WASHINGTON — Friends, readers, countrypeople: Sanity won over insanity — only just — as we hurtled toward financial chaos.

Doing time in the white-domed funhouse here in Washington is making me see that things are really not what they used to be. Even government shutdowns had more lift and cheer in the Bill Clinton years, not as devastating as our October standoff.

At first, the world watched as the inmates took over the asylum on the House side of the Capitol dome. Lesson learned: Just a few can drive the place round the bend. Contagion festers in close quarters.

On the other side of the rotunda, the Senate leaders, Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) found a way out of this place with a debt deal that passed 81-18 in a clean Democratic victory.

Everybody still walking around after the latest shell game, including the Capitol police working without pay, looked exhausted. The stately Senate side, my refuge of sanity, was brought to the brink. The shutdown of 2013, the most avoidable $20 billion crisis in American history, was barely saved by the Senate at the end of a scary descent.

As Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) put it on the floor, "Why hit yourself in the head with a brick?"

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) called the two-week experience "an agonizing odyssey." He was locked up in the Hanoi Hilton as a prisoner of war, so he knows.

Forty House tea party Republicans, elected in 2010, incited by one shameless freshman senator, Texas Republican Ted Cruz, almost blew the top off. That's how the Capitol looked, unfinished, during the Civil War. But Cruz is not the worst doer.

Until the midnight hour, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) failed to let the whole House vote, or "work its will" to avert a shutdown and default. If he had done that, the 200 House Democrats, with sane Republicans, would have halted the tea party's hold-up of the federal government.

They are strangers, mostly from the South and a few from Kansas. They are white and angry at Obamacare — or is it President Obama himself that makes them so mad? Corporate America paid their way, but can't control them. Now they have Congress and the country mad as hatters at them.

Hours before the Treasury's Thursday default deadline, the Senate did what George Washington said it should do, act as a saucer to cool the House's hot tea. How's that for psychic? Washington was the smartest guy under the dome day and night this crazy week. Just between us, his portrait told me he's disgusted with the current tea party. He didn't fight the Revolution for this tomfoolery with the nation's full faith and credit. Alexander Hamilton, his bright right-hand man and the first Treasury secretary, shared Washington's wrath. Yes, I too was bitten by the bug, talking with ghosts.

Oh, l often travel to that other country, the past. Many of my favorite things seemed doomed in 21st-century everyday life. Small consolations, like cream in my coffee. Two of my favorite cafes just give milk, no cream. Come on. I'd kill for a handwritten thank-you note. I'd also like to see a child riding a bike or walking to school solo, to remind me of the old days.

The Senate was one of my favorite places in the 1990s. The late Sen. Robert C. Byrd gave me a volume of famous speeches delivered on the floor. The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy bellowed on the floor like an opera singer, passing major legislation like second nature. I miss these giants.

But Reid — a Capitol policeman in his younger days — patrolled his side of the marble halls like Dodge City. The steely Reid told Obama what to do. He calmly rounded up his caucus like a champ, never flinching in the face of fire. Inmates from the other side of the dome don't get out much. Little did they know, they didn't have a chance against him.

The thank-you note is in the mail.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com