The historian Barbara Tuchman had a rule, which I think might have been paraphrased by Alfred A. Knopf... but it is: Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. The paraphrased version is: The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold (or any figure the reader would care to supply). At any rate, my generalized reading of it is: Crazy times don't seem so crazy to the people in them. I think we are in those kind of times. Technology is revealing possibilities faster than our social structures can adapt. I think these will be recorded as very extraordinary times.