Now that we know America is fractionally less crazy than we might have supposed before the election, we might ask ourselves what shall we do if the end of the world isn't just around the corner? Is preparing for an ongoing future more complicated, frustrating and (dare I say it?) taxing, than total annihilation? Will muddling through yet another decade and then another after that prove to be more than we can handle? It just might be the case.

Americans are "fed up". A term that has as many possible interpretations as there are cable channels. We're literally fed up with junk food, with TV commercials, with radio talk show hosts, with global warming, with traffic, with young know-nothings, with unemployment, with religious kooks, with the national debt and yes, we're even fed up with the Fed. We're so blotted with being fed up that we're all about to pop.

I understand that we are also fed up with Congress. Yet voters were barely able to shift any of them out of their well padded seats. How fed up would we have to get for that to happen? Perhaps it's beyond our puny power to deal with something as enormously immovable as that chronic body. Having gorged itself on unlimited campaign denaro, the endless rantings of goofball talk show hosts and inactivity, the Congressional body has become as bloated as the military budget and remains as disgustingly engorged, arrogant and uncooperative as Jabba the Hutt.

We know that most Americans who bother to consider it, don't agree with this do-nothing bunch, still, there they remain. But if we are going to carry on living here on Earth instead of crashing into some end-of-life-as-we-know-it, we're going to have to figure out how to motivate that immobile institution into something more than a sounding board for flaccid blowhards with about as much personal integrity as the paparazzi.