Consumer-itis seems to become more acute with each passing year, infecting even our relationships. We quantify other people as we would any commodity, making them into things, not quite human. She’s not this enough; he’s not all that. Indulging and gratifying ourselves, instantly and without reserve, we’re no longer subject to the traditional inoculations of conscience — shame, embarrassment and fear. We never judge because this would be to suggest objective standards in a subjective world of relativity.

Alas, even our national feast day is a contrivance of mindless gorging, a mere appetizer to the galloping consumption to follow thanks to the greatest marketing scam on Earth. Celebrants seem impervious to irony as they buy massive quantities of stuff to celebrate the birth of a Savior who had and wanted nothing.

This is the table we’ve set and to which we’ve invited Trump, an extreme businessman who speaks in extreme language about extreme solutions for an angry world endangered by extremists. If you spot a pattern of dots here, they might be worth connecting.