Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
St Frideswide - Design for Stained Glass Window, Christchurch Oxford
(1859)

"I didn't see him again for the rest of that evening."

I might best characterize EndDays as those in which PipeDreaming subsumes otherwise ordinary planning and processing. The Old Status Quo’s natural force seems to defend against acknowledging any more current state of affairs, and those charged with foreseeing expend their increasingly limited energy looking backward, basking in beliefs and perspectives already rendered moot. They do not see the easily foreseeable upcoming, but continue insisting that everything remains essentially fine. Sure, some minor concern might seem prudent, but Our President would not lead us into anything like overwhelming temptation. To them, we seem to be in no real danger, other than the usual business cycle. Sure, they insist, prices might have risen a bit, but the market seems wise enough to compensate before anything crashes. If everything isn’t precisely fine, it sure seems to be trending positive.

The campaign promises were received by some as iron-clad prognostications, learnéd predictions about future performance. If things didn’t seem somewhat precarious, current events wouldn’t even constitute believable fiction. We elected a genuine businessman this time, one who certainly knows how to run our country as if it were a business. (This promise seems roughly equivalent to a promise to run a city like a forest or a forest like a tree, completely beside any point I can comprehend, since government and business remain utterly different animals.) It’s no gift to promise to run anything like it isn’t and never could actually be. PipeDreaming seems to be required to maintain faith in any such utterly delusional initiative. How about running the government as if it were the government our Constitution defines? Any other strategy seems only to betray the citizenry. Run our government as if it were your private business? How long before our incumbent, who never learned how to avoid bankruptcy in his private affairs, manages to set the precedent as the first president to ever bankrupt our government, which was never exclusively his, regardless of how he pretends?

I was speaking with The Muse’s fellow Port Commissioners, since we were attending a Washington State Society for the Prevention of Port Commissioners meeting. I was there as spousal arm candy. Commissioners usually cannot informally speak together outside of formal meetings because doing so would violate open meeting laws, since any two of the three commissioners constitute a quorum, and every quorum of commissioners requires a formally-announced public meeting so the public has the opportunity to witness the proceedings. So declares state law. This convention leaves the Commissioners mostly mind-reading each other between public sessions, when they can finally discuss their support and misgivings. They’d attended a session about the upcoming FIFA tournament scheduled to begin in two scant weeks. The Seattle Port, part of the area these gathered commissioners represent and also involved in the logistics for the Seattle-based portion of the proceedings, had convened a session discussing issues regarding the tournament. I mentioned that I’d heard the whole shebang was in danger of failing, since many potential attendees had sworn to boycott the affair. None of the commissioners, other than The Muse, had heard anything about the potential boycott.

The most conservative commissioner asked why people would boycott the tournament. He genuinely didn’t know why and had apparently never imagined such a possibility. I replied that The Incumbent had threatened to detain attendees, and had raised visa entry fees for foreigners entering The States. The citizens of Denmark had signed a petition demanding that their government withdraw their national team in response to the incumbent’s ongoing threats against Greenland. Also, prices of international flights have skyrocketed in recent weeks, from barely over a hundred to more than four hundred bucks, with even more increases promised as the Iranian War further threatened to undermine fuel markets. Hotel chains had been quietly canceling block reservations for weeks. The whole business sounded like it would be a bust to me, but the majority of the commissioners had heard nary a whisper about this potential. One asked me where I’d heard this news. I replied that I couldn’t seem to avoid it. It had seemed to come from everywhere.

Our economy teeters this morning. I wonder whether we’ll experience a recession this year, as if we already weren’t, or a full-blown, impossible-to-quickly-recover-from Depression. My money’s riding on the Depression arriving because it seems inescapable now. But then, what do I know? The assembled commissioners gathered like they always had. The FIFA presentation was boosterism rather than thoughtful self-criticism, and those charged with planning and executing our future economic development seem remarkably sanguine in the face of what, to me, sure seems like a perfectly foreseeable threat. The commercial real estate market seems to have been in denial for the last few quarters. International trade, the Ports’ bread and butter, has been in the toilet and trending even further downward. Our hapless incumbent had serially violated every international trade deal, offending every trading partner except his beloved Mother Russia. Yet the commissioners continue boostering, blythely ignoring the future noisily overtaking them and us.

The awesome power of any Old Status Quo seems worthy of adoration, for it can blind even the most perceptive to what’s looming right before them. We seem to see our world the way it has always been, and only very hesitantly ever see much of any threat coming over any horizon. The conservative commissioner seemed offended when I innocently attempted to pop his bubble regarding the soccer tournament and his clearly beloved incumbent. It was as if he had never heard a discouraging word about The Incumbent. He genuinely wondered why anybody would consider boycotting a tournament so strongly endorsed by Our President. I could almost see the wheels straining to comprehend, the rusty connections preparing their flight response. I didn’t see him again for the rest of that evening.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz