My father owned a house on a golf course and at night we would sit on his patio.   If we were chatty enough to let it get late there sometimes sounded a helluva riot in the near or far distance.  The coyotes had found prey and were wildly shrieking at a potential kill.  It always sounded like a pack of drunks to me.

It sounded like mass hysteria.

And I suppose we all catch that for better or for worse once in a while.  Maybe the fever broke upon men like my dad when they were off fighting a terrible enemy on two fronts, but somehow I believe the horror surrounding those men sobered them up beyond unimpaired; like having a blood alcohol of minus .08.

Upon JFK’s shooting a dash of mass hysteria was evidenced by an initial blame placed on people of the John Birch Society type, but then the real guy was unveiled as just some loony leftist in love with the Soviet Union and its brand of socialism.  The remnant strain of this hysteria lives on in famous movies made by famous nut jobs; the left has never forgiven the right for not shooting JFK.

Race riots might be an example of mass hysteria brought on by soft tyranny. You keep a people tightly leashed to a meager subsistence with assurance that society’s deck is eternally stacked against them while further insuring that field stays uneven by providing atrocious public education to their children, and some of those people might fly off the handle once in a while.  As the smoke diminishes and the cameras lose interest, the do-gooders return to showering the root problem with spiritually malignant benevolence.  The left is knowingly indifferent to the torn-apart families and shreds of human dignity strewn about the street corner where good intention intersects bad result. 

I was very busy in the 1980s but I seem to remember several years of mass hysteria concerning day-care facilities and sexual abuse.  At the time a large wave of women left their children at home and could be heard roaring onto taxpayer rolls in numbers too big for the government to ignore.  The mass guilt must have been awe-inspiring; I recall any large number of innocents standing accused with a late 20^th century America version of Hester Prynne’s “A” for Abuser stamped upon their heads.  The ensuing frenzy devoured the accused and tore apart their lives.  As it turned out not much was really going on, but by then a pre-Twitter mob of coyotes had left more than some evidence of their destructive path for later generations to mimic.

Mass hysteria feeds on mass hysteria.  This impression began taking root on November 9^th, 2016.  Democrats and the press simply went full mook on us that day and continue to spiral more and more out of orbit: Donald Trump will ban all homosexuals.  Donald Trump will ban all abortions.  Donald Trump will place chains upon all brown people and all Muslims.  Donald Trump will reach out and grab every pussy hat from the head of every pussy hat-wearing woman reaching back ten centuries. Donald Trump will declare himself President for Life before the 2020 election.  Donald Trump will declare himself President for Life if he loses the 2020 election.  Donald Trump will, Donald Trump will, Donald Trump will…

The problem is that he will never do any of those things.  Even the loudest, most stark raving mad frenzy-driven mass hysteric knows Donald Trump will never do those things.  It’s all Pavlov to the left -- there’s no food in the bowl but ring the bell loud enough and all the mongrels will salivate on cue, online both online and on “The Rachel Maddow Show.” (I’m not certain what that program, a strange muddle of facial tics augmented by little boy glasses suggesting Groucho Marx, is called.  The reader is free to search, if so inclined.)

This frenzy is not based upon any reality known to the universe.  Everybody knows Donald Trump is never going to do any of those dreadful things.  Who would let him?  Absolutely no one.  This model of crazy is what happened upon Trump’s election.  The left momentarily lost power and suddenly Donald Trump blew up to the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float and began to bang around in the cavernous skulls of attention hounds who need a lot of drama in their lives; those who need clicks and viewers and voters. In short, those people overly susceptible to mass hysteria.

There are four instances where the electoral vote and popular vote went to different candidates: 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000.  1960 was close, really close.  I was five at the time and my best-bud Dave explained that Nixon had more votes but Kennedy had more steaks, or stakes; the bus was noisy that morning and to this day I’m not certain which.  It was my first dose of fake news.

But all of the 1960 pre-modern-America adults went along with the results as proscribed by the Constitution.  The law meant something, it bound us together.   I suppose that in 1960, America still recalled the horror of a war brought on by several nations sharing a mass hysteria.   America was having none of it.   Additionally, 1960 America probably didn’t contain as many lefty loons in love with Venezuela and its brand of socialism as it does today.

Did I mention that war has a way of sobering up folks?

Somebody should tell the Democrats that behaving like Midnight Coyotes for over two years is wearing on the self and on the body politic.  If they want to preserve the Constitution, they should trust it and abide by it instead of trying to tear it to pieces and devour it in a shared frenzy of mass hysteria.

I’d tell them, but they never stop howling hysterically long enough to get an authentic thought in edgewise.