Tales of perdition and destruction

Our country's politically disturbing situation today has impelled me to hark back to this cautionary essay that I wrote in the early 2000s bewailing our tendency as a people "to consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but terribly bad decisions that make life so miserable for many of us."

IN the engineering discipline, there's this thing they call the strength of materials, or the ability of substances to withstand stress and strain. The maximum stress a material can sustain and still be able to return to its original form is called the elastic limit, and engineers designing structures — bridges and buildings, for instance — savagely subject them to forces beyond their ultimate strengths. For safety's sake, they have models of the structures "tested to destruction."