Ira Blount :
A black cat looks up at a dragonfly fluttering above its head
in this black-and-white, cut paper silhouette.
(2009)

"…if it focuses upon NegativeSpaces, it reliably produces only Obsolescence…"

The oddest thing about our incumbent’s administration, besides the obvious fact that it never intended to administer anything, has been its apparent obsession with producing negative outcomes. Rather than create or build, it has focused almost exclusively upon dismantling, claiming to be all about eliminating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, the Three Horsemen of Obsolescence. They have done this without first providing evidence that any of these attributes actually exist in any volumes that could reasonably be reduced with reasonable effort. Notice how their injunction omits what they aspire to leave behind. Once these three intangibles have been successfully eliminated, what might remain to confirm success? Apparently, just NegativeSpaces, or what we more popularly refer to as nothing. Nada. Zip.

Such negative objectives are never merely a different type of target, but a different kind. Where does an arrow land when launched toward a negative space? Likewise, a cut budget doesn’t leave fingerprints or much of anything as evidence. Same story with eliminated positions, like the DOGE gang dealt in. They came in as if poised to preserve something and left only devastation, hollows where actual assets used to stand, and labeling those missing pieces after the Three Horsemen of Obsolescence only made their insult worse. Their terrible, if not necessarily that swift, swords killed people in absentia, the most cowardly and immoral way to commit murder. They left a gaping hole where civil society once stood.

And so it has been from the very beginning of this sad and sorry non-administration. It will be remembered not for building a garish, new, totally unnecessary ballroom, which will very likely never be built, but for tearing down the East Wing of The People’s House. The incumbent will be remembered as the truly terrible tenant who never understood that he couldn’t just demolish whatever he chose, as if he were the actual owner rather than a short-term renter. He claimed to be a builder. If so, he must have specialized in the demolition part of that business because he leaves little fresh construction behind. It was as if he believed that if he knocked down something that offended him, something more pleasing would spontaneously sprout from the open wound. He always started the demolition phase before securing funding for whatever would replace the resulting divot. He began what he insisted were grand constructions without even a hint of a plan, let alone Congressional authorization. He was never a serious reformer. Whatever We, The People had set up, he seemed more than prepared to knock down.

Even the positive elements of his non-administration produced negative spaces. For instance, he instituted tariffs, a tangible presence more than a negative-space one, essentially taxes. These, of course, disrupted necessary trading patterns, resulting in less for pretty much everyone involved. He proclaimed that those tariffs would make us rich, but they didn’t. They rendered us a pariah nation, preying on the citizens least capable of making up the resulting difference. His recipe for saving the country, then, involved instituting (illegally) the largest across-the-board tax increase in history, and this on top of an already dangerously regressive taxing regime. In an epitome of NegativeSpaces outcomes, those least in need of tax relief received the bulk of the benefits from our incumbent’s ruinous tax “cuts.”

We have grown accustomed to interpreting whatever he proclaims as meaning the opposite, a clear effect of his dealing in NegativeSpaces. There never was, nor could there have been, a there there. This is the underlying price of focusing on NegativeSpaces. One additional aspect common to NegativeSpaces seems well worth mentioning here. They tend to produce the opposite of whatever’s envisioned. The DOGE Waste, Fraud, and Abuse efforts produced more Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, not less. Some magic accompanies all NegativeSpaces Objectives. Because they focus on what they don’t want, those labels seem to fuel results. You might sincerely intend to eliminate those Three Horsemen, but because you labeled your initiative after them, that’s what you produce. Better in every instance to focus upon what you want to replace those ponies with because that produces a tangible target upon which to focus, and maybe even a measurable success.

This might be the oldest error in the book: we innocently focus our attention on what we don’t want, and thereby almost guarantee that’s what we’ll see, if only because we cannot perceive negatives. Listen closely when the next budding authoritarian starts giving speeches. Listen to what he promises, for he will, for certain, feel moved to promise something. If those promises take the negative form, clarifying only what he doesn’t want, what he’s against, what he opposes, you can be certain that he will ultimately be remembered as an inept despot, one who produced precisely what he promised to eliminate. He will have produced his own Comeuppance with his intransigence. He might ride through on one of the Horses of Obsolescence or invent a seemingly new one for his purposes, but if it focuses upon NegativeSpaces, it reliably produces only Obsolescence, Thank Heavens!

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz