Savings
Unknown artist: Saved (19th century)
"They seem to be aching for a comeuppance from Congress."
Christians associate saving with salvation, the deliverance from harm. Savings might seem even more beneficial than a single act of Saving, though in practice, especially in our new NextWorld context, Savings holds an entirely different connotation. One might innocently presume that as a result of Savings, for instance, that one might necessarily have accumulated a nest egg available to purchase stuff. Not so in NextWorld economics; there, the best one might expect from expansive Savings might be fewer future obligations. In a cash economy, nothing will necessarily accumulate as a result, though lower demand on income might eventually result in some surplus. The purpose of Savings in NextWorld exists only on paper. They're intended to make it appear that we'll have no deficit going forward into future years. For this to be the case, of course, the "Savings" would need to focus on paying down pre-existing Deficits, but that does not seem to be the intention here. No, the purpose seems to be to make the economy appear to be credit-worthy, capable of assuming even more significant deficits to subsidize our poor, suffering one-percenters. The billionaires are wailing and desperately need the public to bail them out again.
In practice, Savings means cutting. In NextWorld terms, it means eliminating even essential services.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 02/20/2025
Thomas Holcroft: The Larder (1806)
from Henry Fielding's 1742 novel
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams.
A Difference Nobody Could Miss
Mid-February reliably brings Spring along the forty-seventh parallel, though an arctic intrusion slowed the usual warming this year. The sun crosses some angle where its light reveals a dimension winter withholds. Trees suddenly show height and breadth, and the sky turns the most reassuring shade. A few days spent struggling to shrug off the accumulated snow and, what do you know, it started smelling like Springtime, too. Linda Sue, our housecleaner, chirped that she was so reassured to see the robins flocking in our yard. Flickers descended from up in the mountains to strip our ornamental crabapples bare before they started budding and discarding their fermented fruits. I felt moved to drive my pick-up across the state line to find some fruit tree spray. I'm dedicated to properly pruning the Sacred Apricot and the two newer Maribelle trees this year. I always enter Winter reluctantly, uncertain if I can face up to and survive another isolation. Spring, though, lures me in a month before the calendar finally insists it's here. The calendar and the meteorological always disagree at this time of year, but the angle of the shadows defines a difference that nobody can miss. This was a winter of considerable discontent. May this Spring bring a hasty impeachment. May the inept insurrectionists receive everything they ever feared they'd deserve. I want our country to be of thee and me and you again!
TheWiseKing
Thomas Holctoft: The Welcome (1806)
from Henry Fielding's 1742 novel
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams.
"He obviously had no viceroy insisting The King Is Wise."
Our incumbent has taken to referring to himself as King. He'd starting making "kingly" pronouncements from his first day in office, though most of these seemed eminently ignorable, just so much bluster. But the delusion seemed to expand as his tenure lengthened, culminating in a self-published magazine cover depicting him in an ermine-trimmed coat and crown. He'd replaced Time at the top of the cover with his name, as if to amplify the depth of his growing delusion. He performs like an eight-year-old might, aching for a sword fight. He looks ridiculous, though he doesn't seem to notice, for few experiences are more entrancing than such imaginings. To elevate oneself more than entrances, it quite literally ennobles. It's all delusion, of course, but the most uplifting sort. The notorious madness of kings originates in just this way. Even those who inherit their crown are subject to this come-down, for the limitations of every charter tend to far outweigh the power they bestow. Real kings learn in their earliest training not how to cope with great authority but how to cope with the more humbling reality of their situation.
They learn that they were born more figurehead than anything.
Innuendo
Thomas Holctoft: Squire Guzzle (1806)
from Henry Fielding's 1742 novel
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams.
" … no jury in this universe fails to identify the guilty party."
Being a nation of laws, we highly value evidence. We insist upon more than mere rumor to indict and beyond-doubt evidence to convict. We respect habeas corpus. We prefer to freely cross-examine our witnesses, and we expect them to respond. We have been unaccustomed to moving based solely upon anybody's say-so. NextWorld, though, attempts to run on Innuendo. A mere slur might spur some serious response. Someone without a portfolio might insist that they've cut waste and abuse without producing evidence of either, as if they could replace two hundred and fifty years of disciplined engagement with whispers. Further, nobody seems interested in claiming responsibility. The Who Done It resolves to, at best, vague pronouns. When a federal judge asks who's in charge, the Justice Department defender can't respond, claiming they don't know, so the judge reminds the court of the penalties involved in lying to the court.
The usual sources of vetted information shut down, as if we didn't need to remain well-informed about our government's performance and the spread of the latest infectious diseases.
Dis-
Thomas Holctoft: Lawyer Doublefee (1806)
from Henry Fielding's 1742 novel
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams.
" … They exclusively worship craven images."
NextWorld seems full of imaginary enemies. Former friends and associates apparently turned on us, though I remain unsure just what their infraction was. One morning, I learned that they were also vilified. I wondered if we would have any allies left at the rate we seemed to be chasing them off. Trust collapsed into enmity. Dignity coalesced into infamy. Cooperations evaporated into clouds of obvious Dis-information. Praise became distrust. Admiration turned into public Dis-gust. The incumbent couldn't say enough bad things about anybody. Fascism apparently thrives on a steady diet of imaginary enemies.
But it's not only trading partners who receive these bum's rush characterizations.
MiddleNightMusings
Thomas Holctoft: Salutation (1806)
from Henry Fielding's 1742 novel
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams.
" … it will not be because we knew what to do with it."
My nights have grown longer over the month since NextWorld emerged. Sleep has come in disconnected segments. If I wake a few hours before my alarm rings, I'm apt to opt not to go back to sleep. My monkey mind won't stop grinding, sorting through the disturbing incoming information. Irresolution makes for a disquieting diet.
I sit up with a cat on my lap.
BeLeef
Thomas Holctoft: Parson Trulliber (1806)
from Henry Fielding's 1742 novel
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams.
" … indulging in innocuously guilty pleasures to discover some sense of freedom …"
I suppose I've been steadily accumulating my belief system since just after birth. I don't know this for sure, but I could speculate that my beliefs are merely the sum of my exposures, though that assertion somehow doesn't seem completely genuine. I understand, as nobody else ever could, how I weighted my absorption, favored some inputs over others, and utterly avoided placing myself in the position where some might influence me. I remember back in the eighties when a vendor mentioned how she'd discovered an entertaining new radio commentator. She said he was on for hours daily and couldn't help but listen in as she made her rounds between clients. She played a piece of one of his programs as she drove us to a lunch meeting. I'd never heard of Rush Limbaugh before. I was appalled by his program. I felt as though my vendor had shared porn with me. Her not-even-a-little-bit-guilty indulgence convinced me I should probably not be doing business with her. I quietly withdrew her contracts as they expired and never hired another contractor from her firm.
It seemed to me that she had been poisoned.
Deficits
Thomas Holcroft: The empty purse (1806)
"Damn those who never learned how to manage money!"
The key might be to balance. The very wealthy are different from the rest of us because they exclusively live on somebody else's money. It amounts to a wise way to live if you can get away with it. The more complicated way to live must be hand to mouth, or hand to forehead when there's not enough. Those who live by exchanging cash or, heaven forbid, gold, forfeit the possibility of leverage, a magical process by which one can comfortably live beyond one's means. Galbreath said that every generation seems to need to relearn the lessons leverage extends. They usually learn by leveraging too far beyond even their magically-extended means to utterly undermine their dreams. They default on their debt and undermine their credit. This catastrophic event instantly evaporates prosperity, sometimes permanently leaving the debtor in penury.
But I speak here of individuals and corporations, not reserve currency nations.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 02/13/2025
Hi Red Center: Bundle of Events
Designed by George Maciunas
Published by Fluxus
Edited by Shigeko Kubota
(1965)
Tracks They Left Before
This might be the Cabin Fever Edition of my Weekly Writing Summaries, for these stories emerged into a frozen world featuring snow and ice. Most of this winter seemed barely different from Fall, but Arctic air finally descended. It's been a winter wonderland since. I've been exhibiting my snow shoving technique, which I perfected through six Colorado winters. I learned to avoid shoveling there, which requires lifting, sometimes heavy lifting. I employ my snowplow-like snow shover to nudge the stuff out of my way. A snow cover makes The Villa seem cozier, though I've been avoiding building a fire, even though I have plenty of firewood. It's like I'm concerned that I might run out, so I wear my down vest around the house. The cats have been reluctant to go out but still resist using the litter box. They despise walking through snow and carefully reuse tracks they left before.
BigMysteries
Hi Red Center. Canned Mystery (c.1964) Distributed by Fluxus
Inscriptions and Marks
Inscription: bottom of can, in artist's hand: The letter on the bottom of the can - either H or I - is a code referring to the contents. The code can only be broken by opening the can, which then changes the work....
—-
"This somnambulance could be killing us!"
Since this NextWorld formally began on January 20, 2025, mysteries have been proliferating for me. They started in the moments following inaguration when the new incumbent tied into what, just a scant hour before, had been universally-recognized as the world's most successful economy, the envy of every other nation. The acceptance speech, or what passed for one, disparaged what universal concensus had previously praised. We were transformed from a prosperous country into a pauper one necessitating wholesale restructuring. Budget cuts were not just proposed but imposed, even though the incumbent was never given that particular constitutional power. Mass layoffs were implemented, again without the authority to initiate them. I could not imagine how this magic had occurred, from prosperity to the very edge of penury, in minutes. Never in the history of this world had any country fallen so quickly and so far.
Since then, the mysteries have only deepened.
BigPicture
Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel:
Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1557) Published by Hieronymus Cock
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
This engraving hauntingly illustrates the proverb that the big fish always eats the little fish. Starting with the larger-than-life fish at its center, the image teems with grotesque activity, as bodies spill out of other bodies and hybrid creatures walk and fly about. Pieter Bruegel seems to take a dim view of humanity here, one of disgust at its seemingly endless capacity to cannibalize itself. This is epitomized in the hybrid fish-person at left carrying off its prize, another fish, in its gaping mouth. In the foreground, a man directs a child’s gaze toward the scene, telling him to “behold” (ecce) the proverbial truth on display.
"Those incapable of imagining a coherent BigPicture should never be considered leadership material."
My degree compelled me to enroll in a Systems Thinking class when I went to university. This was considered cutting edge at the time. In it, I was introduced to a few cybernetic precepts and assigned to "design a nuclear-powered electricity generating plant.” I knew nothing about nuclear power or generating electricity, but the instructor showed me how to start with a BigPicture notion of how something like that would have to be configured to work. It would require certain inputs to produce desired outputs, and specific functions would need to occur within the system. The professor demonstrated how to group similar functions into what he referred to as "subsystems." I needed to let go of my natural need to describe details to succeed. I wouldn't need to concern myself with what bolts might hold together a combustion chamber. Those were "mere" details. To arrive at a useful BigPicture, I'd need to presume more than any plant designer needs to define. I was instructed to maintain a useful altitude.
From that perspective, I surprised myself by creating a reasonably practical-seeming high-level portrait of the plant in that exercise.
DeVoting
Anonymous: Cartoon of the funeral of Pastor Abraham van de Velde, 1677
Gallery Notes:
Cartoon of the funeral of Reverend Abraham van de Velde, June 14, 1677. A long funeral parade of 4 rows of men with steep ears or donkey ears moves with the corpse of Ds. van der Velde from the House of Unrest over 'the miserable kerkhof', past some tombstones with appropriate inscriptions to the church of the Spiritual Supreme Wore. Some crying sisters lead the procession; in the middle a banner with the inscription 'The profession of Troyen'. The print includes a text sheet with legend. The Footian pastor had previously been banished from Utrecht and played a role in the conflict in Zeeland between the Footians and Coccejans in 1675.
—
"He never understood why he couldn't make the universe dance once he'd gained advantage."
In NextWorld, accolites will vote to enable their leader to choose what to support. That leader will ignore popular opinion and decide to satisfy his desire for vengence against both those he imagined wronged him and innocent, unrelated citizens, for their leader considers himself omnipotent. Their leader intends this novel use of enfrancisement to undermine the future will to vote. As citizens see that their votes influence nothing, they might choose to disenfranchise themselves further. Their indifference could become the most significant influence in future elections, guaranteeing that only the most dishonest candidates succeed. The DeVoted followers might never suspect that they are victims of deliberate DeVoting, a betrayal of everything their country used to say it stood for. By then, the population will have become overwhelmingly cynical, able to explain everything wrong without exhibiting a notion about what might have always been right or how to repair anything broken. It becomes Down With Everything except their disconnected leader. Then it becomes Down With Him, too.
Those most supportive of DeVoting will naturally be the least capable of deciding anything.
ManifestingDestinies
Albert Bierstadt: Rocky Mountains, "Lander's Peak" (1863)
"God the Father manifests as a terrible sword whenever people get involved."
A gleaming emanates from those who believe themselves on a God-given mission. They are not merely existing or just living, but actively Manifesting. Manifesting what? Their Destinies, of course. They might not hold an explicit vision of their end result. Still, they hold an unshakable conviction that they have been especially chosen to deliver something transforming for themselves and the world. These people are crazy, yet if anybody's likely to accomplish something, it seems most likely to be these driven people. They can be self-sacrificial, unconcerned about their well-being. They can also seem completely self-absorbed, uninterested in anything other than their particular obsession. They often exemplify the sin of self-importance, for even given their sometimes considerable self-sacrifices, they always seem to make whatever they're overcoming about them.
These self-selected envoys from God seem odd.
UpRoarious
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.
Sociopathy
Patricq Kroon: Succession of Spanish dictatorships (1930)
Gallery Notes:
The Spanish King Alfonso XIII watches as the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera falls off the assembly line and is succeeded (in 1930) by the next dictator Dámaso Berenguer. Design for a political cartoon.
"They seem offensively self-centered."
Certain characteristics seem common to the MAGA Class. The traits seem strangely consistent, as if each proponent had been schooled in the same comportment, for each exhibits similar patterns. A MAGA might be reasonably expected to profess Christianity, though not any innocuous odd mainstream kind. They tend to "be" evangelical, which means they carry an explicit obligation to try to convert everyone else to their belief system. This notion must require enormous ego strength to fuel what must eventually seem like serial failures. However, it appears that MAGAs also tend to stay within a narrow social circle where the bulk of people have already "accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior," whatever that might mean. They tend to carry the certainty of The Saved. Whatever sins might have spotted their past, they seem to feel washed clean from them now. They speak and act with unusual impunity.
They might believe they are not beholden to obey specific laws and rules.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 02/06/2025
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.
The American Way
Master of the Die, After Raphael:
Three Cupids Playing With An Ostrich (16th century)
"The stence of competing righteousnesses clogged the nostrils."
The American Way must be one phenomenon that can only be recognized when seen because it sure seems to defy description. I could haul out the fife and drum and affect a limping march while performing an old English drinking song about a gay blade. Very few would take offense at my performance because we were seemingly all raised with that representation, and we immediately recognize it as really about us. Call us, "Macaroni!" We expropriated much of who we are and what we've become from close associations with people from other traditions, other nations. If we aren't a melting pot, we're a slag heap, incompletely assimilated bits and pieces coexisting more or less. Our unity seems to come solely from our inherent diversity: out of many, one. This tenuous identity has been a defining trait through decades of misadventures.
This identity has been particularly annoying to efficiency experts, and few professions have ever been more American than efficiency engineering.
The American Scream
Frederic Edwin Church: Our Banner in the Sky (1861)
Gallery Text:
"Within this vibrant scene of atmospheric flux, an opening within a roiling cloud layer reveals stars against a blue firmament. The barren tree in the foreground doubles as a pole for this celestial apparition of the “broad stripes and bright stars” of the U.S. flag. Following the rapid succession of political provocations that led to Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter, Church channeled his belief in the divine righteousness of the Union cause into this patriotic visual spectacle.
As the sectarian conflict stretched from weeks into months, the oil sketch, with its allegorical river valley resembling the Catskills and the Hudson River, was translated into a popular chromolithograph. The New York branch of Goupil & Cie issued the prints as a subscription fundraiser to support the families of Union soldiers. This is one of the few lithographs from the series that Church painted by hand."
" … trying to rebuild a society similar to the one that existed on the last day of Joe Biden's administration."
It seems in the nature of countries that they do something monumentally stupid every once in a while. Some of them might have seemed like a good idea to a few. Still, ultimately, nobody holds that opinion because these events introduce an extended recovery period during which the country gets to reconsider every belief it ever held. Brexit was such an event for Britain. The firing on Fort Sumpter serves as an example of us doing stupid to ourselves. We still struggle with integrating the ramifications of that single short-sighted act.
However wise or wonderful, every country takes its turn.
The American Dream
Elihu Vedder: The Fates Gathering in the Stars (1887)
Gallery Notes:
Elihu Vedder depicted the three Fates of Greek mythology working the thread of life: Clotho spins the thread, Lachesis fixes its length, and Atropos cuts it at the appointed time of death. Their symbolic tools—spindle, distaff, and shears—rest in the foreground, emphasizing the Fates’ decisive role in matters of life and death. Vedder adapted this painting from an illustration he had designed for an 1884 publication by Edward FitzGerald—a translation of the work of 11th-century poet Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát. Vedder was attracted to mysterious, visionary subject matter. Here, he explored metaphysical questions of life, death, and afterlife, subjects at the core of Khayyám’s poetry.
"We will never feel completely satisfied with this perfection."
People have been trying to improve our Constitution since the day it was ratified. It was born broken, the product of debate and compromise, not even aspiring to perfection. It was genius, though, in perhaps only one aspect. It was deliberately drafted to be amendable. It was created to be changed. Change, therefore, would not be evidence of something having been broken. Change would help realize aspiration, which might have been the whole purpose of our Constitution in the first place. It was an aspirational document rather than the final word. A beginning, never the end. It might have been that the Founders envisioned an ending to their story. If so, history has so far foiled that intention. Between those firmly believing that our Constitution is the word of God and those who perhaps equally firmly believe it was the product of typically imperfect people lies the playing field upon which we create our history's first drafts. Our future might draw a few conclusions about it, but we certainly can't.
The resulting government mirrors the Constitution in one crucial aspect.
The Biggest Lie
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.”
The Biggest Lie in American politics insisted that our country has been stolen by faceless bureaucrats and, in its later configurations, by an unidentified "Deep State." It insisted that our government no longer belonged to us because its laws seemed to hurt rather than reward us. Of special focus, income taxes were characterized as theft and government services as "inefficient," another undefined term intended to mean "wasteful." Lost in these arguments was any sense of how wealthy our country was, perhaps because few could even distantly imagine how wealthy that might have actually been. It was easier for most of us to imagine our government's finances as roughly similar to our household, where perennial income shortfalls continually threatened solvency when we were collectively wealthy beyond almost anyone's wildest imagination. We were in the postwar years, rich enough to personally bankroll the economies of Britain, Europe, and Japan. Our debt became the free world's burgeoning prosperity, and we more than made back every penny we expended, whether in direct aid or financing.
We were so wealthy during the immediate postwar period that our government spent the equivalent of the value of every bit of privately held property on defenses we would never use, and this while steadily increasing the support supplied to disadvantaged citizens.
The CEO Disease
Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait with Cigar
Original Language Title: Selvportrett med sigar
(1908-1909)
" … nobody's pissed off Old Mary enough. Yet."
Thirty-three years ago this month, I went to work as a very junior consultant with a boutique Silicon Valley consulting firm. Our clients included most of the hot high-tech companies of the time, with Apple topping the long list. I'd gone from a middle management position in a regional mutual life insurance company to being an advisor to some of the best and brightest minds in the acknowledged finest high-tech companies. I found those minds to be largely unexceptional, for they seemed to be prey to the self-same delusions and misconceptions within which I'd caught myself dabbling. Something extraordinary happens whenever we engage in project work together. I had been working on an understanding of this mysterious something. That was a big reason I'd agreed to take that job, even though it gave me a pay cut and demanded that I travel four or five days each week. I sensed a considerable upside. If I could work with these great companies, perhaps I could learn their secret. Maybe I could even finally become proficient in the project work I'd failed to master over the prior decade.
Several of our clients were led by what I understood to be true industry icons.
The Fourth Stage of Cruelty: Reward
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."
"The Final Stage of Cruelty, following the casually random, wide-ranging cruelties practiced through Stage Three, occurs posthumously via some form of autopsy. The corpus will be literally cut open as if to find the source of the evil he incarnated. The coroner will find nothing to explain the behavior. No brain tumor or pituitary problem. He will ultimately be judged as apparently normal except for those disturbing behaviors he seemed compelled to inflict. He was not, as many speculated through his life, particularly sick. Anyone with a dick even that size might have been tempted to act out, but he went beyond mere over-compensating behavior. His performance eclipsed acting. He will have died at his own hand. Not necessarily suicidally, but as a direct result of casually inflicting some genuine cruelty. Eventually, even the universe loses her patience and takes out a particularly errant child. This one never matured into an actual adult. He died as he existed, at the emotional age of about eight. May we finally rest in peace without him." NextWorld, The Third Stage of Cruelty: Perfection
I began this final installment of this series within my Nextworld Series with the final paragraph from the next-to-last installment, for I presaged this ending there.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/30/2025
Guiseppe Scolari: Saint George and the Dragon (1570/1600)
How You Decided To Treat Me
Cruelty might be the most unnecessary weapon. It sits like a turd atop an already desecrated dessert, an always absolutely unnecessary embellishment. Whatever might have been intended, its footprints point toward the perpetrator as the guiltiest party because he chose to mete excessive punishment rather than justice. Cruelty might be the victimizer of choice, exclusively employed by those most skilled at victimizing themselves. It remains the bully's favorite response and properly frames the bully's character. Cruelty is always beneath its deployer, effortlessly degrading whatever their standing. The more lofty one's position, the greater the perversion cruelty produces. Our President seems to revel in his power to inflict cruelty on the most innocent among us. This renders him cheaper than most imagined he was, and most already imagined him as cheaper than a two-dollar whore. He'll try to see you by betting a buck-fifty. So far, His administration has suffered greatly from its focus on retribution, not to even scores but to humiliate those not even charged with crimes. This renders them petty rather than powerful, impotent instead of strong. When they assert extra-judicial powers, they disclose how little they know or understand about the land they insist they are dedicated to improving. If humiliating themselves will make America greater, their tactics might prove successful, but in the curious calculus of cruelty, the outcome always mirrors how you decided to treat me.
The Third Stage of Cruelty: Perfection
William Hogarth: Cruelty in Perfection
Series/Book Title: The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751)
"May we finally rest in peace without him."
As The First Stage of Cruelty finding a foothold created space for the institutionalization of cruelty in the Second Stage, the efficient expansion of cruelty within Stage Two burst the barriers into casually practicing any and every perversion after guilt-free cruelty comes unimaginable brutality. What might have started as torture morphs into murder. No limits exist for the experienced. Those who might have dabbled in Stage One Cruelty or felt sucked into Stage Two, if they didn't excuse themselves or flee, finally feel free to simply go off the rails into Stage Three. Hogarth referred to this stage as Perfection because nothing inhibited its excess. It could no longer be considered anomalous. It became just whatever it always was, but now without limits. No guilt intrudes—no sense of error or danger. If pure evil exists, it only persists after reaching Stage Three. Stage Three Cruelty puts everybody at risk because its artillery knows no trajectory. There will be accidents, and innocents will, of course, be destroyed. The perpetrator will have lost their inhibitions by then.
There will be no reformation.
The Second Stage of Cruelty
William Hogarth: The Second Stage of Cruelty
Alternate Title: The Four Stages of Cruelty, Plate 2.
Series/Book Title: The Four Stages of Cruelty
1751
" … no business even attempting to lead others."
Cruelty becomes insidious once institutionalized. However benevolent an institution might have seemed when founded, it might always remain vulnerable to corruption. The corruption might first seem merely seductive, a not-quite guilty pleasure, diverting entertainment. It was probably championed then by someone who seemed unafraid of judgments, somehow above routine worldly cares, a millionaire, seeming unusually powerful. Few would have noticed how vulnerable he felt, for even he was probably not in touch with those depths. He stood securely in only two dimensions and, lacking depth, could have been easily toppled then by even a concerted casual wind. But he stood. He stood and didn't entirely embarrass himself, and he took the wrong message from this early success, which was actually more like an early absence of overt failure. He continued until his behavior became his identity, and it became merely expected. He attracted followers who, accustomed to mimicking, behaved the same. Soon enough, those performances no longer raised so many eyebrows. They still seemed uncouth but no longer obscene. Values had already eroded.
When institutions turn to cruelty, they render it efficient.
The First Stage of Cruelty
William Hogarth: The First Stage of Cruelty (1751)
Series/Book Title: The Four Stages of Cruelty
Alternate Title: The Four Stages of Cruelty, Plate 1.
"I'm asking for a dear friend of mine and yours."
The initial stage of cruelty must come subtly if it's to be sustained. Too overt an entry can shock even partisans into premature recognition. It ideally occurs against some other, preferably one long-reviled. The torturer often targets minorities for precisely this reason. The best victims naturally have the fewest supporters. Some leakage remains unavoidable, though, scrupulously one designs their offensive. Remember, cruelty is inherently offensive. It will seem at least somewhat repulsive to every witness, even the most thoroughly enthralled. The executioner, therefore, has, by long practice, characterized himself as the greatest victim in the transaction. "Poor Henry, whose fate calls for him to behead people for a living!" In extreme cases, the director of the cruelty can comfortably characterize himself as the worst off for the experience. Just imagine! He has to forever live with the memory of the execution while the victims hardly felt a thing as they exited.
The psychology does not seem terribly complicated.
NoNews
Christoffel van Sichem II:
David receives the news of the death of Absalom
Alternate Title:
A ruler on a throne rends his clothes upon receipt of a message (1646)
"I can't be bothered now!"
I was once a perfect news consumer. At ten, when I started delivering newspapers, I read each edition from cover to cover, skipping over the parts that didn't interest me. I was there when NPR first launched and quickly became an ardent listener. For decades, my alarm clock woke me with BBC or Morning Edition. I rarely missed a broadcast and felt deficient whenever I did. I thought I could not live without those twice daily doses, morning and evening. I subscribed to the local paper, too, and read it through. I considered these habits to be necessities of citizenship and to be ill-informed, a high crime, or at least a significant misdemeanor. When our newly-instilled Chief Executive was sworn in the first time, I found myself suddenly unable to listen to the travesties reported twice daily as news. It seemed like unnecessary information, as meaningful as something produced by the Worldwide Wrestling Federation because it probably was. Further, my old, reliable NPR reporters were retiring on me, replaced by what sounded like interns who insisted upon ending every declarative statement with another question mark. I felt as though the more I heard, the dumber I became. I painfully weaned myself off of my NPR habit.
I retained my New York Times and Washington Post, though I made no attempts to scour those from end to end as I had with my small city publication.
Dreadfulled
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
(tame) hummed hopefully to others (1966)
Inscriptions and Marks
Signed: l.r.: Sister Mary Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: TAME [IT']S [NO]T / Somebody up there likes us. / A hum came suddenly into his head, which seemed to him a good hum such as is hummed hopefully to others. Pooh / Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions upon millions. That fear is kept away by looking upon all those about one who are bound to one as friends or family; but the dread is nevertheless there and one hardly dares think of what would happen to one if all the rest were taken away. Kierkegaard
"They are terrorists …"
The dream was back again last night. I do not recall the last time it visited, but it had not been so long ago that I wasn't familiar with the scene. We were driving through a hallucination. I'd lost my visual field, so when I looked out through the windshield, it looked to me like we were driving on a body of water. I knew there had to be a road there somewhere, and I suspected The Muse could see it, but I couldn't. There was also something about the music playing that seemed especially upsetting. We were in a precarious balance but at great risk of crashing. I woke up, but the dream persisted. It took an hour of sitting up in the dark for the vestiges of it to finally leave me, and even now, the memory persists.
I realize how exhausted I feel.
Cowardice
Kiyochika Kobayashi: The god of cowardice (1895)
"Only cowards engage in endless wars."
Ares, the Greek God of war, was known for his brutality and cowardice. When discovered to have been conducting an affair with Aphrodite, he and his lover were humiliated before the other Gods. Throughout history, mythical and not, great leaders have been reluctant warriors. They could muster an army but would rather settle differences more peacefully. The inherent cruelty of battle renders it a distasteful choice and always has. Beware leaders who rattle swords, for they disclose the opposite of what their saber-rattling might suppose. They might outwardly appear brave, but they will be quaking beneath their armor. Those who pick fights are rarely the mightiest. They attempt to chase off their opponents by appearing fierce. Once engaged, they're more likely to attack the most vulnerable than the more powerful. They invade schools to entrap parents rather than engage with peers as peers, perhaps because they never feel equal or superior.
Our MAGA maniacs come similarly shackled.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/23/2025
Jack Gould: Untitled [composite photograph of a man doing a jumping twist; continuous motion] (c. 1950)
I Dare Not Avert My Eyes
The content shift seemed stark enough, but the underlying context shift seemed more consequential as we moved away from a government sworn to tell the truth to one dedicated to delivering only self-serving lies. Lies betray even the liar, though, and prove unreliable. They backfire. What might have been intended to help the cause often hurts it. In just four days, our new/old Chief Executive sparked several constitutional lawsuits and ample attempted crimes and misdemeanors to justify at least one impeachment inquiry. More will be coming, for this guy clearly knows no limits and personifies self-delusion. His performance seems more feature than problem and reassures me that this NextWorld Series might prove to have been amply justifiable. Under Yogi Berra's old advice that one can see a lot by looking, merely observing and reflecting upon this performance seems to have already better prepared me to cope with its presence. I remain perhaps unjustifiably optimistic that this performance won't last long, certainly not for four more years, but its inherent self-sabotaging nature probably amplifies its fragility. Tough guys feel the weakest inside.
The most confident require continual reassurance.
ContinuouslyTranslating
John Singer Sargent: Figure and Head Studies (1872)
" … his Base eases into apparently effortless understanding."
I cannot comprehend most of whatever The Incumbent says. He mumbles. He exclusively speaks in incomplete sentences that often lack an object, subject, or coherent verb. He seems to speak in a shorthand dialect that some of his more fervent followers certainly seem to understand. I do not know how they accomplish this feat, which seems like mindreading to me. My best explanation comes from my experience working with a partner named Jeff after I joined that boutique Silicon Valley consulting firm back in the nineties. Jeff had previously worked as an engineer for Attari, the early video game producer, and with Apple. He was considered a rainmaker in the consulting firm, for he seemed to know everybody in the valley. Name a company, and he invariably had an old friend there with whom he was on a first-name basis. Several of them were CEOs. They'd grant him an interview and often enough agree to sponsor at least a trial workshop.
Jeff baffled me because as I was learning how to teach that firm's flagship workshop offering, I had been sitting in the back of the room watching Jeff facilitate.
Backpedaling
Unknown: Clown riding donkey backwards (1820 - 1835)
"Yadda yadda, spink, spank, spink!"
Forward progress induces much Backpedaling for the experienced self-saboteur, who tends to make a hash of most things. They cannot seem to stop themselves from going overboard with every initiative. He includes a full cup or more if the recipe calls for a tablespoonful. Consequently, his cakes tend to crumble. He unwittingly encourages his opposition and chases away his partisans with each pompous proclamation. Part of the problem seems to be his penchant for proclaiming, a pastime most Presidents use sparingly, if at all. They were apparently more aware that most changes, indeed, most expressions of a President's power, have to pass through those contentious halls of Congress before they have lasting effect. Proclamations tip off the opposition and so render whatever's proclaimed much less likely to happen. Proclaiming remains an integral part of every self-saboteur's portfolio, though. This inclusion results in much pomp but very little circumstance, some smoke blown over what might have been much more loyal partisans. This even offends those who might have otherwise been a more loyal opposition.
At some level, attempts at Backpedaling rarely succeed.
Apologists
Oliver Herford:
The Goat, for "The Crocodile," by Oliver Herford (1891)
"When you're President, the Apologist supply is infinite."
Whenever a new incumbent ascends office, a crowd of true believers quickly encircle the new President. Their primary purpose might be the opposite of their apparent one, for they might seem to be there to ward off any serious misperceptions and set the story straight from the outset, though they're likely also defending their delicate egos lest some inconvenient truth slips out. It's important to understand that everyone engaging in the following farce already knows the worst about the incoming President. They know most of his most serious shortcomings, for he'd been featuring them as evidence of his superior experience for the position throughout the campaign. Seriously, anyone still able to stand in public and spout self-importance after being convicted of rape and fraud might have curiously earned his place as the leader of the free world, a role that might require an egregious amount of shamelessness.
The Apologists have a ready response to every criticism.
Rationalizing
Helen Hyde: In the Rain (1898)
"The result will mete out its own punishment. Vengence was never mine to deliver."
Slightly more people voted to elect The Oldest President (TOP) than voted against him ever holding public office again. He had abused his privileges during his first turn. He had been promising ever greater abuses if returned to office, so those who couldn't see any attraction to him as either candidate or ex-president were baffled as to why anyone might feel moved to waste their franchise on such a clearly unworthy character. Their vote amounted to an act of self-abuse, I suspect, or maybe it was just a mistake. Ask, though, and one acquires a fresh lesson in the human power of Rationalization, the attempt to make some irrational act seem reasonable in retrospect. Every terrible public servant has trailed a long line of Rationalizers behind them. They've attracted the Lesser Of Two Evils Crowd, who always seem to see only the worst in anyone representing an opposing party. They'd vote for Hanibal Lecter if he were a Repuglican running against anyone enjoying a more conventional diet. They also attract the partisan who never even investigate alternatives. They vote without reflection, choosing not to choose, a part of this country's sometimes overly-proud suffrage tradition. Democracies include even those opposed to democracy.
Then there are the Pig Shavers, the ones who split hairs.
DogEaters
Adriaen van de Velde: Dogs (17th century)
" … they will insist that they represent the real spirit of the laws …"
We speak of the Republican'ts and the Democans as if our society's essential divide lay in mere political labels. It likely lies much deeper than that, as deep as belief and perspective might lie. On one side, we have a cadre who, try though they might (they don’t really try at all), still firmly believe they inhabit a zero-sum world. Conversely, we have those who understand it needn't necessarily be so characterized. It can be a zero-sum world if we insist that it must be, for the world, indeed, our universe, seems poised to be responsive to whatever belief we bring when considering its nature. When it comes to universes, it's not believe-it-when-we-see-it, but we see what we believe—it cooperatively becomes whatever we believe. The eyes we bring to the inquiry make all the difference. Of course, we're always blind to the eyes we cannot bring to an investigation. The Republican'ts, like the Southern Confederates a century and three-quarters before, experienced a zero-sum world of their own projection, where one person's loss was necessarily another's gain. They seriously entertained the notion that force alone could secure their future. They held hostage the means for securing their fortune, believing they could hold justice at bay indefinitely, infinitely.
The zero-sum people see a dog-eat-dog world, where every newborn puppy's destiny must be to either master the skill of puppy killing, or they will undoubtedly be killed and eaten by another puppy.
Inconstancy
Allart van Everdingen: Reynard disguises as monk and distracts cock (17th century)
"Hail to the chief."
[Author's Note: I draw this story from various archetypal descriptions of a psychological type: this one, the eternal eight-year-old who cannot successfully focus upon anything for long. The particulars might misrepresent, though I feel confident that these patterns paint quite an accurate portrait. When dealing with Inconstancy, any opponent can feel confident that their opponent will be their opponent’s most effective opposition, for they cannot maintain their focus or attention long enough to achieve any strategic objective. Hell, they rarely maintain focus long enough to settle on a coherent strategic objective. They mainly pursue warm air, not possessing adequate attention to heat their story to the point where it truly qualifies as hot air.]
Perhaps his sole superpower lies in his sheer Inconstancy.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/16/2025
John Singer Sargent:
Sketch of Sir David Murray [1849 - 1933]
and John Seymour Lucas [1849- 1923] (Jun 18, 1907)
This Seems Inevitable
Winter finally came in the middle of January. Its tardy arrival served as a lesson for me that all inevitabilities eventually occur, however delayed, and that I might depend upon this one principle. Hell might never freeze over, but nobody ever proposed that it should. It will be enough if the backyard pond freezes over, which it usually does, for a week or so before the end of February. Next week, another long-dreaded inevitability will occur when the least capable individual ever to be elected to the highest office twice is supposed to take an oath he has no intention of even trying to live up to. Warren G. Harding might have been less interested in the office, but he had the public courtesy to die before anybody proposed he run for a second term, and nobody would have. It's inevitable that our next incumbent's lies ultimately get the better of him, for he convinced a spare majority under decidedly false pretenses, and he will prove incapable of delivering on his many contradictory promises. I do not know where his sandcastle will first exhibit cracks, but I sense it won't stand long. He inherits an impossible act to follow, an economy in better shape than any odd anyone can remember, and an unparalleled-in-generations standing in the international order. It seems all downhill from here for him. This seems inevitable.
TakingCredit
Honoré Victorin Daumier:
Very High and Mighty Legitimate Brats.
Peoples, defend yourselves, tear yourselves to pieces,
sacrifice yourselves for these royals,
you belong to them, imbeciles, plate 19 (1834)
"He firmly believes he's smarter than everyone else, which renders him the stupidest …"
On inauguration day, the adults will leave the administration, and a malignant narcissist will move in. He started TakingCredit for good things his predecessor accomplished before he even took office. He seems to maintain such a high opinion of himself that he simply cannot help himself. He seems to firmly believe that he is, indeed, the greatest. He accomplishes this astounding feat of self-esteem by steadfastly refusing to acknowledge anything he might have attempted that didn't quite make the grade. Indeed, his actual track record shows him mostly failing, though if you listen to him and his minions tell the story, he never fails. He will rather quickly begin identifying people who disappointed him. He claims to pick only winners, but his choices inevitably prove faulty. He will fein surprise then and insist that this seldom happens to him and that it was actually somebody else's fault that he selected a faulty incumbent. He maintains a queue of even better candidates, though he insisted before that his original list comprised only the best and brightest.
I will have to get used to having a malign eight-year-old in the highest office in the land.
Disingenuosity
Anonymous, after a design by Hans Baldung Grien:
Tenth commandment:
do not give false testimony about another
[iende gebod: leg over een ander geen vals getuigenis af]
1539
" … the least qualified President in history about to begin his second term."
It would simplify the situation if certain nominees would appear to testify wearing orange jumpsuits. Some of these guys seem like they're interviewing to be included in the Colorado Supermax Class of 2030. They quite transparently lie or withhold or deny. Their clever attorney clearly counseled them to go ahead and be disingenuous. They give Disingenuosity a bad name. History will remember them, but not kindly. Those disseminating straightforward questions become infamous, especially when 60 Minutes replays the juicy part of their testimony after the future incident. There will always be a future incident with these clowns. There always has been. They are uniformly unqualified for whatever role the incoming executive has nominated them to fulfill. Everyone in the hearing room understands they are not voting for or against the clown before them but the impending executive who chose him. Partisans need to appear supportive. Opponents must appear fair and balanced, which is always tricky in a context where the clown in question won't answer even the most straightforward question. This one's mom submitted testimony against him.
He calls known facts with sufficient evidence anonymous rumors and innuendos.
Ineptitude
Israel van Meckenem the Younger:
The Fight over the Trousers (c. 1495)
" … the patience of Job and the countenance of Greek statuary …"
Through his first foray into The Presidency, our impending incumbent proved incredibly, if intermittently, inept. Usually, his operation proved capable of producing run-of-the-mill cruelty and only managed anything more significant by accident. Many attempted initiatives got away from their initiators to take on their own lives, seemingly without meaningful external control. They proved the adage that a broken clock works twice each day, even though it's ordinarily so wrong as to be useless. Those of us opposed to those initiatives learned that we could usually rely upon that administration's inherent Ineptitude, which would have been humorous had it not also been occasionally so disastrous. It was as if the incumbent brought no executive experience into his role, for he seemed incapable of even the barest executive performance. He exhibited little strategic influence, frittering away his time on initiatives that could no more than temporarily annoy his opposition. His opposition would occasionally register outrage when something especially egregious occurred, but they primarily focused on building their coalition and expressing gratitude their opponent was so poorly resourced.
Before taking the oath of office that he will have no intention of upholding, he's been busying himself with selecting prospective cabinet members.
IntoFamiliarity
Rembrandt van Rijn: Peasant Family on the Tramp (c. 1652)
"I might even rediscover who I always was …"
Trump's election as President for the second time left me peering into a dreaded future. I felt curious and confident that he would once again prove himself not nearly up to the task and dreading the inevitable failures he would most certainly produce with his inept attempts. His successful campaign rendered him no smarter or more popular, and it seemed inevitable that he would be dragging his familiar ineptness into everything he attempted to accomplish. I most dreaded that impending bumbling, for he would set about attempting to reinvent wheels his predecessors had already successfully invented, leaving us worse off for his efforts. It seemed a certainty that he would leave us all worse off. We liquidated our stock portfolios and hunkered in, though that's not all we did in response. We also fled IntoFamiliarity as an antidote to the dread.
Finally, almost three years after returning from Exile, I began organizing my tools and basement workshop.
SelfRecrimination
William Blake:
To annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit & false Forgiveness
(1804-08)
"The usual answer will be, "No, there wasn't," but only because there never is."
After any significant loss comes a period of SelfRecrimination, I suspect that the healthiest might engage in the deepest reconsideration of their former positions, for a loss should properly bring some of anyone's basis into question. What of what then seemed so right was so wrong? Could I have credibly owned any alternative position? Would I have agreed to pursue any other end with anything resembling a similar passion? Were my convictions wrong enough to warrant a reconfiguration of my perspective? Each of these questions should rightly feel unsettling, for these challenge the very basis upon which any thinking person holds any position.
Contrary to popular opinion, the best team does not always win.
Pherocity
Spex:
The sovereigns offered their subjects entertainment and fierce beast fights in circuses
[Les souverains offraient à leurs sujets des divertissements et des combats de bêtes féroces dans les cirques]
(1882 - 1884)
" … we cannot help but hear their disturbing noises."
Outrage, outward rage, might be the signature emotion of the MAGA movement. They seem consumed by theatricality, always performing as if they were cast in a production from Ancient Greece where the actors needed to artificially project their voices so the backbenchers could hear their lines. Their every expression seems cartoonish and caricatured. They seem incapable of thoughtfulness or gentleness. They never seem to be merely disappointed with an outcome but enraged. Their emotional content seems unsustainable, but with each new performance, that same familiar character emerges. Whatever the role, they seem to overplay their part. They seem decidedly self-conscious, not just in role but hyper-aware that they're in that role. They rarely, if ever, let down this facade. Some speculate that they're deep down shallow. A seething frustration lies just above their surface. They have an unscratchable itch. They bitch about everything. They would seem ferocious if their performances were in any way believable. They project a phony-seeming form of ferocity instead, mere Pherocity.
They seem to believe everything's a life-or-death matter and a zero-sum game.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/09/2025
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo:
Punchinellos Cooking and Tasting Gnocchi
[Punchinellos’ Repast] (1740/52)
Stay My Course
This week, I saw inklings that we are moving back into a post-truth era with Zuckerberg deciding to stop fact-checking on his Meta platforms. Also, President-Elect Unmentionable released a fresh stream of whoppers. I suspect he's warming up for his inaugural speech, which should set fresh records for fictional content. The need for reliable witnesses has never been greater. In my eighteen years of posting here, I have tried to avoid sharing lies and advice. This hasn't been much of a stretch. I've thought of myself as a principled contributor. I have occasionally, like anybody, been caught echoing what turned out to be false stories or lousy advice. I've quickly taken them down when notified of my error. I look back and wonder how that one slipped through my defenses. I come to the same conclusion. I want to believe the best of everyone. I find it incredible that anyone might want to deliberately spread false information. My nature has made it difficult for me to create this present series, where I'm striving to describe patterns that often violate what I consider to be moral and ethical boundaries.
When our leaders lack moral foundations and ethical edges, their only recourse might be to spread more lies. Hence, another post-truth era. I will not be vacating Facebook, though. I intend to stay and remain the bastian I believe I have always been there. The Muse promised to show me how bluesky works. I might dabble there as I dabble on SubStack and LinkedIn. If I stay in one place, the world will undoubtedly slip by me. It has slipped by me before. Whatever I do, this world will eventually learn to slip by me. For now, though, I will stay my course. Leaving FaceBook would abandon my audience. Why would I do that?
Pretexting
Charles WIlliams: A New Mode of Presenting Two Addresses at Once
(published February 1818)
"We must be their enemy."
When one feels called to save the world, one must find some Pretext for engaging because nobody would ever recognize their savior should they happen upon them. Vonnegut described The Second Coming as featuring an undescribably ugly alien who appears at a suburban shopping mall and communicates exclusively through tap dancing and farting. Rather than recognize salvation in their midst, a disgruntled crowd beat him to death. One might choose to dress themselves up in any costume, but whichever one they choose, it will be a mere Pretext, a cloaking mechanism primarily intended to prevent others from understanding one's agenda. This charade must occur if the means don't matter. If the ends truly justify whatever must be done to achieve them, then deception becomes job one. Making America Great Again, for instance, must involve tearing down America's reputation. The best economy in the world must be characterized as failing. Justice must be framed as fundamentally unjust. Wrongs become violated natural rights. Up must always be referred to as down.
Educating a population in this kind of negative thinking also involves continuous Pretexting.
Threatenings
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.
Newness
Attributed to Philip Dawe: The New Fashioned Phaeton (1776)
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
Devoting less effort to the fabric textures and pearly luster of high-society mezzotint portraits, publishers also mocked sartorial excesses, especially those with foreign sources. In 1770s London, the epithet macaroni was directed at dandyish men and overdressed women who adopted an outrageous, European style and acted in an affected manners that their genders were said to become indistinguishable. Such costumes evidently even made leaving home difficult. This print’s subtitle, “Sic Itur ad Astra” (which translates as “Thus one goes to the stars”) comes from the Roman poet Virgil and suggests that the wigs and expanding carriages shown here have reached astronomical new heights.
—Art Institute of Chicago
"There was never a prescience half as satisfying as projection."
Newness is getting old. As I have aged, the new has increasingly lost its attraction. The information age might have finally done it in, what with the daily builds and too-frequent upgrades. I can't hardly start my laptop without some update needing to be installed, and the old, once-reliable app suddenly behaves differently, never to regain its former utility. We seem too anxious to abandon what was in favor of what never quite is yet. We speak of evolution but experience near-constant revolution. What might I depend upon now?
I struggle even to imagine replacements when an old and once-reliable falls by some wayside.
NuthingBut
Honoré Victorin Daumier:
A Young Man to Whom Nothing is Sacred,
plate 8 from Professeurs Et Moutards (1846)
"We will be inaugurating the lamest duck in our country's history …"
In courts of law in this country, witnesses are compelled to swear to tell "the whole truth and NothingBut." Consequently, telling falsehoods can result in a perjury charge for lying to the jury. Outside of court, nobody holds anybody to such stringent expectations. We all can get a little loose with literal truths, but most of us work hard to avoid materially misrepresenting ourselves if only because few want to be fairly characterized as loose with the truth. We rely upon each other to fairly represent our experiences, so it’s scandalous, if not strictly illegal when a private citizen routinely misrepresents himself. Further, deliberate misrepresentation tends to introduce a parody of a response as repeated attempts to uncover the truth produce responses intended to cloak it further. These interactions resemble old I Love Lucy episodes from the fifties but are not nearly so entertaining.
As of this writing, our current President, Joe Biden, has kept his promise to tell The People the truth.
Statusing
Nicolas Toussaint Charlet:
Metselaar bij een muur [Mason at a wall] (1821)
"They despise themselves most."
With the MAGA crowd, I sense that I could never belong. Though I cannot delineate their selection criteria, they run a more exclusive operation than most country clubs. It seems backward and upside-down from more established segregations, though a few selection criteria seem obvious. They stand in apparent deliberate opposition to more traditional segmentations as if formulated to thumb their nose at an establishment. However, they seem every bit as exclusive as any old-school gentleman's club. Those granted entrance can seemingly do no wrong until they do. They remain blessed regardless of their sins, former or ongoing, much as their leader enjoys blind forgiveness from his followers. They do not perceive themselves as members but as loyal and devoted followers. They insist they're Christian, though apparently only in name. They also claim conservatism as a central organizing principle, which seems unlike any conservatism the good old days knew. It seems secret, though, as if its members were plotting the overthrow of something. Those not allowed into their club believe they represent a malign influence on our politics and treat them with the same respect they traditionally extended to the Klu Klux Klan.
The apparent obsession with status, though, baffles me.
BeingGrudged
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.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/02/2025
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.
—-
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.
Inanities
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.
Vanities
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.
Stupidities
Jean Dubrayet*:
Minerva bindt de Domheid vast met een touw
[Minerva ties the Stupidity with a rope] (c. 1627)
Titelpagina voor een boek met tekenvoorbeelden.
[Title page for a book with drawing examples]
*"Jean Dubrayet was a print maker who is known for works such as Minerva ties the Stupidity with a rope and Portrait of Ajax." (Google AI experiment) I could find no other biographical information on this artist.
" … the trinkets with which our future was purchased."
It might be that history has always been a slave to the Stupidities. When I was still very young, I remember my more ancient elders wondering how their world would get along with the quality of young people coming up to eventually replace them. The young have always known nothing, and to those who knew everything in their time, they unavoidably seem relatively stupid. Youth tend to master stuff that seems meaningless to their elders. Our own Grand Other was showing off her gaming computer, a gift she and her dad built together as a Christmas present. She was proudly displaying the high-quality graphics, which I could barely see. I was thinking that the old text-based Adventure® game I used to play back on that 360 clone in the 70s had far better graphics, and it was text-based. I lasted a few seconds before I excused myself and went to wait for The Muse in the car. It disturbed me deeply that our Grand Other would somehow tumble to such stupidity! (She belongs to an after-school sports team at her high school. Her sport is, and I kid you not, competitive gaming!)
I'm ordering handbaskets.
UnSerious
Cornelis Visscher after Adriaen Brouwer:
Hearing [De Fiool Speelder] (c. 1649-58)
"We seem poised to reenter kindergarten, where the bully holds the pulpit."
We console ourselves by remembering how inept he was the last time he was in office. He managed to use his office to be cruel to innocents, to unconscionably waste resources, and to inflate the deficit toward no discernable end. Still, he mostly proved incapable of inflicting long-term damaging influence. The office of the Presidency quickly snapped back into respectability once he was ousted, even with him endlessly whining that he'd been illegally overturned. He provided nothing that any court considered proof of his assertion. He proved to be an eminently ignorable distraction, a sore loser, and the most UnSerious candidate ever to seek re-election. That he won astounded everyone I know.
This time, he will be the most UnSerious President in the history of this nation.
Surrealizations
Dorothy Dehner: Landscape for Cynics (1945)
"Merry Christmas might take any of a variety of meanings in any NextWorld."
When The Muse and I bought our Villa Vatta Schmaltz, we imagined it would eventually become the center of many extended family gatherings. I imagined that when my kids had children, The Villa would naturally become the over-the-river-and-through-the-woods holiday destination of choice for them, as my folks' place had been for me and my family in my time, but it hasn't. Our twelve-year exile opened space for different patterns to imprint. By the time we returned, we remained as off the holiday radar as we had been when exiled in Washington, DC, and Colorado, both places too absurdly far away and lacking any history for the family to reasonably consider as holiday destinations. So, those generations imprinted on other places for the holidays, though I hadn't reimprinted on this NextWorld until this just passing Christmas.
My Christmas gift was the Surrealization that I had been living embedded in that past notion, that what I had tenuously believed would be the case twenty-some years earlier would likely still eventually come to pass.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/26/2024
Tobias Conrad Lotter:
Astronomische theorieën en uitleg
[Astronomical theories and explanation] (1749)
Adequately Chilling
The first week of Winter brought Spring-like weather with Chinook winds and more rain than we've seen since last Spring. We've had three bomb cyclone systems bump into our coast since Halloween, each bringing fierce wind and much-needed rain. The Winter Wheat, already sprouted in the fields, has gotten a great head start. Our wheatfields sport Spring Green cover while we continue waiting for our first killing frost. I still have last summer's petunias, geraniums, and roses, which are still blooming. I sank the fuchsias into a composter bin; they seem secure enough for now. Winter has not come yet. Moreover, our usual weeks of numbing fog mostly missed us as those wet and windy systems repeatedly scoured our valley. I began a new series this week that has yet to reveal its purpose. After the terrifying results of last Fall's elections, I needed something more positive than politics to focus my attention on. I anticipate a period of great upheaval, even tragedy. I needed to clean out my backlog before taking on another initiative. Winter might not come this season, but the events unfolding on the world's stage threaten to be adequately chilling. I worry about our NextWorld.
UnProcrastinating
Stuart Davis:
Advancing and Retiring Colors Diagram (1942)
" … I can accomplish virtually anything."
Almost four years ago, when we moved back into The Villa Vatta Schmaltz after a twelve-year absence, we just crammed some stuff into whatever corner availed itself, particularly in the basement. Then, life regained momentum, and we didn't find a reason to retrace our earlier decisions. Clogs resulted. Particularly in my basement shop/laundry room, the clutter predominated. I'd just splayed most of my tools along the vast workbench top and worked around that mess. A month ago, I took positive steps toward eradicating that embarrassment. I hired Kurt, our painter, to refinish a peeling back wall, and I pivoted some of the shelving ninety degrees to provide space along its backside for pegboard, where I imagined I could mount my hand tools for tidy and convenient access. Painting done, I've not yet started moving back into the freshly refurbished space.
I am in the process of UnProcrastinating, with the explicit intention of creating a fresh context, if not a NextWorld.
Distinctioning
Jan Luyken: Vrouw Wereld toont kinderen de brede en smalle weg
[Woman World shows children the wide and narrow road] (1699)
" … largely unexplored."
When might this NextWorld appear? From here, the answer to this question seems to depend upon what one considers a distinction between one world and a next. What change, one to another, might qualify as enough to accept it as a genuine difference? I know, this seems awfully subjective. Some people maintain stricter standards than others. It might be that those who acknowledge slight differences as constituting distinctions experience more successful lives, for they might more comfortably manage to "change the world." Those who hold the strictest standard when making such distinctions live in a world that, by self-imposed definition, must always stay the same.
But aren't some changes more obvious?
Faith-Based
Jehan Georges Vibert:
Trial of Pierrot (Not Dated - late 19th century)
"I will have levitated by the means of tugging up on my own shoelaces."
I might be one of the least religious people you could ever meet. I don't have much particular animosity toward religion, only that I don't belong. Their lore doesn't interest me much, and their metaphors tend to lose me. For instance, I will never understand the concept of a personal lord and savior. I cannot understand what that phrase means nor imagine what such a service if competently performed, would even look like in practice. I never bought into the idea of original sin, either. I appreciate the good works various religious bodies perform. I am rightly appalled by the evil organizations engage in, seemingly as a matter of course. Any collection of individuals organized together becomes capable of evil far exceeding any individual's potential. I believe that groups must be more careful lest they inflict unintended damage on others. The notion that one collection of people is necessarily superior to another due to their beliefs disgusts me.
All that said, I acknowledge that my life has been a Faith-Based initiative.
ThinkingIll
Lovis Corinth: Cain (1916)
"No whining!"
Two days into creating my Christmas Poem Cycle and halfway finished, I encountered a definite blockage to completion. I caught myself seething inside. I have been holding an anger, and the old, probably incorrect definition of depression was "anger turned inward." The idea apparently was that inward-aiming anger might fester into deep self-destructive sadness while anger aimed outward might at least dissipate, perhaps even harmlessly. But we live in an era when anger has turned outward, which has resulted in considerable carnage. School shootings seem to have become a daily occurrence, and what are those but outward-focused angst? You must have played hooky through those years if you were not seething through middle school.
My challenge as a poem writer involves poisoning the well.
WritingPoems
Yashima Gakutei:
Woman About to Write a Poem (c. 1824)
" … not the definition of insanity but of quality."
Every year, as Christmas nears, I find myself stuck to my desk WritingPoems. Years ago, I solemnly swore to stop buying presents in stores. I'd had it with that despondent shuffle exhibited by people hoping to find that perfect gift while having no real ideas about what such a gift might entail. That annual desperation of hoping a pre-Christmas miracle might appear in an overcrowded aisle. The passion play involving the eternal search for perfection, demanding faith and devotion yet often fruitless. It might be that perfection cannot be successfully sought but can only happen unbidden. Anyway, I'd had it and swore off that curious addiction. I would henceforth write poems and give them as gifts.
After more than twenty years of experience, I can't say that WritingPoems has necessarily been easier than shopping would have been.
NextWorld
Franz Marc: The Bewitched Mill (1913)
"I guess I'll keep watch and see if I can catch a NextWorld emerging."
The inescapable ignorance of youth and the inevitable arrogance of age conspire to mislead most into believing that youth possesses innocence and the elderly own prescient wisdom. What could prove to be further from the truth? Youth has never been able to hear its elders, let alone understand them. The elders innocently expect their broadening experience to amount to something when it rarely does. Youth insists upon making its own mistakes and elders have little with which to trade but their undervalued perspective. The NextWorld, the one continuously emerging, has never turned out to be as anticipated or similar to what came before. Forced to poke sticks into darkness, civilization continually moves onward, if not necessarily forward.
I have little to offer in the way of advice.
Good For A Goose
Fambly (93)
Grace (92)
Humor (2)
iAlogue (1)
Letters to the Editor (1)
NextWorld (64)
Personal (19)
Steam Festival (4)
Vaporized (6)
Work (16)
January 2025
December 2024
November 2024
October 2024
September 2024
August 2024
July 2024
June 2024
May 2024
April 2024
March 2024
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
