“The world’s humor, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilization. Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of today that fade into nothingness tomorrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed, we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels of their childhood.
And here, in its larger aspect, humor is blended with pathos till the two are one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.”
Stephen Leacock
I live in northern New Hampshire, where every town that isn’t a ski resort is dead. They were pleasant, sleepy places in genteel decline 20 years ago. Now they’re hollowed out by heroin and meth, and offering no economic opportunity beyond casual shifts at the KwikkiKrap. And when you listen to the Dems they’re worried about micro-aggressions and transphobia and when you listen to Congressional Republicans they’re talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The two-party one-party state has nothing to say to tens of millions of Americans. -Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/7457/notes-after-new-hampshire