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I was chatting with a work friend earlier today, and she said something along the lines of “Don’t talk to me about politics! Did you hear that Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed?”

On the first point, she sounds just like me. And I keep being excessively irritable with folks when they try to talk to me about what’s happening in Washington — and not only Washington, since it regularly erupts and spills out upon the rest of the world, like a volcano emerging through a septic tank. “No, I’m not following that,” I say. “So please stop bringing it up.” I don’t mean to hurt feelings on the point, but sometimes that reaction on my part just bursts out like… well, like a volcano emerging, etc.

But I don’t ignore it entirely. And as to my friend’s second point, yes, I’m aware of the Tulsi development, I and said what I had to say about it yesterday when it happened:

Dang. Another one of those headlines from The Onion has shown up on my Boston Globe feed… https://t.co/Z1qSrr8naR

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) February 12, 2025

I almost started airing to my friend my complaint that I never expected to live my senior years on the Bizarro World, but then I realized I might have to explain about Superman comics, and not everyone is into comics, and some who are into comics turn their noses up at DC (or at least at Silver Age DC, which is my frame of reference). In other words, I held back upon the verge of one of my conversational digressions, because this had at least started out as a work conversation.

However, digressions are what the blog is for.

Nevertheless, we don’t have to talk any further about the Bizarros — although comments on the topic from y’all are welcome. I’ve moved on.

Let’s talk about the multiverse.

In a moment, that is. First, a digression from the digression… I was watching a bit of light entertainment after dinner last night, before my wife came in and, after politely watching with me for a few moments, suggested something more serious. (The serious thing was very good, by the way, and I recommend it. Look for “Housewife, 49” on Prime.)

Back to the silliness — there was an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” in which Leonard went on Ira Flatow’s radio show and spoke a little too frankly about how the field of physics wasn’t making much (or any) progress on anything world-shaking, despite the billions he and his colleagues were spending. Everyone — especially the development people at his university — got really mad at him. So did Sheldon, but then Sheldon started scribbling on whiteboards about dark matter, super-symmetry and such, and realized theoretical physics really wasn’t making any progress, and then both of our heroes got depressed, and then drunk on some Romulan booze one of them had bought at a comic-con.

This brings me to the multiverse, a theory that we now see being proven to us hundreds, if not thousands, of times daily. In fact, incidents proving the existence of the multiverse are exploding around us in numbers that rival the uncountable number of theoretical universes.

There’s no need to go deeply into quantum mechanics on this. There are (fittingly) multiple ways of thinking about the multiverse, and what it seems like we’re seeing now is the phenomenon in which you’re in one universe that branches off and leads to another — or multiple others. (And don’t lecture me and explain that’s not the way the multiverse works, because no one knows, and I seriously doubt you understand the theory any better than I do. Remember, the cat is both dead and alive…)

In other words, for all our lives we were living in the same universe as Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts and the rest, and this grand experiment in having a republic that functions well in spite of the manifold sins and failings of mankind was working beautifully. There were strains upon it, which we could enumerate in yet another maddening digression, but then BANG! We suddenly, in 2016, found ourselves in a different universe where none of that good stuff worked anymore.

The strains that caused this split had been building for some time, of course. But 2016 was when it really went, as I say, bang. While, for instance, such dangerous phenomena as (to give just one example among many) the new practice of allotting delegates by way of primaries rather than conventions had been eviscerating our political parties since at least 1972, the universe in which a place like the United States of America could thrive was still possible. We were still able to rely upon notions such as “the wisdom of crowds.” It held together. And then it didn’t.

We thought, in 2020, that that was just a glitch, and we were back in the universe in which a pluralistic, deliberative, rational republic — rather than a savage state of nature in which everyone (and I do mean practically everyone, not just one side of the political spectrum) sought a majority of 50 percent plus one so they could cram what they wanted down the throats of those who objected — could securely exist.

The signs were all around us. No evidence — no impeachments or Jan. 6 or multiple criminal convictions or anything else that in our previous universe would have utterly slammed the door on a political career — could deter a majority from developing around the unspeakable notion of again electing someone who, this time, would not be constrained as he was before by the presence of ministers and advisers who still remember that old, rational universe.

And so we have things such as the Tulsi Gabbard confirmation. I keep talking about that one because it involves, of all things, the word “intelligence.” (You could not have included that word and her name in the same thought in the old ‘verse.) But you can mention Bobby Kennedy’s kid, or that Hegspeth guy, or the plethora of executive orders, or the resumption of kissing Putin’s posterior, or whatever.

Somehow, we took a wrong cosmic turn. That’s my point. And you don’t have to accept my assertion that the existence of the multiverse has been proved, because after all, I don’t have the math. I got through calculus in school, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t enough. Anyway, I’ve forgotten what I did learn in all my math courses after Algebra 1 and plane geometry.

So, to back up, you can just say we’ve somehow traveled to the Bizarro world. That works, too…