KEY POINTS:
"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" he chortled in his joy - The Jabberwocky (Lewis Carroll)
Well, it's either that or go mad. And a good chortle must be better than a long incarceration in some latter-day Bedlam.
Mind you, there is an argument for saying we're already in some latter-day Bedlam, inasmuch as Outer Roa itself increasingly seems less a nation and more an institution; a strange Malice in Blunderland infirmary for the dyspeptic, dystopic and delusional.
Let's face it, there wouldn't be many countries where, in the space of a week, you would confront banner headlines about the Parliamentary Waffleweight title bout and some meddlesome busybodies at an overzealous school dobbing in a one-smack mum. And the stunningly sensible staff of a major gummint department deciding to place the artificially inseminated child of two prison inmates in the care of the estranged wife of a double murderer and a big debate about "hymns of hate". And a supposedly life-saving Cabinet reshuffle which in the end turns out to have all the excitement of a damp souffle - or unrisen squib!
Heck, apart from Mark Burton going for one and Trevor swapping benches it's just like any other Cabinet reshuffle - Ms Bungle's replaced Mr Botch, the Ministry of Codswallop's got a new boss and life goes on.
Much like the lurid list of sensations above.
In any sane and normal country, that would be a year's worth. But we get the lot in seven days!! So perhaps it is reasonable to suggest we've become an asylum of sorts - and not just for refugees either. Maybe Bedlam isn't a place we visit but rather where we live.
Although there is one crucial difference between our version and its historic namesake. Back in the 18th century, it was the posh folk, the swells, the grands and the toffs who would, on occasion, when seeking some weekend diversion, go and visit the gibbering masses abandoned in the institutions of the age.
But now it's the other way around. Now it's the posh folk who're in the institution and it's us, the gibbering masses, who get to visit them - albeit metaphorically - through our media's reportage of their frantic antics.
Which is where the chortling comes in. Look, if our actions are a choice then so are our reactions. If we want to, we can choose to get angry and aggravate our ulcers.
We can throw the ore of our outrage into the furnace of talkback and cast some artifact of righteous indignation - knowing it'll be melted down tomorrow when something else comes along.
Or we can laugh.
We can chortle, preferably in a frabjous fashion. We can let our Calloohs and our Callays ring from the rafters and bounce off the walls. And we should!
Because we seldom get the chance to see the asylum quite so clearly as we have of late. We're rarely granted the opportunity to watch our slithy toves behaving with quite the degree of transparent absurdity they've recently displayed.
But that is the gift we've been given. And we should enjoy it.
We should be laughing at the miraculous resurrection (yet again) of the blessed St Winston, now back again - one hesitates to say as brash as ever since that would surely offend at least two people - but certainly as feisty.
And we should be chortling at the realisation that his rediscovered concern about others' "hymn of hate" is basically just an effort to reduce the hate of him.
Well, no, not hate. That's excessive. But certainly indifference.
And if mirth is the measure of our response to Mr P, so too should be the mark of our reaction to L'Malaise Mallarde. In any rational society, news of the legislative fisticuffs would have provoked little more than an indifferent shrug.
"Oh well, boys will be boys," we'd say, or perhaps, "He got what was coming" - a judgment that could equally apply to both protagonists.
But when your politics have been dominated for a generation by the blue stocking notion that "male violence" is the root of all evil and when you've just spent millions of dollars on a big TV ad campaign featuring some bunch of sententious worthies telling us "It's not okay" and "It is our problem" then you have to pretend to take the whole thing seriously by insisting that Trevor gets some counselling or neutering - or both.
So he loses Sport and gets the Environment which, you'd have to say, is a helluva price to pay for a single punch. The only thing worse would be Corrections and Phil Goff's got that, mainly because he's even worse than a sinner - he's a threat!
Now the pessimist might say, in the aftermath of all this swinging of the vorpal sword in the nest of the Jubjub birds, that, in truth, the joke's on us - both literally and figuratively.
And perhaps it is.
But if so, that's even more reason to chortle. At least that way our fast and frumious Bandersnatches will realise we do actually know it's a joke.