THE ZONE OF REASON. I see the estimable Kevin Drum has caught on to Josh Marshall's epochal "Practice to Deceive" article.

This seems a point at which all of us in the Zone of Reason can congregate. I often think of Drum as one of those wimpy liberals, like the Presidente in Viva Zapata! who goes to a secret meeting with the opposition leader and, while getting mowed down by a hail of bullets, cries, "What you do is wrong!" But as the situation grows more dire, I find myself increasingly identifying with his reasonable-but-doomed tone -- like the guys at the end of Vonnegut's "Player Piano," who resist the new fascism "for the record" alone, without any hope that it will affect anything but, with luck, some future generation that might bother to read that record.

Because the country seems, at present, nuts. Yesterday's NYT Business section (the Times' business section is often most interesting on Saturday) carried a story called "In Their Hummers, Right Beside Uncle Sam." It carried testimonials from workaday jackasses who think the fact that they bought themselves expensive military vehicles to drive around their hometown streets connects them in some way with the war effort. "I'm proud of my country," says one such clown, "and I'm proud to be driving a product that is making a significant contribution." Quoth other Humdaddies: "Those who deface a Hummer in word or deed deface the American flag and what it stands for" and "The Hummer is a car in uniform. Right now we are in a time of uncertainty, and people like strong brands with basic emotions."

To explain what is grotesquely inappropriate about the civilian use of military vehicles on suburban streets is not worth the bother. I have acquired a certain patience from teaching remedial English, because I understand that need, as schools no longer do their job in that regard. But the guys in the Times article, who clearly never absorbed common sense from their parents, are in my view beyond remediation. They would, in a perfect world, be committed to institutions that would patiently instruct them in the fundamental values of human society. But in our imperfect world, these madmen are not a pathetic subset, but exemplars of their age. The only madhouse big enough for them is America.

The only comfort I can find is from Peter Boyle in Taxi Driver: "We're all fucked -- more or less." In some ways I'm as insane as these guys. I love big American things, too: outsized power chords, breasts, public monuments, and ambitions. But I never thought these were objective correlatives to patriotism. I never thought America was great because it was big. I thought it was big because it was great.

Someone's got it backwards. I don't think it's me.