Dorothy Dehner: Landscape for Cynics (1945)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum,
Gift of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts
© Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts

"…why they're so confidently leading us into Hell."

We inhabit a time seemingly tailor-made for cynics. The individuals who comprise our administration, who never intended to administer anything, lead the way by steadfastly failing to fulfill the obligations they agreed to when taking their oaths of office. They tend to do the opposite of whatever they promise. The incumbent confuses confabulation with communication. His supporters insist that we should take him seriously, but never literally, whatever that's supposed to mean. The party that long advertised themselves as The Party of Lincoln, family values, and economic conservatism behaves like confederates, pedophiles, and economic ignoramuses in practice. My congressional representative makes no bones about who he believes he's representing, and it's not his constituents, whose interests he's betrayed at every opportunity.

I was no innocent. I'd seen cynicism in practice. I was there to be trickled down upon during both of Reagan's terms. I'd already learned what happens when we elect someone lacking moral character to high office, but we continued electing republicans even after they'd proven themselves serially incapable of governing anything. The Bush years were bad. Trump's first term proved to be much worse. Obama, a respite. Biden, the envy of the world! But secret societies continued selling their snake oil and nutraceuticals, hammering away at The American Way and decency more or less equally. It became fashionable to be sloppy, to believe even the most outrageous lies. To insist, for instance, that assault weapons don't kill people and that it would prove possible to identify who might commit mass murder and intervene before they acted, thereby preserving the right for everyone to arm themselves to their teeth with weapons they insists are incapable of killing anyone, in the interest of self-defense: that and similar illogicals.

Now we have a genuine child in charge, one who continually conflates power and purpose. He seems to believe in nothing so much as his own grandiosity, which doesn't seem all that grand to most of us. He's the sort to insist upon gold-plated toilet paper dispensers and gold toilets for himself and casual cruelty for everybody else. His most dedicated followers seem to revel in receiving his casual cruelty, for they are victims, too. The news overfloweth with hardly half-truths spewed by a machine desperately trying to compensate for what it knows it cannot achieve. When every touted success comes as the direct result of breaking long-established laws, we can be sure that we inhabit an upside-down world.

I feel sorely tempted to become Jaded. There was a time when hopefulness was the underpinning principle of this country. We knew we weren't perfect, but we were working on perfecting our shortcomings. Now we seem insistent upon undermining every attempt to improve our lot. We vilify decency. We prosecute diligence. We dismiss dedication as somehow beneath us. We see destruction as success, dismantling as our highest purpose. We're creating a vacuum within which everything seemingly suffocates. We have a madman at the wheel.

I have been most impressed at how tolerant we've been at the dismantling. Little distress has been expressed, as he has undermined our best and brightest and replaced them with the dimmest bulbs. Suspending habeas corpus should have been enough for the once-Supreme Court to issue a full stop rather than a cynical slap almost near the offending wrist. In the upcoming months, the economy will crash, as it probably already has. How we haven't noticed the undermining rot astounds me. There's no way, short of some previously unimagined form of economic magic, that we won't have engineered another Great Depression before this administration, proven incapable of administering anything, slips into well-deserved oblivion.

I suppose there will be questions about how we managed to become so Jaded. Some commentators will likely conclude that we became spoiled by our successes. Others will insist that it was malign foreign influences. We might ultimately agree that we did this to ourselves. Those of us who refused to subscribe to cable couldn't seem to make a big enough difference to counterbalance all those who chose to subject themselves to the cynical ravings featured on Faux Snooze. It might say something about the American Character or, perhaps, the human condition, that anyone still insists on holding conservative values after experiencing those twisted values in action over the last half century. There was never a more malign influence on any society than the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Both were fascists dressed up as Christians. Both were radical, pretending to be benign. Both were malign, Jaded, and thoroughly cynical. Their members believe they're going to heaven, which might be why they're so confidently leading us into Hell.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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