If anything can lighten the heart, it's this

Medical science has struggled for decades to find the best possible palliative for clinical depression. Some "anti's" on the market — the first, 1958 — have affected partial relief from nature's bio-chemical war waged on humankind since the first homo sapien was laid spiritually low by this then-unknown force of darkness and despair. Though Carl the Caveman mistook his depleted resources of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine for finger-wagging from the gods, followed by their demand that he stiffen a lip, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca haven't much improved on the paleolithic; they manufacture synthetic substitutes requiring synthetic substitutes to effect something akin to efficacy — maybe.

But hark, there be some splendiferous news. What medical science has failed to overcome on behalf of depressives everywhere, politics has proffered the synthetic human Donald Trump. This stumblebumming ignoramus of incompetence set the United States back four years once before; now he has accomplished same in mere months. Heavy is the melancholic head that wears the crown of schadenfreude, but to the millions of ignorant stumblebums who voted this idiot back into office we say, read 'em and weep. Read the polls and weep, you clowns, while we the otherwise downhearted lounge in uplift. Trump's Golden Age of America First has demonstrated with thundering speed precisely what his agenda of sheer malice so overtly promised: a nation ravaged. It's so bad, even the millionesque booboisie can no longer deny what's right in front of their noses.

Among reputable pollsters, not one single-digit "Disapprove."

Apart from the above mix there's one statistical outlier which, at first glance, appears outlandishly puzzling.

Yet Emerson's peculiarity is easily explained: The pollster surveyed equal portions of Trump/Harris voters. And, as is commonly true, the Lord of Idiots "still holds an entrenched base of voters who, if given the chance, say they would vote for him again" — that being the backstory of respondents giving thumbs up on his autocratic performance of macroeconomic stupidity so prodigious, it tortures the mind.

A last word, a note of clarification to friends online and off who have speculated to moi that my spirits have plunged in undeviating correlation with Trump plunging the U.S. into a shithole of a country. Au contraire.

When Richard Emperor Ming the Merciless Nixon was at last made to pack his bags, political columnists and cartoonists throughout the republic were downright disconsolate. They hated the bastard, but oh how they frolicked in the magnificent copy that he was. Without him, whatever would they do? That's when commentors bottomed out. Likewise, I suffered enormously writing about

George W. Bush's eight ghastly years, but I suffered with utter delight. Not once, if memory serves, did my emotional backbone weaken and collapse. He was terrific material, too soon replaced — damnit all — by presidential excellence.

Now we're encumbered, oppressed and daily spat on by a W³. Thus, as it was with Dick, then George, political commentators and cartoonists have never had it so good. In brief, given the bountiful gift of Donald J. Trump — He who is become death, destroyer of nations — my spirits should be soaring. For a while, they did. Regrettably, though, somewhere they took the wrong flight path. A course correction is being filed with Trump's FAA, assuming anyone is still there.