Attilio Mussino: Harlequin and Pulcinella...
were threatening each other with sticks and blows. (1925)

"That's a promise, not a threat!"

Another common aspect of the MAGA style seems to be a fierce vacuity. They spend inordinate amounts of time threatening people, places, and things, even nothings. They always seem ready to interpret any butterfly's shadow as a mortal threat and overreact. This comes across as needlessly theatrical, maniacal ravings rather than well-thought-out intentions. These performances might primarily serve as distractions because any attempt to parse any deeper meaning or significance or, heaven forbid, pattern out of them will leave one grasping hot air. There's rarely anything there, and whatever manages to manifest bears little resemblance to the fire and brimstone characterizations that utterly fail to describe what was supposed to be coming. These performances almost always prove unsatisfying both from a content perspective as well as from any resulting action that might have been expected. In retrospect, they seem like Daffy Duck or Donald Duck rants: many feathers, little consequence.

They do seem to satisfy themselves with this barking, though. Especially their leader, who never could put together a coherent sentence. When he threatens, he comes as close to present as he ever seems to get. He puffs up as if he weren’t already swollen and lets his imaginary enemies have it. He assumes a cartoonish, self-satisfied Il Duce stance as if to say, "Take that!" It's absurdist. The loyalists might occasionally take him seriously, but I suspect even they have learned to simply stand out of the way to avoid getting too much of his spittle on themselves and let him launch into another utterly meaningless tirade. I suspect he engages like this to distract his imagined opponents. When one fights with shadows, one never knows who wins. The more delusional easily imagine the shadow winning most of the time. The witnesses to these contests might never guess the motivating force or the real opponent. They just feel the bottomless vehemence. I often wonder who's winding up these clowns because logic and reason seem missing from the equation. He takes the stage with fresh enemies of the state. Greenland! Panama! It does not matter if distraction is the objective.

In junior high sixty years ago, the principal taught me everything I probably ever needed to know about Threatenings. Those learnings served me well in the ensuing years and might serve me best in what appears will be our NextWorld. He would take to the public address system that allowed him to speak into every hall and homeroom in the school every morning first thing and let loose with a fresh list of threats. Someone was forever doing something that wasn't allowed, and while the principal had not yet learned the names of the malefactors, he promised them Hell to pay when he caught them. It was never 'if' with him. He seemed sublimely confident that, given a bit of time, he would identify the guilty parties and bring them to justice. He never precisely described what punishment he would exact. Just that he would administer punishment. As far as I ever learned, he never punished anybody or found any guilty party. Still, he ended each of these good morning messages with the same phrase. "This is a promise, not a threat!" It was a threat.

The thing about threats that principle taught me is that threats aren't the same as actions. They do not even preface action very well because they tip off the target, giving them time to sidestep any offensive and thereby stay scot-free. Threats seem to be what bullies do in lieu of acting. Someone more interested in acting might reasonably forget the threats since they seem to contribute nothing to achieving the desired outcome unless the desired result is simply to threaten. My junior high school principal was a classic bully. He talked big but exclusively acted small. He seemed to enjoy the trappings of power. He often misused his office. He kept favorites as well as village idiots. When he identified someone as a village idiot, he could make their lives miserable by merely accusing them—that junior high, like all such institutions, was governed under Napoleonic Law. One was guilty until proven innocent. No trial of peers was ever needed. The threats were the punishment. I learned to discount his authority because it was never really about me except when I imagined it was. I wondered why someone with such authority would ever be concerned about a peon like me.

Our MAGA government, once installed, will misuse their public address systems, too. They will most certainly expend their air time railing impotently about some imagined enemy. The tragedies will come whenever anyone takes them too seriously. The threat was supposed to serve as the punishment. Those eight-year-olds who haven't yet learned about impotence might easily slip into feeling genuinely threatened. The weakest and meekest among us might take the bulk of the weight because these leaders might actually seem powerful to them. The rest of us will marvel at how chickens scatter whenever the MAGA principals begin with the mindless patter again. They will appear to be promising more than they could ever accomplish, which might lead some to imagine that they hear a promise rather than somewhat predictable, too-familiar, flatulent noise. That's a threat, not a promise!

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz