We made it a joke because it became normal. The trials. The surgeries. The accusations. The scandals. Michael Jackson’s insanity stopped being insane to us and it turned us coarse and awful.

Yes, there are two types of public insanity. There are the breakdowns. Amanda Bynes. Charlie Sheen. Britney Spears. Eruptions of paranoia or mania or rage that spill into view and elicit a balance of concern, scorn, judgment, pity. We don’t handle these moments well, let’s not kid ourselves, but never do these events fade into the scenery. We see it and we point to it. That is broken. That person needs help. This can’t go on.

But then there is the more insidious crazy. The slow-boil crazy. The Michael Jackson crazy. The crazy that we accept as routine, that changes so slowly that we fail to recognize when we have accepted what should be appalling, when we have desensitized ourselves to something dark and horrible: when we have become insane ourselves.

The same happens in our politics. There are of course the psychotic breaks. Fits of idiocy, depravity, zeal. When a president takes advantage of an intern in the Oval Office or makes false claims about enriched uranium in the State of the Union. When a block of cash is found in the freezer of a congressman or the Supreme Court stops a vote count and says, “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.”

These are events that stop us in our tracks. But the stopping matters. The stopping saves us from ourselves. Then there is the other crazy, the crazy that creeps up on you, like a messy house that fills with junk until one day you’re a hoarder.

The proliferation of horserace political coverage is of this brand of lunacy, where the presumption is that a political act will be described on the basis of how it will be perceived, and this in turn determines how it is perceived because it’s the only way it can be perceived. “Will the president’s statement hurt him?” Yes, if the coverage asks that question, as the question about the hurt is the hurt, which is how we know it hurts.

There are more serious examples we can argue about. The way campaigns are financed. The expansion of presidential power. The size of our prison system. Yes, there are those who get angry about all this. “Hello? This is crazy, right? Anyone?” But eventually we all just go back to looking at our phones.

And then the government shuts down.

It happened slowly, didn’t it? The change in the Republican Party? I don’t know. Maybe it’s nostalgia. There have always been the wild, vicious voices of the right. The devil on the shoulder of the conservative movement that whispers in its ear, “burn it down, burn it down.” But those voices were to be ignored, humored, tolerated, placated, or just deceived. That was the way of things, and we were protected by the obvious: people who believe foolish things tend to be easy to fool.