Still crazy

 The madness transfers. There's your unhappy thought on this second morning of our fresh-from-the-wrapper year.

We threw 2024 on the ash heap of history yesterday, but two days into 2025 it's the same old lunatic's ball, here in America. A cyber truck exploded outside a Trump property in Las Vegas on the first day of 2025. And in New Orleans, Notre Dame and Georgia are still waiting to play the Sugar Bowl because yet another crazy person decided it would be fun to ring in the New Year by taking a ride in his truck.

Right down Bourbon Street at 3:15 on the morning on January 1.

Right through and over the mass of revelers -- including, you have to think, more than a few Notre Dame and Georgia fans -- still partying the night away, because, what the hell, it was New Orleans and it was the New Year.

The death toll from Crazy Person's little excursion has now hit 15, with more than 30 injured. That doesn't include Crazy Person, who apparently had an ISIS flag flapping from his pickup's hitch and died in a shootout with police when he climbed out of his truck with a gun (of course, this being America) and started blazing away.

The dead Crazy Person was identified as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, who hailed from Texas. He was a U.S. citizen and Army veteran, so at least the MAGAs can't whip up more nativist paranoia about dangerous illegals coming here by the hundreds of thousands solely to rape, kill and pillage.

In this case, the feds are classifying the attack as an act of terror, given Jabbar's ISIS flag and the discovery of several "improvised explosive devices" found at the scene. The latter, presumably, is what mainly prompted Sugar Bowl officials to postpone the game until today.

And in the meantime ...

In the meantime, welcome to the new year, same as the old year. Same madness. Same violence. Same resentment and irrational fury -- and all of it stoked by the usual lies and half-truths from the usual snake-oil salesmen and charlatans, operating from the usual divide-and-conquer playbook.

It's tempting to say these days there is more of this than ever, but that is captive-of-the-moment stuff. Religious and cultural fanaticism, after all, have always been with us. Murderous insanity, too. And the fear-mongering rhetoric about diseased and lawless immigrants "poisoning the blood of America" (as our president-elect so charmingly put it) is as old as the republic itself.

Go back to the 1840s, and the MAGAs of their time were saying the same things about the Irish, who were going to turn America over to the Pope. And then the Germans with their radical ideologies. And then the alien Chinese ... and the bomb-throwing anarchists from Eastern Europe ... and the criminal Italians ... and right on up to the Muslims and pet-eating Haitians and murderous Venezuelan drug cartels coming here to poison our children with fentanyl.

Of a piece, all of it. And (one more unhappy thought) it's likely to get worse before it gets better, because on January 20 one of the fear-mongering snake-oil salesmen brings his own pack of Crazy Persons to Washington for the next four years.

Let's be clear here: This in no way is to equate them with the Crazy Person who ran down Bourbon Street partiers in the wee hours yesterday.  That sort of madness is wholly separate from the madness about to descend upon us. The former is true psychopathy; the latter, merely policy.

America is a great nation, but like all great nations it was built on bloody conquest in pursuit of that greatness. Regrettably, that has translated for a certain segment of humanity to a might-makes-right theology, and the notion that violence for righteousness' sake is a noble thing. 

Righteousness, of course, being defined by whoever chooses to define it.

At one end of the spectrum, the guy who posted an interwhosis rendering of Donald Trump above the message it was time to "kick some ass".

At the other, a certain Crazy Person from Texas, three hours into a New Year that's not so new, driving onto a sidewalk in a pickup to kill as many people as possible.