William Blake: Thy Sons and Daughters Were Eating and Drinking Wine (The Book of Job),
Alternate Title: Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan (1821)

"The incumbent will richly deserve his comeuppance."

A hundred days into our incumbent's second term, it's difficult for me not to feel as though I'm stuck somewhere in the Book of Job. You will remember Job as the unfortunate believer whose life inexplicably turns to shit as if he had been a sinner. True belief in anything doesn't immunize anyone from very much of anything. Some things happen regardless of anyone's faithfulness. Other things might occur due to misplaced belief. Belief in false premises or misleading promises can contribute to reversing fortunes, but belief itself can't independently be ascribed as cause. Other factors must intrude to produce results. In our case, our incumbent's abysmal second-term results seem easily ascribable to our incumbent himself. Whatever evil playbook he might have tried to follow, his performance so far shows him incapable of following any playbook. Investors have begun to publicly speculate that he's insane. Former supporters have started moving further away as he's again demonstrated his incompetence in practice.

As I've noted before, our economy was the world's envy a short hundred days ago. Now, it's suddenly and perhaps irreparably a pariah. This has not happened because of anyone's intentions. Misconception might have contributed most. The sense from within this mess feels like society’s crumbling. I feel as though masonry's suddenly turning back into sand. On the grand Monopoly board, we've been ordered back to something like the Mediterranian Avenue neighborhood without passing Go and, definitely, without collecting two hundred dollars. Now, we're sitting before Just Visiting and Jail, praying nobody's erected hotels on Ventnor Avenue. Rolling dice terrifies us now. What was promise devolved into a familiar tangle. Our lives have been cruelly and unnecessarily disrupted. The local food pantry lost its federal funding. It's state funding can't be far behind. We once relied upon this sacred resource to help us over a rough patch in our lives. Recently, the wealthiest country in the history of the world can't afford to put food on its most vulnerable tables.

Whatever else a government must be responsible for, it must, at any cost, maintain peace. The history of the warmakers remains brief and sobering, for those who initiate conflict always eventually fail. They might wreak incredible havoc in the process, but their efforts will almost certainly prove not worth it. To wage war is to impose failure upon oneself. To wage peace might redeem any number of shortcomings. No god ever blessed those who believed they could take whatever they wanted, however insurmountable they might have seemed to themselves or their self-imposed enemies. Might doesn't even begin to make wrong, let alone right, and those, like our incumbent, who believe they can bull through any barrier eventually manage only to fool themselves. They fool their followers before betraying their faith and good credit. There are no exceptions.

Our incumbent is headed toward a third and final impeachment. Each day, more former followers and opposers understand this. It seems inescapable now. This introduces an even more fraught time because the more he fails, the more he will flail, and flailing leaders mostly inflict unintended collateral damage. What might have begun as standard, run-of-the-mill overreach will stretch well into the truly outrageous. We will continue to respond sluggishly, but only because of the surprisingly self-destructive nature of each self-sabotage. After losing in the court of public opinion, he will find that he cannot succeed in the more formal kind of courtroom, either. This will encourage further entrenchment. Denial being the first stage of acceptance, these defenses will not hold, but they might further enbold him. If we felt like Job before, we'll most likely feel even more Job-like before this sorry chapter's over. We still do not know which of his upcoming irrevocable acts will tip the scale. We only know that act cannot fail to appear, given who and what we're playing with here.

The investors are correct when they characterize his behavior as only explainable as insanity. He's been crazy as long as anybody can remember. His followers, his much-vaunted base, believed his insanity to be just what our society needed. It's proven an effective force for undermining prosperity and little else. Those disgruntled before will experience worse due to their Chosen One waging a war on decency itself. I could say, "Good riddance," except we have not and will apparently not get rid of anything very easily. Job experienced unrelenting setbacks. Even after any auditor or line judge would have insisted he'd more than repaid any indebtedness, his punishments continued. Not because he'd earned them, though, not for any good or logical reason. Let's speculate that he just found himself in the wrong place and time or in precisely the proper place to learn some lesson that visited unbegotten. The incumbent will richly deserve his comeuppance. The rest of us will, by then, deserve some respite.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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