Stinky Cheese

The human tragedy and cataclysmic damage of devastating storms like Florence, Harvey and Maria are natural disasters that mercifully divert the news emphasis, just for a while, from the unnatural disaster that is the American political system. I don't wish to be flippant about tragic and costly storms, so I'll spare you the glib analogies, other than to describe an American society that is being overwhelmed by floods of distrust.

The destruction is not just the result of one man -- that is, the demagogic, grossly incapable Donald Trump. Instead, it's an accumulation over the decades of amoral...