You eat Chinese with a close friend, discuss the modalities of his purchase of a townhouse, and end the meal by breaking open a fortune cookie which gives you this forecast (for the year ahead hopefully, for you do need all the friends you have got and some):

"You will have many friends when you need them"

Meanwhile, an ex-dictator (and the former best friend of a (now only) superpower) is being readied for execution elsewhere, all of which is breathlessly covered live on network TV (you wonder if the same thing would have happened at the Numerberg Trials?). Death as a spectacle is the default state of the air waves; it now happens all the time, and if they can show it live, they will.

Approximately, 53,000 bodies are piling up there and here as you write this; in this pile of bodies, one can only be sure of those last 3000 or so bodies because they belong to "US", and one can only be sure that most of these will be buried with tears, bluges, pomp, flags and quick forgetting; the rest 50,000 bodies are, well, collateral damage, or offerings to Mars, the god of war, or loose change, or something like that. Let's not bother you with the details of each of those lives.

So in such a dark time, in which you open a fortune cookie to the music of executions, even the eye should find it hard to see as it becomes hard to tell who is a hero, who a fool, who an innocent, who a judge, who an executionr, who sane, and who mad:

"What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have."*

*From Theodore Roethke’s "In A Dark Time"