Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Perseus Series: The Finding of Medusa
(1882)

"…going Backwards inevitably proves impossible and ultimately self-defeating."

Electing a corrupted individual into a public office sets the whole enterprise reeling Backwards. Whatever formerly passed for human progress abruptly ceases. Utter irrelevances replace significances, and the purpose of the resulting administration, besides their utter inability to actually administer anything, becomes corruption. We should have long ago passed a law, a prominent amendment to our revered Constitution, declaring that no convicted felon could be qualified to hold the highest office. It had never happened before, though this first time clearly shows the wisdom of just such a provision. Now, the corruption extends to pretty nearly everyone still left in this administration incapable of administration, and not only because only the most incompetent remain; all of the honest ones were successfully chased off by their refusal, steadfast and quick, to compromise their ethical standards. Those remaining apparently never had such compunctions. Many gleefully agreed to assist in engineering a delusional Backwards shift.

Generations of actual progress toward creating a genuinely more perfect union were discarded in an initial blizzard of misrepresentations. Decency in some cases became an indictable offense. Bigotry and racism were heralded as innovations. Equality under the law was slowly, seemingly inexorably, replaced with a twisted sort of privilege. Those least deserving of special handling seemed to receive the velvet glove. Those most deserving were, in some cases, crudely deported. Those stuck in the middle found themselves disoriented when they could no longer presume that the arc of history trended toward justice, but instead toward the sort of inequality not seen since the failed post-Civil War reconstruction effort. Confederate terrorists were resurrected, their statues reclaimed, and military installations were renamed for insurrectionists.

The world runs Backwards now. The careful clockwork generations of civil servants and regular citizens conspired to erect became suspect once the judgment of a convicted conman and felon was chosen to decide. He possessed an uncanny ability to interpret generational progress Backwards. He ran on a slogan that seemed to deny any promise any future might provide. He screamed Make America Great Again, as if it had ever been greater than its forward evolution had moved it toward. He initiated a concerted war against modernity, casting actual progress as somehow villainous and decline as the one and only true progress. He slanders himself, declaring his contributions to be the very best in recorded history. The mystery resides in those who swallow his stories despite every measurable metric screaming that the only progress observed so far has been Backwards. Regular gas hit $5.95 per gallon yesterday, still rising. While I applaud the progress made to reduce demand for fossil fuels, price coercion might not have been the best strategy for convincing people to switch to renewables, especially when this administration, dead set against competently administering anything, has further complicated the construction of renewable replacements for our ruinous fossil fuels. Cruel.

I imagine decades spent rebuilding in our near future. It might be that, having cleared out history, our future might suddenly be even more achievable than it had been before this inhuman wrecking ball of an administration that considers Backwards forward progress appeared on the horizon. Whatever happens, I expect years of back-to-the-future experiences, where we slip into a period in which we will be reinventing previously invented wheels and experiencing genuine disadvantages. No viable future ever lived in any past, however desirable prior experience might sometimes seem. There is no such thing as Backwards progress, because progress moves exclusively in one, inexorable direction. To deny this flow never bodes well. History provides no evidence that anybody’s greatness ever once resided in anybody’s past, however corrupted and compromised any present might have appeared. Progress was never meant to feel familiar, and nostalgia misleads more than it ever informs.

I miss nickel candy bars, too, and time off for good behavior. I ache for something, anything familiar, too, just like you do. I’m learning that the future should rightfully seem disorienting. It offers a continual dedication test over whether I’ll choose progress or bend over Backwards to some path of apparently less resistance. That tension I sense before me might, instead, encourage me, especially since facing any uncertain future (and which future was ever NOT uncertain?) demands little more than courage, however inaccessible courage might sometimes seem. Fleeing into some delusion of any past, fleeing Backwards, was never a viable option, and those who choose that pursuit prove to be cowards. No past ever knew what it might ultimately need to move forward. They moved forward anyway, though some chose to take a more roundabout way. Backwards yields no future worth inhabiting. It’s probably incapable of producing any future at all. The criminal presently in charge of navigation apparently never learned this most fundamental life lesson. We were never supposed to know how to move forward, and going Backwards inevitably proves impossible and ultimately self-defeating.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz