It’s become pretty clear that writing about Wayne Gretzky leads you down a path to indecipherable gibbering, so it is with some trepidation that I take up the pen here. I’m not totally kidding about this, either. We are living in a period of uncertain length in which it has become disreputable to remain wholly rational about politics — one of those occasional frenzies that beset the human race, like McCarthyism or Europe in August 1914, and which are inherently difficult to comprehend in retrospect, even by the participants.