Edvard Munch: Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones (1894)

" I'm hoping the arc of our collective experience turns toward enlightenment …"

Last week, I proposed five elements of what I referred to as The Stupidities that seem to be ascendent as we move into our impending NextWorld. These elements terrify me because they seem to reduce our polity's resilience. They amount to increasingly popular fallacies, mis- or dis-representations of our everyday reality. They undermine an individual's ability to agilely navigate together into our future. Gathered together as a common practice, the group engaging in these behaviors damages their abilities and hobbles their societies. As I explained before, those engaging in The Supidities tend to insist that they're certain about what nobody could ever be certain about, often about delusions and fictions. They engage in what The Muse refers to as The Sins of Self-Importance; they are vain and sincerely believe that everything was always actually all about them. They also exhibit a discernable addiction to common Inanities. They seem dependent upon and exclusively informed by unreliable sources that have few compunctions about just making shit up as news.

Another common presence in this mix engaging in The Stupidities seems to be, among a significant portion of the population, a sense of BeingGrudged.

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz

Jan Goeree:
Frontispiece Design from Corpus Inscriptionum (c. 1707)

Gallery Statement: A weeping Minerva is depicted here near a dilapidated statue of the city of Rome, surrounded by all manner of ancient remains. The drawing is the design for the title page from a collection of Roman inscriptions compiled by J. Gruter and published in 1707. The engraving was used once again in 1726, with a different text, as the frontispiece for a survey of the monuments of ancient Rome.

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The Day Inexplicably Turns

Into the new year and still without a killing frost. My Magnolia tree is budding out and will bloom before the end of January unless some winter settles in. I'm now praying for what I so recently dreaded, though the extended rainy season has already answered many prayers. It still unsettles me to acknowledge that we utterly rely upon the rains, which come more or less randomly. Anyone still holding on to the conviction that we must have strong central coordination might have missed this underlying condition. The context within which we exist was not concocted by us, no matter how much we might have tried to reengineer it to do our bidding. Now that we're actively influencing age-old patterns, our world responds, coloring outside expected lines. Summer gardens extend into the following January. Winter might not come this year. Magnolias might bloom twice. Our NextWorld seems only tangentially related to our more familiar ones. It's a wonder I hadn't noticed much earlier. I might not have been paying close enough attention, but I suppose it's our nature to take much for granted. We might be more blessed than we could ever appreciate. As I've watched my world slink toward the dreaded upcoming inauguration, I have been paying closer attention. I suspect the tardy winter will arrive to inconvenience what might have been an early spring, and everything will become jumbled again as if that might constitute a difference. I anticipate everything becoming strange once the new administration begins with their abomination. I savor these final few days before the air turns gray and the day inexplicably turns into a long night.

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz

George Wesley Bellows:
Dance at Insane Asylum (1907)

"I'm confident it's coming."

In the late 1980s, a relatively new phenomenon entered America's media landscape. A disc jockey from Miami found traction as a political commentator. He was never knowledgeable. His superpower seemed to have been his willingness to say anything on air. He was not careful to distinguish between fact and fiction. Indeed, almost everything he said on air was provably fictitious, but the delay between utterance and rebuttal rendered his utterances most memorable. Ordinary people were attracted to this doubtlessly entertaining programming, and very quickly, the vocabulary of political dialogue changed on Main Street. What had previously seemed unspeakable became common vocabulary. In this way, formerly arch-conservative opinions slid into more of a mainstream position.

A decade later, a media billionaire from Australia started an alternative news service patterned after the worst of the British Fleet Street rags.

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz

In the manner of Adriaen van der Werff:
Bubble-blowing Girl with a Vanitas Still Life
(1680 - 1775)

"He spends his wealth on the equivalent of candy and gum."

We were the first country founded on the principle that every citizen was granted the freedom to pursue happiness. Unsurprisingly, this freedom has not resulted in unbridled happiness. Like always, true happiness seems intermittent and the purview of a select few. Most seem to more or less content themselves with the understanding that they possess the right to pursue happiness, even if it continually eludes them. Happiness, under this freedom's influence, seems to have taken many curious forms, the Second Amendment right to bear arms among the strangest. Who would naturally correlate gun possession with happiness? The Beatle's tune Happiness Is A Warm Gun was intended as irony rather than a declaration of natural fact.

Happiness can be a tricky objective.

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz