Charles Joseph Traviès de Villers:
Got to admit that the government has a very funny head.
Original Language Title:
Faut avouer que l'gouvernement a une bien drôle de tête.
Series/Book Title: La Caricature III (60) 22 dec 1831, no. 121
(1831)

"You should have cornered the popcorn franchise before you started. That might have rendered you rich and successful."

The MAGA Movement became a movement the same way the more traditional bowel movement emerged, primarily by seeking to create Uproars. They aim to disrupt rather than propose, to break instead of repair. What they intended to be an UpRoar most often becomes UpRoarious, hilarious in its naivety and evident ineptness. They hold principles they carried forward from the darkest Middle Ages. I hope I'm not inadvertently disparaging the more respectable elements of Middle Ages culture to suggest that the MAGA worldview seems tenaciously backward. They tout White Supremacy as if those memes had not been proven self-cancelling since at least the fifties. The eighteen-fifties. They call themselves conservatives, but few understand why they chose to get stuck so far behind modernity. They behave as if everything modern were an abomination, and so they seem to casually discard the accumulated efforts at creating more perfect unions since the creation of this nation. They consequently present a far less than more-perfect platform, but a demonstrably worse one.

They sing the praises of the days when only two genders existed, as if those days had existed. They seek greatness again but can't find a single coherent example of that greatness anywhere since robber barons ran the government. Not even they hold any hope of producing convincing logic, so they inevitably choose to baffle with bullshit instead. Those who've grown accustomed to swallowing their daily ration of bullshit, long ago came to prefer it to more nourishing fare. They believe they're offending those with over-delicate sensibilities, so they swallow it with evident joy. Their audience considers them incredibly inept clowns, apparently entertaining themselves if nobody else. Most long ago lost their patience. About a quarter of the electorate lost their patience, so those indifferent ones decide elections by default. The UpRoarious never suspect how ridiculous their audience considers their performance.

They can and do produce chaos, though nobody involved in chaotic systems has ever meaningfully controlled them. They are the primary tools of absolute fools, yet they exclusively employ them. They rely upon the chance outcome, the one-in-a-hundred odds that sometimes produce results. The majority of their moves come to nothing but quickly forgotten commentary. They create noise and smoke that almost always results in a fizzle. They induce many failures, though seemingly rarely discouraged by their abysmal results. They proclaim themselves to be "people of faith." One might reasonably wonder "faith in what?" for they seem to maintain faith in their inherent infallibility, all observeable evidence to the contrary. If belief is a conviction held without proof, perhaps faith, as the MAGAs employ it, amounts to unshakable delusion. They seem to sincerely believe themselves holy when they dredge up some Old Testament gibberish supporting White Supremacy and ascribe it to Jesus, who was not in any way what they might consider white or supremacist. They sure seem to know their bible verses' words without deeply considering their allegorical significance. This results in some of their more UpRoarious dances.

They seem like pious clowns, characatures of intentions. They act exclusively through proclamation, which might eventually buy them something if accompanied by a quarter. They ignore the sacred constitutional order in favor of a variety of made-up perogatives enjoyed once by long-ago deposed kings and more recently, modern tin-pot dictators. They say they seek to make our government more efficient. Nothing could be further from our Founders' original intent. Our founders wanted a pedantic governance requiring deliberation over contradictions, and applied logic. They claim to be making the world safe for regular people without first enlisting a single regular one for their cause, apparently without appreciating that there never were any regular people in this country. We're each exceptional. This truth alone should guarantee their eventual failure. Belief in the supremacy of any race demonstrates only its ignorance. Attempting to dismantle two hundred and fifty years of progress over a fear that someone might choose to use a different bathroom seems a narrow premise upon which to retool the most successful society in the history of societies. We can hardly wait to religate you, too, to history's sorriest ash heap. You should have cornered the popcorn franchise before you started. That might have rendered you rich and successful.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz