Thomas Rowlandson: Libel Hunters on the Look Out,
or Daily Examiners of the Liberty of the Press
Series/Book Title: Tegg's Caricatures
Published by Thomas Tegg (April 12, 1810)

"I've been Coping by averting my gaze and Hoping for better …"

With what have I been so actively Hoping for and Coping with through this series? Aside from the frequently malign attempts at misadministration, the mischaracterization of virtually everything has been haunting me most. During his first term, we had almost grown accustomed to the ever-growing lists of untruths produced by him and his team. It seemed that nothing ever crossing those lips came close to any truth, let alone the whole or anything but. It seemed more like the perennially partial and everything but the truth from that machine. They seemed inherently disagreeable. No sky could be characterized as blue but what one of his supporters would get their nose all out of joint to argue about the actual color, which was essentially always clearly some shade of blue. The pickier the complaint, the more weight it seemed to carry. The effort seemed primarily focused on discrediting anyone of decent character. We stopped wondering how low they might go because they always went even lower than that in their attempts to … what? Bolster their boss's delicate ego?

It becomes curiously frustrating when I know for sure that someone is lying to me. It's not that I cannot see right through each fresh fiction. It's also not that I hadn't long ago set my receivers to reject every proffered proclamation. The futility of even trying to communicate with such reliable liars can turn even the most generous interpreter into a cynical listener. When I know for sure that the underlying truth is, in fact, always lying beneath an unknown number of layers of lies, whatever's passed as explanation only further muddies already essentially opaque waters. They deal in misdirection instead of information. The news stories attempting to share their side of a story only amplify the underlying misdirection, for they tacitly withhold whatever might have been the actual other side of the story. They offer no side for anybody to reliably accept or deny. They offer only irrelevance, regardless.

This insults much more than a public's intelligence. It renders it just as irrelevant as whatever story they're promoting that day. They have an ecosystem specifically designed to amplify their non-stories. It spends billions blowing smoke. It employs only the most cynical reporters and producers. Only those willing to betray their professional oaths need apply. In exchange, they are granted the absolute freedom to lie to their heart's content. So rarely does any truth ever come into their professional lives that they become fictional characters, superheroes to their fans, irreducible. Our incumbent chose several individuals who rose to prominence within this context to become cabinet members and other high-level government officials. Their primary qualification for their position appeared to be loyalty to the incumbent and an absolute dedication to continuing whatever Slander&Libel the producers commanded them to amplify and echo.

Our hometown AM radio station, the one that broadcasts crop and commodity reports, fills our public airways with hate speech instead of news. Those who fall into its gaze live in a daze, divorced from what the rest of us might easily recognize as reality. To them, Biden actually left our borders wide open, though the rest of us know for sure that never happened because it didn’t. A catacheism of lies categorizes our world as something other than it ever was. Membership in the Republican Party has become like membership in a cult or The Project Management Institute, dependent upon echoing blatant untruths as evidence of fealty to the cause. And what is that cause asks the one who stopped listening to the noise? I suspect that even the most loyal MAGA no longer knows or cares what the cause might have once been or become. They probably know for certain that cause no longer matters. Only the Slander&Libel matter now, maintaining the illusion that reason remains suspicious and that decency seems suspect.

I doubt the true believers have much of any soul left. They traded it for a vengeance that could never have been theirs. But their leader promised, not that he'd ever delivered on any previous promise before. He seemed to be in an endless battle with what his followers might experience as boring. Beyond logic and far beneath truth lies entertainment. Its purpose might be to fill in the empty spaces between meaningful experiences. With each new technology, critics have cautioned that the next generation of entertainment media will finally reduce the human brain to protoplasm, and with each successive generation, they have been proven correct in their warning. We used to wonder what we'd do once productivity reduced the need for everybody to labor sixteen hours seven days each week. Now we know. Rather than advance civilization by creating something or working to save ourselves, we spend that bonus time pursuing entertainment. It's not just in Prime Time anymore. It's taking over our government, too, and me and you.

A libelous administration is no longer scandalous. It's just a novel form of entertainment now—mass round-ups of innocent citizens gone horribly wrong, just the latest installment. The franchise could not continue without introducing shocking, fresh plot twists. Reliable commentary could only undermine the actual value—by which I mean the entertainment value—of our government. This machine runs on cynicism, freely contributed. It utterly depends upon discrediting every credible contributor to make room for the even more incredible—AKA the ever less plausible. Think of these as disembodied stories, actors merely portraying rather than living. Look into their eyes and they will not disguise what they are doing. I've been Coping by averting my gaze and Hoping for better one day.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz