Carlo Marchionni: Caricature of Man Writing
(18th Century)

Smothered In Fresh Bullshit
I don't think of myself as so much a slave to truth but more of its servant. Truths have generally served me well, once I recovered from my typical adolescent embarrassment over who I was. As I discovered, developed, and learned to appreciate my gifts, I could increasingly feature them in my stories rather than presenting ginned-up exemplars. I found more leverage telling my truths than by fabricating lies. I noticed then that I attracted different sorts of friends than others discovered around them. They weren't selling anything. They seemed accepting. They lived above board. They kept their share of secrets but for privacy instead of piracy. It surprises me how central lies seem to be in this NextWorld presidency. I doubt anybody can keep up with the lies spewing out of the White House. Small and huge, covering every possible topic.

I doubt anyone can discriminate between truth and lies from there, other than to conclude that there's no truth in there. I wonder about the self-esteem required to so thoroughly surround oneself with fabrications. I sense a slimy sort of soul poking out sticks from within a cage. He must be terrified of the truth. I'd never before considered how fungible lies can be. They might be easier to defend than even the most obvious truth, for they do not depend upon anything but imagination to justify them. They seem relatively impervious to criticism. A simple denial surrounded by a remarkably few fresh untruths and even the most dedicated critic finds themself smothered in fresh bullshit.

——

Weekly Writing Summary

This NextWorld Story contains the fourth and final installment of my Four Stages of Cruelty mini-series within this NextWorld Series: The Fourth Stage of Cruelty: Reward. This one describes the legacy rightfully deserved by anyone, like our current incumbent, who dedicates their life to inflicting cruelty on others.

John Bell, after William Hogarth: The Reward of Cruelty (1750)-Series/Book Title: The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751)
"We will be as grateful then as we were rightfully fearful before, Gods willing."
—

This NextWorld Story starts sharing the truth about The CEO Disease. Our current incumbent seems to have been elected by people who didn't understand that they were suffering from The CEO Disease. Consider this installment to be the first vaccination against an impending contagion.

Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait with Cigar Original Language Title: Selvportrett med sigar (1908-1909)
" … nobody's pissed off Old Mary enough. Yet."
—
This NextWorld Story steps back to provide some historical context to The Biggest Lie that would ultimately spark the most significant constitutional crisis in this nation's history. That crisis remains in the future today but will one day become the defining turning point in our country's history. It began with a whisper before it ultimately became deafening, and we can thank Ronald Reagan for amplifying that whisper into The American Scream.

Félix Edouard Vallotton: The Lie, plate one from Intimacies (1897)
“Those who had most loudly insisted that faceless bureaucrats had compromised our country became the faceless bureaucrats about who they so publicly complained.”
—
I wrote this NextWorld Story to remind me of what’s at stake within our current Constitutional Crisis. I doubt that any billionaire set upon undermining our form of governance understands the underlying mystery that will ultimately prevent him, or anybody, from succeeding. It takes seizing something different than an automated payment system to undermine The American Dream!

Elihu Vedder: The Fates Gathering in the Stars (1887)
"We will never feel completely satisfied with this perfection."
—
This NextWorld Story finally resorts to screaming. The American Scream finally comes after we as a society engage in something monumentally stupid from which we will forever be recovering.

Frederic Edwin Church: Our Banner in the Sky (1861)
" … trying to rebuild a society similar to the one that existed on the last day of Joe Biden's administration."
—
This NextWorld Story, The American Way, recounts the continuing tussle between the forces of manufacturing efficiency and humanity's essential vulnerability. Government regulation offends efficiency experts and sustains ordinary citizens. Watch what happens when the efficiency experts temporarily prevail. The Jungle magically reappears.

Master of the Die, After Raphael: Three Cupids Playing With An Ostrich (16th century)
"The stence of competing righteousnesses clogged the nostrils."
—
This week, I felt like I was creating a series of abnormal psychology essays. The aberrant behaviors emerging from this NextWorld’s birth have appalled me without completely surprising me. I had spent enough time immersed in American culture to be able to anticipate some of the cruelty displayed. The final stage of cruelty, the reward, can’t come soon enough for me, for the reward will most certainly be infamy. But that infamy still lies in the future as of this writing. The NextWorld Story continues unfolding as there’s no way anybody knows how it will resolve; other than that it will most certainly eventually resolve. The CEO Disease might be a common variant of The Normals that occasionally annoyingly flares up. The Biggest Lie seems neither headline news nor forgotten history. It seems terribly present, with special emphasis on the truly terrible part. The American Dream remains intact, though more recently accompanied by The American Scream. The American Way remains one of those know-it-when-I-see-it things. Was it Churchill who insisted that Americans almost always do the right thing after exhausting every alternative? These long days transitioning into this baffling NextWorld have been exhausting. Thank you for following along.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz