming, really furious.

    If I could translate that dudgeon into national and international — not to mention local — affairs I would be a virtual firebrand, and in a state every day, losing sleep because of the transmogrification into dreams of the plaints of my waking hours.

    But then I wouldn’t be a card-carrying WASP.

    (Confession: As it is, I do get up at 3 a.m. to pee, though without the angst.)

    The French side of my family used to call me Morpheus, and it is true that even to this day I am quasi-narcoleptic, drifting off while reading, while watching TV, while at my wooooooord process.................

    But to the point at hand: I could begin with overassessment and the coddling of south-of-the-highway denizens, and then segue into executive pay, gun-running and the absurd availability of semiautomatic weapons, nuclear power, nuclear proliferation, the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, the scapegoating of teachers (long live whatever unions that are left), the war against Planned Parenthood, the packing of prisons, foreign policy overreach, the tyranny of health insurance companies, deficit obsession at the expense of jobs, the worship of false gods, xenophobia, quackery of all sorts, bloviating of all sorts, the plague of social media, swine flu, staph infections, plate tectonics, and overwriting.

    There. I feel better, cleansed.

    Yes, there is plenty to be mad about to be sure. I’ve about got to the point where, with Peter Finch, I’m inclined to say, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”