A madman has moved into our lives. How soon will he disappear?

A madman has moved into our lives. How soon will he disappear?

I suppose it’s necessary for every boy to horrify his father, swagger, read trash, listen to deafening music, get ugly tattoos, but it doesn’t lead to much that’s worth the trouble, whereas learning a useful trade — carpentry, math, raising tomatoes, baking bread, reporting, cleaning hotel rooms — leads you out into the world beyond your ego and into unexpected friendships and discoveries, valuable experiences, an enduring respect for laws and limits and for the energy of optimism, and eventually you can learn to be a good person.

This is common wisdom, shared by stubborn conservatives and airy liberals alike, and no wonder we are all fascinated by the raging alien who is president of the United States. The smirk, the scowl, the New Yawk con-man talk — so-and-so is a “great, great guy,” it was a “beautiful meeting,” the “incredible support,” “fantastic,” “unbelievable” — the compulsive bragging, the inability to admit mistakes, the blindness to ethics. What is this jerk doing in the White House? How soon will he disappear?

Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality.

Source: How did we get here anyway? – The Washington Post