Systemantics2
Ben Shahn: Untitled [Borobudur, Java]
(January 26, 1960-February 2, 1960)
"Woe be to anybody believing they know better than even the simplest system, for they are the most easily fooled."
A panel of three judges, one nominated by our incumbent the last time he pretended to be president, found his Liberation Day tariff scheme unconstitutional and, therefore, illegal, ordering the administration to immediately stop collecting these extortions and to refund any already gathered. This ruling, of course, appealed, guts the incumbent's aggressive and ill-conceived transformation of our economy from the envy of the world to its pity. Our incumbent insists upon employing simple-minded strategies to achieve all of his aims, and such strategies hold little promise when pitted against mature governing systems.
It's not simply that the systems he attacks have been around for ages; they are each extremely complex.
Alonely
Figure 1 
Figure 2
Figure 1: Charles Howard Hodges:
Portret van een onbekende man, het hoofd niet getekend
Portrait of an unknown man, the head not drawn
(1774 - 1837)
Figure 2: Charles Howard Hodges:
Portret van onbekende heer
Portrait of unknown gentleman
(1774 - 1837)
"I remain a hale enough fellow, best met by myself …"
In this world at this time, I characterize myself as not so much alone or lonely but Alonely. I spend a great deal of my time alone. I rise extremely early to work in isolation, finishing my efforts just before The Muse rises to begin her day. A short time later, I query her about her schedule, for as a public servant, she almost always has an active agenda: meetings. I listen impasively as I learn what I might expect from the day. Typically, she's gone before noon, returning several times between sessions. She doesn't have an evening meeting every evening, but a late afternoon session will still likely delay supper. We're almost always fed by eight or eight-thirty. I head for bed around nine.
There's little time in any day for us to while away the time together.
MemorialDay
John J. A. Murphy: Memories (20th century)
"We left feeling more connected …"
Come MemorialDay, the iris have gotten closer to gone. The Peonies and roses have just started. We have plenty of blossoms to share a few with our dearly departeds. The Muse and I observe MemorialDay by toodling out to the local cemetery to play hide-and-seek with our forebears. We visit graves in a circular sequence, without regard to seniority. We always start with my great-great-grandparents, people I knew when I was small, both born in the 1870s. I remember sitting on my great-great-grandmother's broad lap in the rocking chair. The Muse later recovered it, and it now sits in our library room, still squeaking as it always has. My great-great-grandfather Luther's father, was a Civil War veteran who died of a war-weakened heart after crossing the Oregon Trail three times. His grave was lost to the ages near a dusty Eastern Oregon rimrock cowtown.
We always lose our way at first, misremembering exact locations.
Twenty-Three
Willem Claesz. Heda: Still Life with a Gilt Cup (1635)
Gallery Comments:
The range of grey tonalities that Willem Heda could paint is astounding. With this subtle palette, he deftly rendered the objects – of pewter, silver, damask, glass and mother-of-pearl – on this table. A few yellow and ochre accents compliment this refined interplay of colours. Heda specialized in near monochromatic still lifes, so-called ‘tonal banquet pieces’.
——
" … to revel in what randomly colliding atoms can sometimes produce."
I met Mark on the same day I met The Muse, so it seemed especially fitting that he'd made the long trek across the state to visit on our wedding anniversary, May 25. We were married on 5/25/02, and this year's anniversary would fall on 5/25/25, Twenty-Three years later. Our life together has been characterized by fives and twos by inadvertent design. The Muse made a fabulous veal scallopini supper, and we sat around the table reminiscing. Our wedding had been a cooperative affair. Everyone invited had also been asked to help in some way. The result was the product of everyone present. We celebrated being together as much as we celebrated the marriage. On reflection, over supper, we recalled all who were no longer with us, twenty-three years later.
We were in the same house, now extensively renovated.
Thinning
Jacques Callot: Gardener Pruning a Shrub (17th century)
"My garden tolerates my well-intended presence."
I think of gardening as a nurturing activity, though that description misrepresents the bulk of my effort. Much, if not most, of the time, I spend communing with nature there, defending myself against encroaching fertility rather than trying to encourage it. Sure, I maintain my compost heap, recycling every non-meat bit of kitchen waste back into superrich soil, but the plantings here hardly need any further encouragement. The soil, after more than twenty years of continuous improvement, has reached a level of self-sustainability. None of it will ever need much fertilizer or nurturing in my lifetime. Water whatever into the soil, and it will try to take over. Therefore, I spend most of my gardening time discouraging plants from taking over.
As with any garden, weeds prove to be the most prolific plants.
Aftering
Edgar Degas: After the Bath III (1891–92)
"I'll be actively Aftering until this nightmare's over."
During an intolerable time, I appreciate even more fully the human capacity to project into a more satisfying future. Even if it comes in the form of daydreaming, there's something supremely satisfying about it. I can seemingly leave present troubles behind me for a spell and heal myself there. These respites help render difficult experiences more tolerable and prove to be a godsend for those of us who occasionally find ourselves overwhelmed. I find reassurances in the realization that, however awful, every present proves fleeting, never to return. If today seems awful, tomorrow and especially the days after, promise at least the potential of better.
Those who believe they can extend their current streak indefinitely tend to be the most disappointed in the end.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 05/22/2025
Jan Saenredam: Spring (1601)
Mastery Was Always Illusory
I swear that I used to understand how this world works, though I probably never did. It might be that none of us ever understood or could understand. We get by almost exclusively via lucky guesses and collaborations. Without either, we'd be sunk. I over-rely upon The Muse, who understands more than I ever knew needed to be understood. She relies upon me, too, though. Nobody is self-reliant anymore, and never was. I feel increasingly vulnerable. I'm finally arriving at the age where I can no longer deny that I've been aging. My doctor concluded that I'm still street-worthy after my annual physical last week, just before I managed to wretch out my back again. Then I caught a common cold, a not-so-common experience anymore. I used to be able to set up a Zoom call, but the application has become user-hostile as it's claimed to contain more intelligence. I miss the dumber version that reliably remembered me from one session to the next. Now, I have to invoke a Pastword remembering app in order to access my account, and the smarter new version seems to assign a unique account number to each session, so regulars cannot use their familiar logins. Neither can I. I'd ask why if I didn't already know the answer. Entropy rules here and always has. Mastery was always illusory.
Futuristic
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
let the sun shine (1968)
Inscriptions and Marks: Signed: l.r.: Corita
Printed text reads: LET THE SUN SHINE IN
the creative revolution—to take a chunk of the imagined future and put it into the present— to follow the law of the future and live it in the present. Waskow
inscription: l.l., in graphite: 68-69-E
"Let's focus, as we almost always have, on Making America Great Like Never Before."
The American Way might be most properly described as Futuristic. We live in our future. Dissatisfied with our present, we project and take ownership of a better future. We are gleefully mortgaged. In the fifties and sixties, when I was a kid, the future seemed more present than it has ever been since. Since then, we've seen a slow erosion of who and what we were once destined to become. We grew up to disappoint ourselves. Conservatives, always a presence, began asserting a backward-looking dominion over us, as if our futures featured sin instead of the always before expected salvation. They equated mortgages with penury and our unique sort of prosperity with degradation. They worshiped tax cuts and balanced budgets, false gods from the distant past, over our proven, reliable gods from our future. They promised less and delivered worse, proving themselves wildly unpopular. They'd get elected by lying, by playing bait-and-switch politics.
Whomever reviles their future undermines their past, for our past holds no relevance except that which is delivered by its diligence.
DoubleBounding
Will Hicock Low:
Pale Grew Her Immortality,
For Woe of All These Lovers (1885)
"It was already plenty great enough …"
One cannot exercise MAGA-style governance and retain a democracy because the two seem in fundamental opposition with each other. MAGA demands authoritarian leadership, someone, above all, willing to tell others what to do. It also presumes that the majority will passively follow, regardless of the questionable direction from the top. Democracy assumes almost the precise opposite: a populace willing to be actively involved in deciding direction and the gumption to follow properly determined decisions. Both MAGA and democracy follow their leader. The MAGA leader is a person, while the law leads democracies.
Once elected, MAGA faced a dilemma, for the country remained a democracy rather than an autocracy.
Prosterity
Prosper-Alphonse Isaac:
Wrak van roeiboot op strand in Cancale
[Wreck of rowing boat on beach in Cancale] (c. 1912)
"I pray that we might come to understand one day."
Those buildings fortunate enough to still have businesses leasing their street-level spaces are nevertheless hollow above their second floor. Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco mirror each other. A generation ago, their downtowns bustled with economic activity. Each was the absolute envy of the other as postwar prosperity reversed their wartime austerity. Actual prosperity resulted. Since, a series of austerity-promoting presidents and feckless Congresses have managed to pretty much hollow out the promise evident on each street corner then. Now, Portland shows no shortage of first-class hotel rooms that overlook empty windows in century-old, once-proud commercial edifices. The Starbucks doesn't have seats, only stand-up tables to discourage the homeless from encamping there. The visiting writer can't, as he once casually did, find a corner to create his morning missive. He takes one to-go instead and stumbles back to his tiny first-class hotel room, with altogether too much furniture, overlooking near absolute devastation.
The austere years bought us little.
Dementia
Unknown Artist: ‘Crazy Quilt’ Parlor Throw (1887/88)
Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, United States
"They were neither patriotism nor loyalty, but the effects of top-down Dementia."
A case could be made that our incumbent suffers from Dementia. The evidence seems overwhelming unless presented to a partisan supporter, who might as well also be suffering from the same disorder. The behavior of the incumbent's party members exhibits the same dysfunction evident in their leader. Fish. Water. They cannot see it. The rest of us can't help but see it in nearly every action of both the incumbent and his followers. Nothing else rationally explains the behaviors. They're not entirely logical, but neither are they merely irrational. They seem non-rational, not guided by reason or explainable through a reasonable description. They are not wholly random, but somewhat more patterned, with a pattern that probably best resembles a crazy quilt. It's all of one kind yet never rational. Empassioned explanations utterly fail to explain anything. People seem patient, perhaps too patient given the gravity of the resulting situation. The whole administration resonates with the clearly disturbed behavior of its leader.
This response seems perfectly understandable.
Dubiety
Heinrich Hoerle: Worker
(Self-Portrait in Front of Trees and Chimneys)
Arbeiter (Selbstbildnis vor Bäumen und Schornsteinen) (1931)
"Justice, like freedom, stands on firmer premises than the dubious."
Never before in all history has a presidency attempted to administer upon such dubious premises. I could label this the Dubiety Presidency. Each proclamation has been justified by citing some obscure ruling obviously used out of its original context. An insistence that our present condition legally puts us on a war footing, for instance. Congress might tolerate these imaginings, but so far, the courts, as has always been their purpose, have remained dubious. They call a questionable justification into question. They question baseless accusations. They restore a much-needed sense of reason to the proceedings. The fever dream that always was MAGA was never based on anything even distantly resembling reason or fact. It was impure emotion packaged as if it might qualify as justification when it wasn't, and it couldn't succeed. The vagaries of our system allow an incumbent certain latitude. He can act first, knowing he'll only be questioned later. Later, he will have already effected some change, inflicted genuine damage. Then his act becomes something in need of reclaimation. Employees, acting in good faith, follow his directives only to become complicit in some grave miscarriages once the courts find against the incumbent again.
It's become a pattern now.
WordSalad
Georges Hugnet: Au pied de la Lettre/Word for word
Series/Book Title: The Guaranteed Surrealist Postcard Series
(1937)
"He does not want to be accurately understood."
The same menu every meal with this guy. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks - the same things always come to the table. Standing up, sitting down, or on the run, it remains identical. Furthermore, it tastes terrible. The mouth feel remains the same. It's always too salty and never quite sweet enough, though it's obvious sometimes he's tried to sugar-coat it, often with saccharine substitute. Still, it never manages to taste very different. It's somewhere south of gourmet while still north of greasy spoon. It always comes too soon and stays too long. It's not just him, though he's clearly the instigator. Nobody else could create such culinary abominations. Even when slathered with that inevitably gloppy dressing and gaudy flags flying to distract, it remains the same incomprehensible flavor to even the most sophisticated palate. He deals exclusively in WordSalad.
Nobody, not even the incredibly well-paid shill commentators, ever really understands what he's saying.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 05/15/2025
Otto Piene: Untitled
(bleed-through of previous page, left page);
Untitled (notes with design for stage and screen, right page)
Series/Book Title: Sketchbook:
"Retrospective of Inflatables"/"Tobago faces"/Landscapes
(1984)
So Much For The Speeders' Experience
If I could wish everyone one experience, I might choose to bless them with a leisurely toodle through The Palouse in Spring. Much of the year, The Palouse seems an unlikely wish to bestow on anyone. In High Spring, though, anyone might readily understand the blessing. It's green where most of its year knows only buff beige. It's surprisingly yellow as farmers have increasingly embraced Canola seed culture as an antidote to abysmal export wheat markets. It's lonely highway, two-lane blacktop, when you might have been convinced freeways had conquered and ruled every worthwhile route to anywhere. It's the slow way there, uninteresting to anyone still striving to get there first. Oh, there are plenty of drivers who haven't read the memo, passing on blind turns, apparently more anxious to arrive on time than alive, but those have always been there and are easily tolerated by anyone tenaciously insisting that they always win. I pump my brakes to ensure they can return to their proper lane before they execute the Wylie Coyote they seem insistent upon manifesting. Every second I slow prolongs my primal experience. This was never a race. I suspect that The Palouse might be best experienced at the speed of a walking Horse, the way my ancestors traveled. They could breathe in the scents that only ever manifested that one week in Spring, and for the duration of their passage, they were in the center of every possible universe. So much for the speeders' experience.
Weaponizing
Gustavs Klucis (Klutsis):
Turn Your Weapons Against the Soviet Bourgeoisie
Original Language Title:
ПОВЕРНИТЕ ОРУЖИЕ ПРОТИВ СВОЕИ БУРЖУАЗИИ
(c. 1924)
"We might as well believe ourselves blessed to have elected
just this sort of incumbent to remind us who we always were."
The sickly scent of true desperation accompanies our incumbent's every official action. They seem overly staged, as if the production assistant feared not being noticed. Their content often proves incomprehensible, much like the campaign "rallies" that preceded this presidency. The pronouncements do not properly parse and resolve to the fundamentally incomprehensible, though a deep sense of anger inevitably shows through the cheap, glitzy veneer. One finally concludes that he thinks he’s exacting revenge from an earlier assault to mend some essentially unhealable wound. These staged performances amount to elaborate defensive stances. It might seem as though he's actively assaulting much of what we hold dear, but he's more likely frantically shoring up a defensive perimeter he deeply fears has already failed him. The more outrageous the messages, the less convincing they seem. He's already throwing the kitchen sink into action, a sure and certain confirmation that he deeply fears he's losing, that he's likely already lost.
He accuses his predecessors of "Weaponizing" our government, but it's he who's engaged in weaponization, whatever that might mean.
Venge
Adrian van de Venne:
The Donkey Laden with Food,
from Emblematic Figures of Animals (1633)
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
Prints of animals could be accurate and fanciful simultaneously. This finely engraved yet slightly caricatured scene from Aesop’s Fables depicts a donkey laden with fine food and wine who nonetheless happily gnaws at a prickly thistle instead. Moral interpretations of the text have ranged from “One man’s meat is another man’s poison” to a critique of stinginess. Though unsigned, this humorous image of feast and famine set off a chain of copies, ironically ending with a dozen Aesop roundels that decorated the back of trenchers, wooden plates used for the final fruit and nut course in England.
————
"It's probably nobody's friend and certainly everybody's enemy."
With this incumbent, a raft of archaic usages appears to have made a comeback. Perhaps it's the conservative lilt, which intends to return to simpler times, but terms not seen in public since the Old Testament have been appearing on the lips of even the most unqualified cabinet secretaries. Many commentators have compared their vocabulary to that which emerged in 1930s Germany, where certain terms had to be resurrected to describe the horrors being initiated. Nobody had seen anything like them since at least the Dark Ages, and, sure enough, the emerging vocabulary did, indeed, accompany a replaying of some of the Dark Ages' greatest hits. Proper euphemisms gained popularity to avoid describing what was actually happening, just as they have today. Concentration Camp looked better in print than the more direct Death Factory, and the meaning of rights and freedoms were flipped on their heads for the duration. Rights became unspeakable obligations. Freedoms became insidious conscription. Life became death, and death equated with a better life.
Venge has become perhaps the most frequently used.
Emoluments
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos):
Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple
(c. 1570–75)
"I suspect his first impeachment indictment will focus upon his many violations of the Emoluments Clause."
What's in it for me? has never been a question that comes very naturally to me. My birth family raised me under a more self-sacrificial ethic. I always asked what I could do for my country rather than what it might do for me. I do not believe that everybody shares my perspective. Indeed, when reflective, I don't share it, myself, because I learned through sometimes painful repetition that it's often better if I understand what's in it for me when I engage. Not to get all self-centered about it, but I discovered that I also have valid needs and that it need not be all about me for it to have some alluring something in it should I choose to engage. The choice matters. I was raised to default toward self-sacrifice, as if dimninishing myself should serve as adequate payment. I'm still apt to default in that direction and I often require considerable circumspection to catch myself before I martyr myself again.
Some were apparently raised with an opposite ethic, though theirs hardly seems ethical to my reconning. They wouldn't think of lifting a finger without an explicit agreement concerning the resulting payment, and sometimes even requiring a prepayment or deposit to initiate engagement. Their employers are in their debt. The ego strength supporting this stance astounds and confuses me. What could lead anyone to believe they're worth any outlay before they've delivered anything on their promise? This does not smell like service to me. Nor does it resemble what I consider a free or fair exchange. Render the service, then accept payment. In extreme cases, perhaps create a sinking fund to hold the funds until the contrracted effort's acknowledged as done.
Our incumbent observes the latter order. He seems in no way self-sacrificial. Historically, every prior holder of that office has felt as though it was honor enough to simply hold the office. The trust extended by the voters represented essentially a prepayment of whatever salary the execution of the office's duties might provide. This guy has been scheming to bring in more personal revenue from his first second in office. It has often seemed as if he sought the role just for the income it would attract to him, personally. The actual responsibilities of the office seem secondary to how he conducts business. He comes across as a definite Me First character, which is to say he seems to lack some essentially character required of those who hold high public office. The Presidency, especially, was intended to be fulfilled more selflessly than selfishly.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, The so-called Emoluments Clause, prohibits federal officeholders from receiving gifts, payments, or other things of value from foreign governments without Congressional consent. Along with preventing the federal government from granting titles of nobility, the Founders intended it to safeguard against foreign influence and corruption by ensuring that public officials are not influenced by personal gain from foreign entities.Clearly, our current incumbent does not subscribe to that element of our Constitution. He has proven to be a pick-and-choose chief executive, selectively ignoring significant elements of the checks and balances our founders prescribed. Consequently, he adds to the growing Bill of Particulars his adversaries have been accumulating with almost every decision he's been making. Tension builds with each pronouncement.
Few disagree with any fair payment scheme. Many in the public believe their president to be overpaid. They hold the same opinion of their dog catcher, for public service was never supposed to make anybody rich. Accepting a gift of a $400 million dollar obsolete airplane from a jihadi sympathizer wouldn't seem like the shortcut to anybody's heart, but the MAGA crowd lost its pride when it lost its mind. It's heart followed. They don't seem to mind that their titular leader makes billions corrupting his office, our office of our presidency, not his. The plane seems like spare change when compared with his crypto-currency schemes and stock manipulations. Character cannot be purchased no matter how many billions get exchanged. Corruption rots more than merely the direct participants. The context itself sours as simple decency decomposes through complacency and greed. Jesus chased the moneychangers out of the temple, the one exchange where he seemed to genuinely lose his cool. Those who believe they can barter decency for their own enrichment render everyone else poorer, however wealthy they might become. I suspect his first impeachment indictment will focus upon his many violations of the Emoluments Clause. Good riddance!
©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos):
Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple
(c. 1570–75)
"I suspect his first impeachment indictment will focus on his many violations of the Emoluments Clause."
“What's in it for me?” has never been a question that comes very naturally to me. My birth family raised me under a more self-sacrificial ethic. I always asked what I could do for my country rather than what it might do for me. I do not believe that everybody shares my perspective. Indeed, when I reflect, I don't share it, myself, because I learned through sometimes painful repetition that it's often better if I understand what's in it for me when I engage. Not to get all self-centered about it, but I discovered that I also have valid needs and that it need not be all about me for it to have some allure in it, should I choose to engage. The choice matters. I was raised to default toward self-sacrifice, as if diminishing myself should serve as adequate payment. I'm still apt to default in that direction, and I often require considerable circumspection to catch myself before I martyr myself again.
Some were raised with an opposite ethic, though theirs hardly seems ethical to my reckoning.
Surrendering
Anonymous Germany, Anonymous Italy:
Book XXXIII.10 Macedonians pretend to surrender
{Quarte Decadis Liber Quartus p. CXCVIII verso}
Series/Book Title: Illustrations from Livy, Decades.
Venice, Philipp Pincio, September 27, 1511 (1493)
" … to continue contemplating a Surrendering I'll never accomplish."
The seemingly endless inanity eventually wears anyone down. Surrounded by monstrous stupidity, the least of us start feeling defeated. Logic won't work. Reason fails us again and again. There's no reasonable explanation. We eventually say, to ourselves if to nobody else, "Maybe I'm the crazy one." We're exhausted trying to maintain what we previously never even needed to consider. I stopped eating eggs rather than continue fretting over their ridiculous price. I sense my world contracting. I was raised with the explicit expectation that our universe would inexorably continue expanding, so I hold few antibodies to defend against this unlikely experience. I reframe until I appear blue in the face, but all to little avail. I feel altogether too much of a world that seems to exclude altogether too much of myself. I feel older than my age. My back began bothering me as if I'd been shouldering too great a burden. Weariness haunts me. I declared an obscene number of sick days. I feel defeated much of the time, though little of substance seems to have changed.
Our incumbent trades exclusively in paper tigers, though even the paper kind can still cause real havoc.
TEaCh
James Gillray: The Graces in a High Wind
published May 26, 1810
published by Hannah Humphrey
"I hope never to become its master."
The incumbent uses Truth Social, a failed social media experiment in which he holds majority ownership, to share his lies with the world. I suppose a few of his postings contain honest renderings of his thoughts and feelings. Those elicit a near-universal Ewww response from most of the public, offering glimpses into an internal universe about which we imagine we'd be better off never knowing. But it's a given that everybody must employ tech to count these days. Those not plugged into the latest 'thing' seem hardly worth considering, and I'm little different other than the fact that I cannot seem to keep up. I resist downloading every promising new app. I have never once played a video game on any of my many machines, and not just because I do not know how to download and play any of the curiously popular video games. They belong to the class of experiences I've deliberately avoided engaging with, believing them to be the electronic equivalent of poison. I avoided Candy Crush like it was plague. Same with Wordle, whatever that entails. I'm the sort who can't absorb the rules and key strokes required to play because that sort of play feels like excruciating work to me. My eyes glaze over, and I become unresponsive.
I've likewise avoided learning how to operate Microsoft anything.
Trappings
Margaret E Price:
Princess Furball attends the royal festival
adorned in her golden dress (1921)
" … deserve to ultimately be humbled by their surroundings."
Power seems an intangible entity. Nobody would suspect one possesses it until they wield it. Titles largely seem to threaten its use more than promise it. It seems too easily over-reached. It can often be breached. It can manifest as defensive or offensive. It need not be used at all. Gaining power tends to reveal more of a person than many other experiences might, for it carries a frightening capacity to buoy one's self-credulity. Anyone unprepared for a certain shock of recognition or an awe in their own presence seems likely to embarrass themselves without noticing. The true test of any influential person might be the restraint they employ. Not using power serves as the most potent use of power. In this way, power always proves paradoxical. To use it is almost the same as to abuse it, though shrinking from its legitimate uses renders it useless. So, a certain maturity seems necessary for anybody granted power. We've seen immaturity undermine otherwise powerful people. We've watched the assumption of power go to someone's head. We've seen the Trappings that inevitably accompany power catch the attention of the suddenly powerful to utterly undermine whatever their intentions might have been.
The Trappings our incumbent enjoys seem to distract him.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 05/08/2025
John Simmons: Unite or Perish, Chicago (1968)
I Will Inhabit My Future
I was supposed to write this introduction on my new MacBook Air, which arrived yesterday afternoon just as I was sitting down to create this week's writing summary. I deferred playing with that new machine until after I'd completed that chore, setting the copying over of the six hundred thousand odd files through supper. It was still happily grinding away two hours later. When I rose at two, the progress bar reported that three more hours remained, so I went off to distract myself for that time. Back just after five, I found it had finished copying, but it hadn't yet finished with me. It had prepared a gauntlet of Pastwords for breakfast, each with a slightly different name and incomprehensible, in turn. With The Muse's groggy help, I made it through the first two gates and was delighted that Safari and Chrome could remember the last opened tabs. The new computer apparently had a functional touch key, which might mean that I won't have to continually type out my seventeen-digit Pastwork so frequently. That alone would justify the purchase. I'm hoping the continual crashing that has become a near-constant background annoyance might finally be reduced or even eliminated. Facebook couldn't remember me or my Pastword, and, as is often the case, my Pastword-remembering software apparently couldn't remember the most current iteration, either. I figure if it can determine that my Pastword's incorrect, it already knows who I am and is just playing hard to get. Typed in Pastwords make as much sense as TSA pat-downs yet we all submit to the tyranny. The Facebook failure chased me back to my old machine, even though I knew I'd undermine the parallel environments final migration would require. It was Friday, and I was not yet ready for my daily posting and my preparation for my Zoom Chat. One day, I will inhabit my future.
SlyenceFriction
Lucas Emil Vorsterman: Backgammon Players (c. 1630)
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
Adam de Coster was a prominent painter of illuminated night scenes in Antwerp around 1630, about the same time that Lucas Emil Vorsterman was engraving works after his popular contemporaries in the same city. A student of Peter Paul Rubens, Vorsterman employed a style that was originally similar to that of the Flemish master, until a falling out with Rubens and subsequent trip to England provoked him to create stronger, more stylized, Caravaggesque engravings such as Backgammon Players. Clearly influenced by De Coster’s handling of light, Vorsterman brightened the otherwise dark scene with two candles whose flames illuminate the faces of those seated around the table.
"Real life does not even distantly resemble a game of Grand Theft Auto, and probably never will."
A seemingly separate species of human has emerged over recent decades. If this species existed before modern times, they were never terribly influential in human affairs. In scientific circles and among scientific professionals, odd lifestyles doubtless proliferated and were tolerated. Many famous early scientists’ histories read like psychodramas, but they were rarely asked for their opinion on taxation, for instance, or moral questions. Today, nerds seem to have gotten out of hand. Gamers carry a certain reverence in much of the public mind, as if their successes on the Xbox certify them as geniuses or something. Those who take science fiction seriously today enjoy a certain cachet imparted on no ancient. Those who believe we should be colonizing Mars are inexplicably thought to be exceptionally insightful rather than the more traditionally delusional. Something feels unsettling about people who choose to spend their non-refundable time gaming, especially those who consider gaming to be a competitive sport. People who get their jollies blowing away imaginary space aliens might be "on the spectrum" but seem too spacey to ever be senior advisors to a President. So much the worse for anybody who believes science fiction is mere allegory. Many now sincerely believe it's predictive and prescient.
Those who follow false Gods have never before been so involved in politics.
Pettiness
Style of Abraham Jansz Diepenbeeck:
King Midas at the Contest Between Apollo and Pan
(circa 1616–1675)
"That's the cultural capability of our present incumbent: Pettiness."
I was raised on tales of great men accomplishing great things. The possibility of a President actively promoting Pettiness never came up in polite conversation, so it's been particularly jarring as our incumbent has set about accomplishing nothing after rising to the role of so-called Most Powerful Person In The World. Such authority apparently lies in something other than the title, for our incumbent has already amply demonstrated that power lacks authority when placed in unworthy hands. It's not clever to opt out of employing lawful means to attempt to accomplish change. It's downright stupid to flaunt the Constitution because that document, above all others, amounts to sacrosanct text in this culture. Further, the oath of office insists upon an active defense against enemies of said Constitution, both foreign and domestic. It does considerably more than stretch credulity when the incumbent embodies every element of that enemy against which he took that oath, dedicating himself to defending against it instead. This paradox just seems to amplify his pre-existing cognitive disabilities.
Nothing of greatness has even been suggested since this administration, Hell-bent on not successfully administering anything, began failing to effectively rule.
Scheduled
Lewis Wickes Hine: Women do Irregular Work,
Schedule of an unusually fast wrapper stripper for four weeks.
Series/Book Title: Social Museum Collection
(1907-1908)
"It was only ever eternal in the moment before it was declared done."
My dental hygienist reported that she was Scheduled into next year and booked solid into November, six months hence. Her dentist was booking into the following month, and so couldn't possibly perform any procedure not previously Scheduled. I once maintained such a schedule where I could reasonably predict my position months into the future. I inhabited a speculative reality, one capable of containing me every bit as effectively as any jail cell might have. I willingly entered, feeling secure in there rather than imprisoned. Call it job security, but I felt a real sense of certainty then. I later became a freelancer and lost most of my previous confidence. Then, I felt as though I was constantly juggling, coniving to survive somehow. Like the biblical Birds of the Field, though, I rarely starved. Plenty manifested before me, even in the absence of a tangible Schedule. I came to understand that Scheduled might have always been more of a preference than an imperative. In the absence of a Scheduled horizon, I'd reliably stumble upon one that managed to sustain me. This experience amounted to heresy.
I worked in the Project Management field.
Mistery
Master of the Die: Apollo Slaying Python, plate one from The History of Apollo and Daphne (c. 1532)
Gallery Note:
The alteration to this impression is not initially evident, but closer inspection reveals that this predominantly nude Apollo is missing his genitalia. A viewer deliberately scraped away the ink at the god’s crotch in a campaign of extremely localized censorship. Given how modestly Apollo was originally endowed, this change does not significantly alter the image overall. Rather, the god’s sizable arrow quiver dangles more provocatively between his legs than his own penis ever did. The objecting viewer, apparently lacking a grasp of age-old visual puns, may not have realized that, with his alteration, the visual emphasis merely shifted to this larger and more obvious phallus substitute.
"Eye for an eye and tooth for tooth sentences actually seem like justice to them."
For MAGAs, the past is not comprised of memories. Those of us seeking referents for MAGA assertions about the past seem doomed to disappointment, for they do not share a history with anybody but themselves. They rely upon a different basis upon which to anchor their assertions. To their minds, these are not fictional representations, but more like Biblical ones. Sure, the past might not have happened precisely like they recall, but their rememberings seem more divinely inspired and thereby more valid than what might have actually happened. Their recollections carry the gravitas of Old Testament testimony, unlike the obviously phony more conventional histories. They and the members of their tribe know better than the “lame” mainstream academics. Academic histories were obviously written with political agendas, as are all histories written by winners. The losers carry different stories and believe in theirs more fervently than any professional historian ever believes in theirs. The professionals might insist that theirs are not dependent upon belief but facts. In any wrestling match between belief and facts, bet on the beliefs to ultimately prevail.
Many advancements seem absent from MAGA history.
RecitalRules
Lee Russell:
Boy giving recitation in program at end of school term. FSA
(Farm Security Administration) labor camp. Caldwell, Idaho (1941)
"We only have everything to lose otherwise."
Lest I forget the purpose for which I started writing this series forty-five days ago, The Universe has been conspiring to remind me. In my experience, if I set my mind on something, the universe sets about reminding me when I misplace my focus. My part in the circus seems to come from forgetting that focus and generously accepting reminders. I tend to wander and weave my way, whichever way I've chosen. The universe always seems to be conspiring to remind me, and I don't mind. I appreciate that I inhabit a universe so generously disposed to focus on somebody as genuinely insignificant as little old me. I can use the reinforcement, especially when I'd committed to write about hope and coping. How have I been doing? I've been wandering and weaving, as is typically my way. I rarely travel via straight lines. I've even proven myself to be more than capable of going backwards when pursuing something, even when that something seems as essential to my well-being as coping and hope. I've proven myself more than capable of losing my way, so I sincerely appreciate this universe when it seems to nudge me back into awareness.
It's been a rough time, with interference appearing almost every morning.
Idiology
James Castle: Red Coat; verso: Back of Man ((20th century)
"The best of all possible opponents to have when battling for decency and justice."
People complain about the MAGA ideology without slowing down to appreciate its underlying Idiology. It might be that we innocently mistake one for the other. Ideology amounts to ideas and ideals—beliefs—that drive political theories and policies. It's easy to presume that some shared beliefs drive an ideological bus, when they might not be present or that influential. It sure seems as though every MAGA has undergone a brain transplant to replace their intelligence with something less inquisitive. Belief sure seems to drive their behaviors, but their beliefs don't seem to be all that consistent. What might bring them together when their beliefs only seem to converge? I think it's the urge, or more properly, the inherent inability to control that urge. It's not so much what they believe as how they believe. They believe with such conviction that they do not seem to question the reasoning behind their interventions. Because of this hair-trigger belief system, they render themselves incapable of foreseeing likely implementation complications. They act without first questioning. They engage with such unshakable certainty that they seem genuinely shaken when their latest hare-brained scheme predictably blows up in their face.
It's a genuine gift for an opponent to exhibit authentic Idiology, for however fickle the details of their moves might seem, they each share a hyper-predictable pattern.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 05/01/2025
Charles Green Bush:
Let Us Have Peace! -Fortissimo, from Harper’s Weekly
(published June 19, 1869)
He Will Probably Never Recover
May caught me napping. It arrived while I spent most of my writing week escaping from a seriously twingy back pain that visited me for no apparent reason. One problem with even attempting to be a reasoning being comes with unreasonable events, occurrences that sidestep or somehow transcend reason. There never seems to be a reasonable end to the search for the cause of these afflictions. The doctor asks questions to which I can muster no reasonable response. The first prescription doesn't work. The second doesn't do much, either. Circa day three, I took a high-level pain pill The Muse had leftover from some prior procedure, one of the ones the doctor threatened to prescribe, so I took one. It didn't touch the pain, either. Maybe that second batch of muscle relaxers worked, or, after four down days, my body started responding to rest. By the fifth morning, my back still felt twingy, but the twinges no longer elicited grimaces. A week spent in intermittent agony serves to reset the gauge intended to determine whether I'm okay. My threshold has been considerably reduced from where I'd grown accustomed to it.
Ire
Peter Paul Rubens:
Hl. Ambrosius und Kaiser Theodosius (1615/1616)
"This reaction makes the so-called superior appear inferior and the complier seem spineless."
Recent headlines reported that many, including a few of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this universe, have taken to tiptoeing around our incumbent to "avoid his Ire." I recognize the word "Ire" as one of those holiday serving spoons restricted from ordinary supper use, exclusively reserved for company. I remember the few times it's been trotted out, not for itself, but for what it was always associated with. Its presence seems rare enough in memory to almost be considered a sacrament, warmly remembered. I proudly recall the times when I managed to spark Ire, especially in someone I was supposed to automatically provide deference: a principal, police officer, or high official who felt as though I'd disrespected their position, if not them personally. The Ire itself always took the form of threats, promising retribution for the imagined infraction. The imagined portion was almost always a misunderstanding stemming from my failure to engage with what I might characterize as adequate gravitas. I might have engaged with a superior as if he were an equal or, worse, a lesser. Few angers rival those sparked by a sleight perceived by a superior, for they might seem to threaten the whole concept of "superior." Those relying upon their position to prevent being perceived as inferior seem to possess the thinnest skin and generate the bulk of the Ire in this universe.
I prefer to inhabit a world where we employ a more level playing field where nobody can be seriously considered to be anyone's better.
Infliction
William Hogarth:
The Punishment Inflicted on Lemuel Gulliver (1726)
"Good riddance to abysmal governance."
Only apprentices ever opt to Inflict difference upon others. Ten thousand more effective ways exist, so only the deeply inexperienced ever resort to Inflicting change. The more insistent the Infliction, the less effective, and the shorter-lasting the attempted change. Those who seriously believe they can command while others will obey only successfully delude themselves. It's a sad and sorry spectacle to observe, especially when the Inflictor convinces themself that they're acting in the Inflicted's best interest. Such attempts inevitably fall far short of an actual initiative. They might initially appear to produce real difference, but whatever initially appears to stick proves to be short-lived. Considerable undoing might result, but the desired change will quickly dissolve and disappear. Further, the Inflictor will ultimately fall much further than they imagined they might rise had their initiative proven effective. Those afflicted by the attempt will be absolved of all accusations against them when they resisted. The opposition will produce the only heroes. The Inflictors will make themselves infamous.
Fresh from a multi-day affliction, an epic back spasm that left me bedridden and aching, I carry a fresh appreciation for change.
SacredSarcasm
John Tenniel: "Once," said the Mock Turtle, with a deep sigh,
"I was a real turtle."
Illustration from the 1911 Edition of Alice in Wonderland (1911)
"Congratulations, or something, Mr. President! Grow a pair!"
If anything distinguishes Democracies from all other forms of governance, it must be the freedom to shamelessly mock itself in public. The chief problem with authoritarianism lies in its innate humorlessness. It takes everything, especially the microscopically irrelevant, seriously. It presumes to make daily proclamations insisting upon the most fantastical absurdities. It continually assaults common sense and its citizens' own experience, attempting to override it with idiotic ideology. One's left wondering what could possibly come next. Our current authoritarianism infection began with a full frontal assault on decency. If an unwinnable opponent were ever proposed, common decency would seem the perfect choice. Only one so thoroughly entranced in their own self-importance could ever seriously consider making decency their primary enemy. Of course, they had to ineptly hide their real agenda. This tactic barely worked before utterly undermining itself, as any founding father could have easily predicted it would, for we are not that serious a society. We were founded upon the sacred proposition that all people were created equal, which, roughly translated, means in practice that everyone holds the more or less equal responsibility to be the butt of their fellow citizens' jokes. If nobody stands above the law, nobody stands above the next derisive punchline, either.
Our society has evolved into an entertainment medium.
BadBack
Jacques Callot: Beggar on Crutches and Wearing a Hat,
seen from Back, plate five from The Beggars (c. 1622)
" … I'd be aching, too, if I had to put up with all I put it through."
I have not had a BadBack since I finally submitted to that long-deferred back surgery more than twenty years ago. Before that, I suffered from a standard stenosis and a lingering adolescent denial in more or less equal proportions. The physical difficulty was easily resolved with a straightforward surgery. The denial required more than a decade of concerted effort and considerable suffering to finally resolve, which was achieved by my merely consenting to the long-averted surgery. I tried every non-surgical alternative but mostly embraced suffering as the antidote. I got very, very good at suffering because I was already a near master at denial. I could work through that white hot blindness that waves of pain brought, essentially blocking vision. I could stand and deliver while otherwise basically unconscious. I also experienced public collapse like that especially memorable time when a blinding wave of pain disabled me while I was strolling down Lower Broadway in New York City. Miles from my hotel room, I could neither stand nor sit comfortably. That one scared me.
It took a bout of shingles to finally convince my doctor and me that I had successfully tried and worn out every possible alternative.
Restarting
Unknown, After Jean Restout: Saint Hymer in Solitude
(c. 1735)
" … whether or not it accomplishes anything else."
Restarting my machine has become the first step when producing another story. This amounts to ritual now, in that it reassures more than guarantees anything. If I don't Restart first, I might increase the risk of my machine crashing before I've finished, and then have to recreate lost parts. Writing to post involves using five or six different applications combined with plenty of cutting and pasting. I accomplish all this on my thirteen-inch MacBook Air. The small screen means I cannot just grab and drop most copyings. I need to switch displays to change applications. I save before switching between any two applications, so I'm also continually saving in addition to the constant cutting and pasting. I'm uncertain which of these operations will eventually result in crashing my machine. Usually, my blog application crashes first. I try to save something in it, and it doesn't respond. I pull up the ever-useful ForceQuit display, which usually indicates that RapidWeaver's frozen again. Then, I can ForceQuit that application and either reopen it or choose to execute another full Restart. The full Restart takes a few minutes, as each application needs to reopen. Sometimes, depending upon where the crash finds me in the process, I have to copy the contents of something like a Facebook post over and into Pages for safekeeping during the subsequent Restarting; otherwise, I'll lose whatever I've started there.
In these ways, my writing has become an exercise in paranoia.
Improv
Vasily Kandinsky: Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) (1913)
" … as if his audience was supposed to care."
It might be essential to remember that our incumbent is an actor. Actors train in and practice the art of deception. They pretend. They might become most skilled at pretending to be themselves, an identity that typically gets garbled in such practice. The others they become skilled at pretending to be are unavoidably incomplete, for nobody, however experienced, has ever managed to thoroughly portray somebody else. There are too many edges to consciously cover. To compensate, skilled actors amplify a few of the more prominent traits of the ones they portray, thereby accentuating some of their more recognizable aspects. They become identifiable by overplaying some characteristics. Voice impersonators tend to employ a few key phrases associated with the character they play. This produces a reinforcing association, whether or not their voice very accurately mimics their target's. John Wayne was apparently the only actor whose character employed the term "Pilgrim" in their dialogue.
Actors train in their trade by engaging in Improv.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/24/2025
Henry Fuseli: Milton Dictating to His Daughter (1794)
Gallery Notes:
This painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli depicts 17th-century English poet John Milton, who became blind in his 40s, dictating his epic poem Paradise Lost. His daughter transcribes his words while another woman listens intently as she sews. A forerunner of the Romantic Movement, Fuseli created drama through chromatic contrast. A cool light illuminates the rosy-cheeked women and casts deep shadows around Milton’s ghostly figure and face. Fuseli created this painting for his Milton Gallery, a self-run enterprise that showcased the artist’s Milton-inspired works. While this entrepreneurial venture failed commercially, it raised Fuseli’s prestige and visibility as an artist.
Given The Current Volume of Obvious Imperfections
One week each year, perhaps a few days longer, the Villa's yard takes on the Garden of Eden Scent. The apple blossom sweet of the two enormous ornamental crabapples, with the magenta one dominating, combine with the budding lilacs. When we returned from our exile four years ago this Spring, I planted five fresh lilac bushes along the back fence. They were healthy three-footers then. Now, they're topping seven feet and bursting with blossoms. They provide a sampling line where The Muse and I can sink our snouts deep into each bush's blossoms to experience the subtle differences between the various varieties. We added fish to our bubbling backyard pond this week, and I immediately felt the difference their presence brought. I suspect the neighborhood raccoons have already discovered this addition, as somebody tipped over the fountain pump on two successive nights. My lawnmower replacement for the one recalled as a potential fire hazard arrived just in time to counter the emerging lawn, and the carpenters completed installation of the front porch beadboard ceiling. I could proclaim that all's right with the world, but there's still a considerable lot that's not right yet. I feel reassured that this world can pull off a Springtime like this, even given the current volume of obvious imperfections.
Tech
Nan Lurie: Technological improvements (1937)
Works Progress Administration
"We thrive exclusively on the promise of another paradigm shift …"
Technology serves as both our enabler and enslaver. It encourages hope and creates the lion's share of the frustrations we daily struggle to cope with. If ever a human invention exemplified the notion that there's no such thing as a free lunch, Technology holds that distinction. It giveth while also taking away. It encourages before disappointing. It seems to be continually, constantly annoying. On my better days, I find ways to fiddle with it less. On my worst days, it can hold me completely in its thrall. I curse its presence and pitch a fit when I cannot access it. It improves life immeasurably, by which I mean unavoidably. It creeps into routines almost unobserved, then won't let go for anything.
It seems I can barely remember my life before, if I had a life before Tech.
Presententions
Master of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist:
Allegory: Combat of Animals in the Presence of Man with Shield (1515/20)
"Everything except the lilac garden seems twisted and broken."
I inhabit a suddenly disorienting time when usual expectations no longer reliably produce. Emerging realities seem wacky. Our incumbent leads exclusively by whim. This might entertain He With A Negative Attention Span, but it exhausts the rest of us. He appears wholly presumptuous, as if he targets every one of his mindless proclamations for The Ages. I sense he, or more likely his fundamentalist followers, thinks his "reign" biblical and, as usual, the most devout take the allegories literally. This produces predictably ridiculous reactions, the sole predictable part of his many machinations. They always go sideways and are often rescinded after inducing some fresh, otherwise unnecessary, chaos. Some speculate that chaos must be the underlying purpose, keeping opponents off balance. This almost works, except it seems to off-balance the perpetrator more than the opponents. Consequently, the loyal opposition appears to be gaining the upper hand. As usual, the incumbent seems only capable of undermining his own plans, assuming he even has any plans.
He seems to live by presumption.
Serfdom
Jules Breton: The Song of the Lark (1884)
"Let us choose more wisely going forward after we finally impeach this bastard."
The problem with monarchies must be that they require vast numbers of peasants. All that idling demands many waitpeople, cooks, gardeners, butlers, maids, footmen, and vast numbers of serfs, peasant farmers who live at or slightly below subsistence so that their monarchs might live as kings. The overhead involved seems unreasonable to us raised in more liberal circumstances. How much better might it be if everybody could become more self-sufficient and at least earn and pay a living wage? People could trade rather than indenture, choose instead of becoming chattel. This tension between the monarchial and liberal worlds has peaked lately, with a self-proclaimed dictator elected to lead the world's oldest liberal democracy. Conservatives, traditionally those most enamoured of market traditionalism, for some unknown reason, embraced him who became our first self-proclaimed dictator. Dictatorships and monarchies seem identical at some level, for they both require unreasonable numbers to perform as peasants.
The Road To Serfdom, a popular book from the 1940s by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, described how excessive government control of economic decision-making and central planning inevitably lead to tyranny.
GigaMa
Xiang Shengmoe:
Crab-apple Blossom from a Flower Album of Ten Leaves
(1656)
"May she fondly remember her great-grands."
The Muse's post-cancer treatment includes five years of surveillance involving frequent doctor visits and occasional specialist consultations. No reason for serious concern has yet emerged from this scrutiny, but the inquiry continues for at least another eighteen months. She could have chosen to see this specialist via tele-health. Still, she decided it might be useful to visit in person, if only to stay in touch with someone offering more experience than her local practitioner can. This means a short trip to what I'll forever call Sleazeattle, an overnight in a grossly over-priced hotel, and associated adventures. Ask me what gives me Hope, and I'll respond that the future renders me hopeful. When the present seems filled with hopeless boobs conspiring to make their lives Hell, the future never gets even distantly involved in those shenanigans. What helps me cope with how things seem to be now? Two things: the shadow of my future and the ability to roam around a bit in my present. I'm a dedicated homebody, but The Muse insists I get out into The World. I rarely regret these excursions, though I usually faunch beforehand in anticipation.
The Muse opted to see this specialist in person because it gave her an excuse to see her great-granddaughter Really. (Really's a family name! Nobody's ever a family member until after they've been given a family name to fix the shortcomings their original inevitably exhibits.) Her real name doesn't matter to family. To us, she's Really. The Muse had seen her a few months ago, but we do not live nearby, so she's already three times older than she was on that first visit. I'd never met her, and though I'm no blood relative, I still consider her my great-granddaughter. Great-granddaughters provide a reason to feel hopeful, regardless of current conditions. A GGD has an upside, which is the one thing no great-grandfather can realistically provide. My future's been shrinking constantly since the day I was born, leaving me ever further behind on the upside portion of the program. I'm more than physically shrinking. A GGD provides an extension into a world I will never know. That's hopeful for me.
The ride over was typically remarkable.
BowSaw
Jack Gould: Untitled (two men sawing large logs) (c. 1950)
" … designed to preserve enthusiasm rather than undermine it."
Yesterday, while the rest of the world was busy going to Hell, I rediscovered an often unused corner of my little Heaven here. I'd tried and failed to construct a little pop-up-paint-tent on the front of the garage to shade me while I strip and repaint some long trim boards for our front porch restoration. I'd drilled holes and set eye hooks, thinking I could string up a tarp to serve as the roof, but I was short one anchor point. I figured I could screw a left over cut-down seven-foot two-by into a paver then further weigh that down with a concrete cornerstone, but the screws failed, so I folded up the tarp and set that project aside. My puttering efforts often encounter such blockages because, despite my advancing age, I remain largely ignorant about calculating forces. Combine that innocence with at least an equal ignorance of how such problems are typically solved, and I have an explanation for why my grand schemes so often initially fail. I do not take these failures personally. I consider my attempts experiments, even though I suspect that someone out there could solve such problems in their head without even resorting to pencil and paper. I almost always eventually resolve such difficulties, though usually in ways I couldn't have imagined before serially failing. The universe backs me into most of my successes.
That problem set aside, I attempted to resolve another small dilemma.
FreshStart
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): fresh bread (1967)
Inscriptions and Marks:
Signed: l.r.: Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: Fresh bread, a secret agent / A jug of wine a loaf of bread and WOW / What kind of a revolution would it be if all the people in the whole world would sit around in a circle and eat together? [heart shape] / What you seek in vain for half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. Thoreau
—-
"I prefer the quality only ignorance ever dispenses."
I've grown weary of the continuing anticipation, the fantasies pretending to qualify as policies, and the inescapable idiocy masquerading as stable genius. This will never become genius, regardless of how many unqualified commentators try to convince us. We will never be persuaded. If anybody does, we possess the closest thing to common sense anybody ever has. I'm not casting aspersions, but those who don't understand won't. It's just not in them. Whether through willful ignorance or chance, they were never invited to the dance. Yes, they hold grudges. They do not seek justice, but vengeance. They flee from decency, apparently the only toxic substance likely to do them in. I fear that too close an association might render me like them. I worry that even watching them so closely has been rendering me stupid.
Yet I do not want to miss any subtle shift in strategy.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/17/2025
Jack Gould: Untitled [mother and daughter at table, writing] (c. 1948)
We Prefer Homemade
Our small city has been hosting Town Hall events featuring our absent congressional representative because we're worried, and he seems uninterested or unable to facilitate a gathering to reassure us. Though we try, we don't really reassure each other when we gather. We show up, by which I mean we bring our natural diversity, as if we intended to annoy each other by displaying it. Only in a cult, where everybody's too terrified of being identified as different, do we gather without fear of disturbing each other. The usual sensitivities always come, as if to highlight our shared dilemma. We ache to be community, but we dare not insist upon conformity. E Pluribus Unim, as I said somewhere this week, insists we're from different root stock, not similar. The miracle of our form of government was never its ability to engender anything even distantly resembling efficiency. Its stated purpose was to promote apparently inefficient diversities to surprisingly produce more than the sum of their components. This strategy has worked for approaching two hundred and fifty years. The efficiency experts lack the calculus to reduce this possibility into anything resembling a satisfying formula. As I also said somewhere this writing week, those who pay to play cannot understand those who would never pay for or play with any of the freedoms we enjoy. We're freeloaders where freedom's concerned. To purchase it defiles it. We prefer homemade.
Desperation
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes:
Fool’s Folly, from Disparates (1816–19, published 1877)
"He was never primed to contribute what success always requires."
The unmistakable scent of Desperation accompanies every proclamation and every action initiated by this goofy administration. It's as if they know everybody's already on to them. They persist, perhaps bravely, failing to achieve even a threshold of believability. They have not managed to convince themselves. They cling together around their largely absurdist stories like proverbial rats clinging to flotsam, and hardly even deserving that hackneyed old allegory to describe their condition. They present as pitiful, yet they still seem to produce fruitful disruption. As the courts start kicking in, their explanations become even more fantastical. We knew they weren't serious from the outset, with their assault on decency and efficiency, neither of which parsed to anything other than fantasy: abuse, fraud, and waste. Their “savings” cost more than they saved. Their police for their police state seems comical, cosplay goons performing administrative errors. International incidents initiated by middle-of-the-night tirades: the usual.
The more paranoid point out that they follow a plan, published in paperback form, so the rest of us can follow along.
Crumbling
William Blake: Thy Sons and Daughters Were Eating and Drinking Wine (The Book of Job),
Alternate Title: Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan (1821)
"The incumbent will richly deserve his comeuppance."
A hundred days into our incumbent's second term, it's difficult for me not to feel as though I'm stuck somewhere in the Book of Job. You will remember Job as the unfortunate believer whose life inexplicably turns to shit as if he had been a sinner. True belief in anything doesn't immunize anyone from very much of anything. Some things happen regardless of anyone's faithfulness. Other things might occur due to misplaced belief. Belief in false premises or misleading promises can contribute to reversing fortunes, but belief itself can't independently be ascribed as cause. Other factors must intrude to produce results. In our case, our incumbent's abysmal second-term results seem easily ascribable to our incumbent himself. Whatever evil playbook he might have tried to follow, his performance so far shows him incapable of following any playbook. Investors have begun to publicly speculate that he's insane. Former supporters have started moving further away as he's again demonstrated his incompetence in practice.
As I've noted before, our economy was the world's envy a short hundred days ago.
Contemptible
Jean Audran: Minachting [Contempt] (1727)
"Such behavior transcends explanation and excuse."
Our incumbent was never careful. Oh, he took precautions, though even those seemed a little too loose or fast to ultimately evade detection. Most of his administration's business has been conducted on Signal®, an insecure and illegal platform upon which to conduct official business. Even in small things, he chooses lawlessness. He thumbs his nose at convention and decency with equal contempt. I'm unsurprised, then, that the sum of his efforts amounts to Contemptible. He holds decency in contempt as easily as he seems to revere evil. He seems to have been built backward from most people. He can't help but carry what most hold as internal out on his shoulders. He continually shares way too much information. He parses his world with a rusty potato peeler. He skins convention alive. It should be no surprise that he managed to prove himself Contemptible in the eyes of his sole Court of Last Resort, one he struggled, in his last administration, to stack with unfit judges owing him. They suddenly owe him no longer.
It's quite an accomplishment to offend people you paid to be your friend, but even paid-for justices have their limits.
CopingTactics
Ferdinand Olivier: Coping-stone (1823)
"I'd rather be crazy on my terms …"
Most people seem incapable of mustering a coping strategy, for we do not live all that strategically. We exist episodically, hoping against hope that we will somehow cope with even the more extraordinary stresses our times expose us to. I might insist that I've never seen a time like this, but I've survived stressful times before. Those times sure seemed dire at the time, and only in retrospect do they seem tame by any comparison. They terrified me to what I then understood to be my core. I didn't know beforehand if I could cope with those tensions and stresses. The tenacious unknowingness of those times caused the bulk of the damage. Others were more wounded than I, though it was not in any way a credit to anything I necessarily contributed. I proved fortunate under those circumstances, though I felt anything but lucky at the time. One never knows or, certainly, I never seemed to know at any point. Later, perhaps through speculation, I sometimes made sense of such experiences, though I suspect my stories about those times better qualify as fiction than accurate reportage. I chalk them up to one of my more prominent CopingTactics.
I write my cares away, though writing more often amplifies my cares than mollifies them.
Wealth_
Jan Luyken:
Man met de wereld in zijn armen laat kostbaarheden vallen
[Man with the world in his arms drops valuables] (1710)
"I will then settle in to become dirt myself."
April brings recovery. The messes accumulated over the receding winter demand attention, and rediscovery accompanies that attention. It always takes me some time to get started again, for engaging quickly becomes obligation. There will be scant respite until at least November. What begins as preliminary weeding blooms into mowing, planting, watering, fertilizing, and ongoing weeding. Some reconfiguring always intrudes, too, as something will have degraded since the prior growing season. This is a reminding time, for each April, I rediscover my Wealth, the single sure accumulated asset I will ever truly steward. I can't possibly own it, for it belongs more to the ages than it could ever belong to anybody. It represents my tacit legacy. Properly prepared so no inheritor will ever know precisely what they receive, though each might well find reason to revere me come future Aprils.
I measure my Wealth in tilth, the soil quality in my garden.
MagicalThinking
Master of the Die: Psyche,
Thinking to Appear More Beautiful...,
Opens the Fateful Box (1530–1540)
"We never were merely externalities …"
Our billionaires inhabit a radically different universe than the rest of us, for they exist without consequences. I might reasonably believe their existence must prove much more consequential if only because they command vast resources. In that narrowest sense, I might consent, but commanding vast resources says little about success. It might be that few things more reliably exceed than excess, but this says nothing about effectiveness. It's little or nothing to purchase something with one-hundredth of one percent of one's resources. The significance, however otherwise magnificent, tends to get lost in rounding on those sorts of transactions. A working man might struggle for a decade to finally save a downpayment for a modest home he'll never ultimately pay for. Still, he will have really accomplished something monumental in so doing. The lowly billionaire could buy and sell him ten thousand times without diminishing his wealth by a comparative dime, yet never once experienced success in the way that workingman does. Nor could they experience consequences because the workman risks everything to achieve his modest result, and the billionaire risks essentially nothing.
It's much more and different from idolatry to worship our billionaires' successes.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/10/2025
Francesco Bartolozzi: April [Aprile] (18th century)
Attempting To Go It Alone
Following George McGovern's presidential campaign, self-described 'gonzo journalist' Hunter S. Thompson published a collection of his Rolling Stone campaign dispatches into a book titled Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72. I cut my teeth on Thompson's writing. For years, I carted around my Rolling Stones collection as one of my most prized possessions. Even with Richard Nixon involved, what constituted Fear and Loathing in 1972 would hardly spark a disinterested retch today. Our current incumbent's shenanigans have reset the bar for fear and loathing. Our closest neighbor now considers the United States to be a rogue state, the source of illegal guns, drugs, and every manner of contraband, rather than a trusted ally. We offer them lax border security.
I can't seem to help feeling as though my reputation has also been tarnished, even though I in no way supported any of this clown's initiatives.
Smugness
Ewald Dülberg: Self-Portrait (1917)
" … he sure seems clueless about how transparently he exposes his inner urges."
Woe be the leader without competent advisors. Those who go it alone and serve as their own coach have the fewest resources from which to draw. They must make much of it up, and nobody's imagination proves bottomless enough to adequately serve that need. Worse, though, comes when said leader considers themselves the smartest person in every room, for even if this belief were true, it would provide little benefit. Life is no more an IQ test than in is a race. Those who compete, especially those who compete with themselves, lose the most. Those for whom each decision becomes a competition probably have nothing left to lose. Our incumbent seems to suffer from these conditions. On those occasions when he listens to someone, he more often acts upon his misunderstanding of what they'd intended to advise. He usually swipes some notion out of context and then claims it is his original before swelling with a curious Smugness. It's a genuinely infuriating habit, an authentic abuse of power.
I suppose we each profoundly misunderstand the world in our own unique ways.
Weakman
Unknown Artist: Man of Sorrows (1465/70)
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
Images such as the Man of Sorrows were intended to shock the beholder into repentance. The pristine condition, and even survival, of this hand-colored woodcut is primarily due to its having been pasted-like many early devotional woodcuts-within a protective book cover. This unique impression was discovered amidst the rubble during the bombardment of London in 1945.
"Good riddance to another so deluded he couldn't recognize his own weaknesses when they manifested."
——
Our incumbent fancies himself a strongman on the order of a mafia don. The most curious attribute of such strength might be how it reeks of weakness. It seems primarily defensive in nature, often co-optive, as it intends to do unto others before they have the chance of doing it undo them. These amount to preemptive retributions, a speculative getting even for something that hasn't really happened yet. In this manner, the self-proclaimed strongman exists as a Weakman instead, for the surest signs of weaknesses accompany the unselfconscious use of force as if it represented power. The truly powerful have little to show off, for their strength lies mostly in reserve, unperturbed by day-to-day existence. They live in peace, with deep respect for the absolute calamity that would have occurred had a Weakman been in charge. The weak might speak of law and order, but their rhetoric, carried to action, encourages righteous lawlessness, producing deeply defensive disorder.
The Weakman sees the world as zero-sum contentions sorted into clear winners and obvious losers.
Insanity
Adolph von Menzel:
Studies in the Insane Asylum (1844)
"We never know how to respond congruently."
Ordinarily, politics entails differences of opinion. It's different than this in the case of our current incumbent. There, realities seem to conflict. He and his minions deny the existence of verifiable conditions and assert the existence of clearly delusional ones. He exercises uninformed power. He primarily exercises non-existent powers. He proclaims stuff that could never be objectively excused as in any way related to truths. He holds convictions that only the more deluded conspiracy theorists ever seem convinced, then threatens and even exercises retribution against anyone disagreeing or, to use his words, "defying" him. Since when has a difference of opinion warranted such a response in this country that first championed freedom of speech, religion, and political conviction? Disagreement doesn't constitute a crime here. We have long revered dissent as one of the purest forms of patriotism, indeed nothing deserving any form of political retribution.
We teeter on an edge more perilous than mere politics.
WhollyUnlawful
Jean François Janinet: M. de Lafayette Arrests a Man for the Unlawful Hanging of a Thief (24 May 1790)
Book Title: Gravures Historiques des principaux événements depuis l'ouverture des Etats
[Historical Engravings of the main events since the opening of the States]
(1789?)
"Keep our Constitution out of the bedroom and the … board room out of our legislature … "
The Baby Boom Generation might have been the most scofflaw in history so far. We tended to obey the laws we agreed with and ignored those we didn't. Much of the difficulty might be reasonably assigned to a series of absolutely ridiculous laws, which, in my humbled opinion, attempted to legislate a particular morality, one not even a plurality of the polity ever really agreed to obey. We are much more pious publically than privately. We try to keep our immoralities off the front page of the papers. We figure it's nobody's business if we choose to smoke marijuana in the privacy of our home, even if, to enjoy that illegal liberty, we have to financially support the ever-burgeoning drug smuggling and distribution industry and all the greater sins that entails. We didn't imagine ourselves criminals but principled dissenters, the post-modern equivalent of Minute Men protesting against The Stamp Act. A whole array of such infractions riddled our modern society. Ever more, it seemed, as the more conservative came to dominate domestic politics. It should have been no surprise that Women's Rights were the most frequently, profoundly, and unjustly affected.
Eventually, one didn't need to smoke weed or develop an inflated sense of the personal rights bestowed by the Second Amendment to feel as though they righteously protested against a seemingly ever-more intrusive government.
TheBlues
Dodge Macknight: Blue Sky (19th-20th century)
"I had TheBlues so bad one time it turned my face into a permanent frown …"
Taj Mahal: "Cake Walk Into Town" from Recycling the Blues & Other Related Stuff
℗ 1972 Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment
Released on: 1972-01-01
I live in such close proximity to ambiguity that it's a genuine wonder I can usually figure out what's happening around me. I can see out of The Villa's back second-story windows TheBlues rising to the east and south, the Blue Mountain foothills, that is. They represent a world of considerable wonder. In the summer, The Muse and I trundle up there to gather a sharp-scented local Black Current variation prized by The Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) tribe, TheBlues, comprising a significant portion of their homeland. In the spring, we enter seeking morels, a magical, almost mythical mushroom revered around here by both chefs and hillbillies. In winter, the snow crazy wend there way up into that country to ski, an activity that never made much sense to me, but God bless them, anyway. Last Fall, we stumbled upon a significant crop of wild huckleberries up there. Wildfires overran our favorite space during the teens; in our lifetime, it will never again be anything like it was. We still visit to reminisce and walk around in the remaining reassuring silence.
My ancestors crossed on The Oregon Trail, which passed a point I've not been able to locate, which they called The Top Of TheBlues.
InDEIcency
Hendrick Goltzius: Those who litigate must be shameless, patient and rich (1597)
Gallery Notes:
A litigating man (Litigator) walks up a staircase with two things in his hands and behind him three women carrying bags with the inscriptions 'Shamelessness', 'Patience' and 'Money' in Latin. Extensive caption in Dutch, German and Latin. This print is part of a series of eight prints about greed, deception and litigation.
——
" … we pride ourselves on being a decent people …"
Our current incumbent began waging a senseless war on decency from his first hour in office. He focused upon a modest-seeming target: recent attempts to codify decency into law. The overriding Law of Unintended Consequences might have gotten involved because quite a constituency had accreted around the idea that equality constituted an intolerable insult to the polity. They described it as Reverse Descrimination. From a zero-sum mindset, I suspect this logic might make close to perfect sense, for within that worldview, any gain by anyone else constitutes a loss for the home team. Consequently, they sense their historical and, therefore, sacred boundaries eroding. Further, such insistences become intolerable when any law commands that people treat everybody decently, for only some seem more deserving. Besides, the subtext screams that we were here first, so our rights and privileges must be superior, even though we don't believe we are in any way privileged.
The concept had been shorthanded into the label DEI, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 04/03/2025
Judith Rothschild: Untitled-
from Untitled portfolio of fifteen works by Judith Rothschild, Frank Bacher, and Sheri Martinelli (1946)
Why Should Any Of Us Be Any Different?
The turbulent end to this March and the even more turbulent beginning of April realized what had been prefacing since this incumbent took the oath he had no intention of fulfilling. The troubling story continues more or less unabated. When delusion got elected, our collective coping skills were called to kick in along with our harder-won hoping skills. Of course, this week also challenged our collective and individual abilities to hope, for the future looked progressively grimmer with each passing day. I continued writing, sharing my impressions. This morning, a neighbor stopped as she walked by out front, as I was saying goodbye to a visiting childhood friend, to report that she'd just survived a half-hour conversation with someone she felt sure was a Trumper. She was shocky. As I wrote this week, I reminded her that Rome wasn't undermined in a day. It wasn't built in a day, either. Little happens in a single day. However horrible events might seem on some of the more troubling days. Days decide nothing, though they can appear to undermine everything. That sense that all is lost must certainly be illusory. Even more illusory than that sense that our hope might be fruitless. I'm pleading for maintaing the quality of my experience at pretty much any cost, so I took some respite days and crawled around my yard preparing for Spring this week. Few things cannot be improved by crawling around a yard preparing for Spring. Spring comes regardless of our hopefulness to deliver reassurance not one of us was ever worthy of receiving. The Maribelle plum trees are blooming. The magenta ornamental crabapple is threatening to astound. Why should any of us be any different?
Power
Jan Asselijn: The Threatened Swan (c. 1650)
"Who went too far?"
Precisely because there's so very little to be gained, he engages in the game as if meant something. Sure, it's cruel; for some, that alone would constitute a more than adequate payoff. His thirst seems more of an unquenchable variety. His hunger was never once satisfied by merely consuming anything. Eating seems to sharpen his hunger, leaving him, if anything, even hungrier. He seems insatiable because he most likely is insatiable. Some mistake this for formidable, but it looks more like a vulnerability. He has no sense for enough. Adequacy evades his grasp. He demands excess in all things except moderation. Because he always goes big, he lacks strategic intent. He defaults rather than chooses. In the long run, he cannot conserve his resources. He believes himself all-powerful. This, of course, remains his greatest vulnerability.
Not everyone seems capable of wisely wielding Power.
Respite
Robert Capa: Wounded Loyalist Is Aided Behind The Lines, Spanish Civil War (1937)
" … must I remain on the ramparts as if my presence alone repels a disoriented and misguided aggressor?"
Even breaking news eventually grows old. The sense that my attention might be the only thing holding this increasingly fragile world together becomes self-destructive. Even though the battle, let alone any wider war, remains unfinished, my effectiveness diminishes. I realize it cannot be my calling to be always up to date with the latest developments. My media diet seems too anemic to maintain an adequate watch. I don't even subscribe to cable, and I cannot figure out how to access local television stations without The Muse's intervention. I get by with what I can stream, my local paper, which has a surprisingly effective editor, and the beleaguered NYTimes, my Washington Post sadly having recently disqualified itself. Much of what I can perceive from here appears to be feinting moves, stuff of little short or long-term consequence. It's helpful to understand that there is no master plan guiding these intrusions, and even if there were, those executing those plans seem incapable of following directions, even those painstakingly written with kindergarten crayons.
April came, dragging Spring behind her.
Forty-fourth
Harold Edgerton: Ouch! [Archery] (1934)
" … and I don’t think they can!"
I take a respite from my CHope series today to remember my remarkable daughter, born on this day forty-four years ago. She was not supposed to die before me, though she left me with occasionally overwhelming memories of her presence. I miss toodling into the Willamette Valley to spot newborn lambs with her. We were formidable lamb-lookers. I miss our long-searching conversations that always lead to revelations. My magic almost always worked with her. I won't forget our final conversation where she cried, revealing that the latest surgery had not relieved her symptoms or her often overwhelming pain. She fixed that herself in a meticulously planned and executed execution.
The searing superficiality of all our present incumbent engages with pales compared to a single genuinely significant life, like my darling daughter's.
Hubris
Anonymous, after print by Jean Veber: Schaduw van Paul Kruger hangt over het Franse leger tijdens de wapenschouw te Bétheny,
[Shadow of Paul Kruger hangs over the French army during the gun show in Bétheny] (1901)
Gallery Comment:
"This coat of arms of the French army was held on September 19, 1901 in Bétheny for Tsar Nicholas II. Paul Kruger was in Europe at the time, where he tried to recruit support for the struggle of the Boers in South Africa - especially from enemies of the United Kingdom, such as Russia and France. Print is part of a magazine with cartoons about the Second Boer War. With a three-line caption: Never has a cleaner army shown its strength more brilliantly… while such a clean use had to be made of it for the matter of law."
"They will exit on the same horse they rode in on."
Every civil society insists upon certain comportments. In Washington, DC, most government employees still wear formal business attire. It's unthinkable to go into the office in jeans. In Silicon Valley, a similarly enforced dress code focuses upon a more studiously casual style, just as religiously observed. There, it might be unthinkable not to go to the office in jeans. In the South, people still routinely address each other as "sir" and "madam," however backward that might seem. When I lived there, I quickly adapted to the local standard even though I'd previously thought myself too modern to so engage. I noticed the resulting gentility when people observed this practice and felt adequately cultured when I participated. Even though I'm re-ensconced back in the heathen north, I still observe this practice. It now seems like a matter of simple decency to me. If I had not been raised well, I managed to learn better.
There are likewise comportments that never seem to contribute anything positive.
WitchHunting
Jean Veber: Witches (1900)
"All accusations to the contrary qualify as WitchHunting."
Even wannabe dictators must learn to spend much of their time in denial, for they become a magnet attracting outrageous accusations. Not that most of them aren't true, but it just would not do to confess to what he's actually up to. Aspiring dictators must uphold certain standards, and truthfulness is, frankly, somebody else's purview. Truth and fiction must become indistinguishable, requiring at least daily denial. News conferences almost always feature the incumbent awkwardly admitting something by vehemently denying it. The assembled journalists and even the press secretary understand the ritual, and few even attempt to deliver a killer follow-up after their original question gets rudely blown off. The palpable fictional content of the denial hangs in the air for a while like smoke obscuring mirrors. He insists they've only uncovered another Witch Hunt, which everyone understands does nothing but confirm the absolute truth of the original statement.
It might help the eroding credibility if he could vary the terms he employs to describe the situation.
ChangingThePast
Mel Bochner: If the Color Changes [MB2042] (2001)
© Mel Bochner
"They toil to expunge themselves. Good riddance!"
Unable to positively change any future, repressive regimes quickly turn their attention to ChangingThePast. This amounts to an impossible objective, though the native impossibility of it won't halt or even meaningfully retard their effort, for outrunning an unsavory past seems imperative if the repressive regime is to gain any respectability. If they can whitewash history, they might stand a chance to reprogram memories. This could result in a sort of forced respectability that repressive regimes always seek. They want to be seen as in favor of mom and apple pie rather than bloody labor strife and Jim Crow Laws. If they are nothing, they are deep-down hypocrites. They desperately want to forget whatever might tarnish their reputation and, their reputation being less than reputable, requires some extraordinary reengineering. They focus on repressing books because they're an easy and reliable target. Not that many of their supporters read all that many books. They've always sown deep suspicions that readers are progressives. They slur other publications and their publishers. Suppose The New York Times publishes a highly-regarded series that turns into a book and a Netflix series tracing the real history of African Americans. In that case, everyone involved gets labeled as "woke." Pure public relations genius soon rebrands "woke" from meaning a form of insightful wisdom to meaning a means for demeaning white people. Wokeness becomes public enemy number one.
Repressive regimes seem uninterested in any distinction between truth and fiction.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 03/27/2025
Kunisada Utagawa: Writing examination (1810 - 1830)
Just Trending Toward Something
If I'm witnessing a revolution, it certainly seems to be an awfully ham-handed one. I'm reminded of how a gorilla might go about disassembling something he doesn't understand. He resorts to muted brute force, not knowing what might cause the thing to open. He dents the case and ultimately gets defeated by tiny screws, the operation of which seems too subtle for him to comprehend. Almost every move has been thwarted by the courts. Appeals have likewise proven fruitless. Chaos has resulted. I won't argue that chaos doesn't produce its own effects, though they tend to be something other than structural. They might even create a more substantial structure than it attempted to threaten. As chilling as many of the initiatives have seemed, they sum to deeply superficial, perhaps because they're inspired by science fiction. They rely upon non-existent principles and properties. They profoundly misunderstand human nature.
PennyWisdom
Percy Billinghurst: The fool who sold wisdom. (1900)
"I wonder how our public purse might be influenced
if our billionaire benefactors had ever learned to play Find A Penny, Pick It Up."
The recent injection of multitudes of billionaires into positions affecting the public purse has provided an opportunity to understand better how the very wealthy relate to money. I, the son of parents who grew up through the Great Depression, inherited certain beliefs and practices regarding money. I believe that money is almost impossible to acquire. This belief encourages me to be stingy. I do not seek luxury. I prefer good enough over perfect. I understand that everything costs money and that, mostly, the amount of money stuff costs cannot be meaningfully reduced. Attempting to reduce the cost associated with basic living tends to increase that cost. Trying to eliminate that cost almost always creates catastrophe; the absence of such expenses produces genuine calamity that will cost multiples of whatever was supposed to be saved to recover. I try to be satisfied with what I have, understanding that it's always possible to spend a lot more without gaining an ounce of additional satisfaction. Get-rich-quick schemes tend to be the best way to get poorer quickly.
BIllionaires seem to believe that a penny not spent is a penny somehow liberated from a form of slavery.
Equivocal
Alfred Stieglitz: Equivalent, Spiritual America (1923)
"The reigning forces of darkness have no idea what they've inspired."
They lie so reflexively it remains impossible to see any shred of truth in their responses. They know that you know, too. It's as if they're chiding you, urging you to go ahead and try to get even. Impunity never imagined a better friend. And they're right for the moment. In that instant, there couldn't possibly be any leveling of that playing field. The whole game seems to belong to Simon Legree's team. The umpires are crooked. The fans, divided. Even the future of the game appears undecided. What was once considered The Great American Pastime no longer means anything to anybody. It's become a medium for domination to a few and the absolute symbol of subjugation to a fast-growing majority. This situation will turn, but not immediately, and certainly not without considerably more discomfort. Until then, the lies will continue unabated as if winning those little controversies mattered, and the liars will continue enjoying the only notoriety they will ever see. They're each set on a course toward infamy.
Philosophers might insist that every human action might as well be considered ambiguous.
Insecure
Attributed to Giuseppe Maria Crespi:
Woman Looking For Fleas (c. 1715)
" … the one true sign of their underlying cowardice!"
Security was never gonna be this administration that can't administer anything's strong suit. If loose lips did sink ships, we'd be down a few battle cruisers after only two months with "him" in office. Fortunately, most breaches go unnoticed by allies and enemies. The most damaging ones live on to become exemplars of an administration's performance, bloopers that lived on to become definingly infamous. The amateurs employed by this operation ensured a day like yesterday would eventually come around, where a group of senior officials engaged in top-secret government business on an insecure private network with an inadvertently invited journalist listening in. This arrangement violated more laws than it respected, though few doubt that what it represented has been a typical scenario since this incumbent took office. I know from a recent conversation with an old friend who works at the USDA that they, too, communicate via Signal, though that violates multiple communication preservation and security protocols. It should surprise nobody that this incumbent, who scoffs at almost everything, also routinely scoffs at security laws.
When confronted with the evidence of this egregious security breach, our new Secretary of Defense (SecDeaf) responded by screaming at the questioning reporter, thoughtfully channeling his emotional age as if anybody was likely to guess differently.
Extortion
James McNeill Whistler: The Strong Arm (1895)
"Congratulations, or something. Such are the wages Extortionists always earn."
Nothing better evidences the weakness of this new administration that can't seem to administer anything than that they resort to bullying instead of convincing. Honest politicians exercise the considerable art of forging such deals, persuading, horse-trading, and working for agreement with the implicit acknowledgment that whatever's decided won't hang together long without voluntary acceptance. Governing demands the consent of the governed, as every failed authoritarian can readily testify. They thought it might be somehow simpler to strong-arm their way toward acquiescence, and in the extremely short run, such tactics might even seem to succeed, but no allies get created when inflicting such decisions. Quite the opposite. With each so-called success, the number of detractors grows until no supporters are left. It matters how treaties emerge.
It feels no less terrifying to understand that the assault comes as a result of their weakness.
MessSitting
Jack Gould: Untitled [mess on floor of ruined apartment] (1955)
"I'm first coping with the underlying nature of the difficulty."
Last night, for the second night in a row, The Muse and I had been invited out to engage in another dialogue. Neither engagement was intended to fix anything, but each was more focused on better understanding the nature of the difficulties or what fixing might entail. We might have wondered what we'd gain from engaging in conversations while Rome burns, except our experience strongly suggested that failing to engage in precisely such conversations might be the leading cause of failures when attempting to extinguish fires. It's all too easy to run into the burning building armed with little more than the best intentions, only to discover some hidden nature of the fire after entering. Under the Measure Twice Before Cutting Rule, it's often proved better to engage in some aimless conversation before acting to resolve a situation, however urgent it seems. It might even be that the more urgent a response appears, the more necessary the preceding conversation. Improving focus or understanding might better target a response.
This always seems like wasted time.
CHope
Jules Bastien-Lepage: Mower Honing a Scythe (1878)
" … and to radiate enough hope to make however I cope feel worthwhile."
Over recent months, my MacBook Air started crashing each morning. Because I became a compulsive saver, I rarely lost anything in these crashes. They became annoying, usually happening at one of the more inconvenient times. I'd be rushing to finish posting my daily story when everything would freeze up, and I'd have to begin that familiar recovery routine. We all know how rebooting under such conditions seems to take a little longer than forever. I'd recover and then finish my business feeling persecuted rather than elated. On a recent trip to Portland, I resolved to buy a new MacBook. I'd diagnosed the crashing difficulty as being caused by insufficient memory. I'd learned that my current machine already has all the memory it can handle, so I reasoned that I needed a new machine. The Apple Store was its usual minimalist purgatory overrun with potential customers. I managed to catch the attention of a representative after spending fifteen or twenty minutes poking at sample display machines. I'd decided what I needed but quickly learned they didn't have what I wanted. I was advised I could order one online but cautioned that the low inventory probably meant some newer models were imminent. I left with a pocketful of complications, knowing that I would not run home and purchase a new machine online.
I started coping better with my situation instead.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 03/20/2025
Louis Auguste Lepère: Modern Bucolic (1901)
My Still-Tolerable Fiction
I have become somewhat of a Pollyanna character in the current psychodrama because I remain hopeful and optimistic despite or because of the current troubles. I remain astounded by how so many seem so sure that they can see what's coming. Many seem to project from recent experience to confidently insist that we've already lost our sacred Democracy. And if we could reasonably project just from recent experience, their confidence might be well-placed. I don't understand what such confidence gets anyone besides discouragement when we seem to need more courage rather than less. I admit that I do not and most probably cannot know. This admission doesn't nudge my dread into complete remission, but it does seem to extend permission to believe remission still remains possible.
This NextWorld Series has helped me focus and perceive what has been unfolding before me, as much as I would have preferred to have been distracted and not paying such close attention.
Without
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen: Without a Cent (March 1894)
printed by Edouard Kleinmann
" … patriotically doing Without!"
The first day of spring started suitably moist. The tail end of a week-long Pacific front left the street leading toward The Center of the Universe puddled and glistening. The cats, lately too familiar with that damp back fur feeling, hesitated before departing outside to make their morning rounds. I've tried to preserve their sense of rhythm through the long and isolating winter where outside so often seemed too unpromising for them to spend much time out there. I hovered close as if they might return the favor, for I also needed my time regulated. My world started disintegrating as the NextWorld began kicking in, though even my anticipation of it served to start closing me in. I anticipated shortages. As a proud veteran of the pandemic, I'd excelled at doing Without. I hunkered down and proudly made do, timing my off-hours excursions to avoid crowded venues. We didn't go out for supper. We avoided movies. We became willing homebodies, feeling we contributed to the common good via small sacrifices. While some protested the need for such compromises, we reveled in them. We thought mask mandates were common sense, and people complaining about them seemed self-destructively stupid.
The crazies have taken over now.
Unresolved
Constant Troyon: Unfinished Study of Sheep (c. 1850)
"If you think changing the world is difficult, try to keep it the same."
The ninetieth installment of any of my series marks the planned last story for me. This NextWorld Series will be a little different. It was probably always the nature of this particular series that it might hold the potential to be never-ending, for I designed it to be more about chronicling than post-facto reporting. At the beginning, I couldn't have known how or even if it might ever end, and that was my explicit intent. This has been my thirty-first series written over the prior almost eight years. Each followed this same design principle: the story would unfold rather than be outlined beforehand. In this sense, each series has violated one of the fundamental principles of both fiction and non-fiction. I might have been a writer much earlier in life, but I had to first get over the instructions that my fifth-grade teacher insisted represented the only proper way to write. She demanded an outline first before even laying pencil to paper. Then, she'd judge the result by how closely the finished work tracked to the original outline, as if this represented how anything works. It took decades for me to outgrow that poisonous lesson and simply start writing.
" … to mistake an aspirational for a supposed-to-be might be the source of most tragedy in this world."
Now, I can't seem to stop.
Lawlessness
Anti-slavery Almanac:
Lawless " burning of men " by the many. (1840)
(The American Anti-Slavery Society published the almanac
yearly from 1836 to 1843.)
"We were not supposed to abandon all hope here."
Every bully dreams of anarchy, believing themselves immune from the inevitable harm that always accompanies Lawlessness. Their so-called success always proves temporary when they succeed, for the bullies always manage to do the most damage to themselves under such regimes. Without rules or line judges, they tend toward excesses that not even they can ultimately tolerate. Further, there is no respite when every man, woman, and child decides they're a despot. Vigilance starts against vilified groups but soon extends to include former friends and even relations. When agreements can be blithely ignored, everyone's imperiled, and no defensive force proves adequate to repel the wolves from any door. Periods of relative anarchy historically proceed periods of stricter order. The comeuppance comes as a kind of penance never soon forgotten. Vestiges of that innate wildness remain, of course, or we wouldn't be human, by which I mean, or else we wouldn't be wild animals. We never were as civilized as we'd hoped we'd be. It seems we're only decently respectful toward each other after we've committed some significant sin together. Armistices celebrate a temporary end to evil more than the beginning of good.
Our incumbent was always dangerous because he refused to follow prescribed rules.
ImaginaryEnemies
Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Title Page from Imaginary Prisons (1749–50)
"I do not believe he can possibly succeed by so transparently misleading us with his ImaginaryEnemies."
Sixty days into NextWorld, ImaginaryEnemies seem to outnumber any actual ones so far. Our fresh incumbent must possess a hyperactive imagination, if only because of the astounding number of opponents it manufactures. Ancient allies regularly turn up on replacement watch lists, accused of some previously invisible infraction. Our oldest trading partners stand accused of ripping us off for generations by insisting on following mutually agreed-upon trading rules. Our former benefactors join the ever-lengthening list of probable suspects. It almost seems as if we’re suddenly suffering from some persecution complex, as ridiculous as most of the accusations seem. With each new indictment, the accuser's credibility diminishes in the public's eye. With plummeting popularity, he, unsurprisingly, doubles then triples down. It would not surprise me to learn that we had finally been discovered to have been our own worst enemy for years and that it took a stable genius in the White House to finally recognize the threat. I suppose we will be owed an obligatory tariff on ourselves next.
I feel increasingly exhausted by the transparently imaginary turmoil.
HeadCold
Robert Dighton: Dev'lish Cold, from A Set of Heads (c. 1795)
"Achoo! [Bless You!] Bless us all!"
I've had something like a HeadCold haunting me over the last week. It's been sneaky because its sole tell has been a clogged left ear. No runny nose. No overwhelming sneezing. No cough or phlegmy throat, just that otherwise innocuous yet annoying clogged ear. I bought some decongestants, which, carrying on the proud tradition of decongestants throughout history, worked just a little worse than nose-picking. The primary symptom has been modest disorientation. I'll be writing a story at my deck when I suddenly sense myself listing slightly to the left. I felt weary then, as if I needed to lie down for a minute. These sensations distract me from my mission, though I have so far been able to stave off completely caving into them. However, I have been begging off working in the springtime yard in favor of lengthy naps. As we enter my favorite season after a protracted and unusually discouraging winter, I've been slinking around, so I sense something's wrong. The HeadCold hardly seems to qualify as an explanatory diagnosis.
Then, I caught onto an underlying significance.
Blather
Edward Lear: from Book of Nonsense (1850s)
"Fishermen and golfers tend to be the most prodigious liars, masterful Blatherers."
News outlets have finally started publishing ver batum quotes from our incumbent. Before, journalists would attempt to translate whatever he'd attempt to say in what might have been a misguided belief that it was their journalistic responsibility to at least try to translate the essence of what he'd attempted to impart. This tactic failed in two significant ways. First, nobody could ever be confident that they'd adequately parsed a proclamation, so the reportage violated some journalistic first principle separating observation from fiction. The results often better qualified as reassuring fiction. Second, the reader was insulated from the more significant element of the story, that their president exclusively spoke in incoherent utterances instead of straightforward sentences. During the campaign, many complained that he seemed to be losing cognition. They'd assess word variety and see that his vocabulary had shrunk compared to earlier campaigns. Video of his speeches, almost exclusively replayed in small snippets, also demonstrated a definite incoherence. Those who survived one of his ninety-minute barn burners tended to lose cognition themselves from being subjected to his usages for so long.
Now that he's chief executive, he seems to have lost some of his former reticence.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 03/13/2025
Wolf Vostell: TV-Oxen II, from the portfolio "Weekend"
[TV-Ochsen II, from the portfolio "Weekend"] (1972)
Published by Galerie René Block, Berlin
I Quietly Pray As I Wonder
I often wonder whether what I write will hold any future significance. Moments slip past all of us, and it might be that all writers attempt to stem that slippage by chronicling time's passing. As I reported last week, I've been spending more time considering before setting fingers to keys since I started this series. This time has seemed almost pregnant with significance. I write in ignorance, if not total ignorance, at most the usual volume of it. I anticipate here and also reflect; neither acts perfect reflections. Imperfections might best represent this time later, this period when NextWorld started manifesting without anyone controlling it. Our fresh incumbent seems to have honed his self-sabotage skills since his last time in office, and he already possessed perhaps the very best such skills ever seen in any incumbent. He's far surpassing even his prior incompetence. Our democracy struggles to compensate for his utter incivility. Most days, it seems as if he never noticed that other people are here, many utterly dependent upon his decisions. Fortunately, our attorneys general and judiciary remain steadfastly standing between us and his ineptency. I quietly pray as I wonder what to describe in my writing each morning.
Woebegone
Claude Monet: Sandvika, Norway (1895)
"I expect they'll continue trying, anyway."
The Lake Woebegone Syndrome might have proved the most damaging of all the popular delusions. Some would vote for Dunning-Kruger, "a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities" (Wikipedia) Different people favor different foibles, but for self-sustaining delusion power, Woebegone works for me. Named after Garrison Keillor's fictional Minnesota town of Lake Woebegone, where, in his description, "the men are strong, the women, good looking, and the children, above average." Keillor describes a fictional place that perfectly encapsulates a common human aspiration. Who wouldn't want to call such a place home? Who didn't, at some level, hail from a similar myth, if only because the world of our youth might have seemed more understandable, more reasonable? I refer to my hometown as the center of my universe, where gravity works right, and Keillor taps into that sense when he characterizes Lake Woebegone. Who doesn't aspire to return to such a place? Who doesn't secretly try to recreate that sense when designing something?
It's common that a company, when considering recruitment, produces a process intended to create a little Lake Woebegone.
Undue
Lucas Cranach the Younger:
page from book: The Art of Wrestling: Eighty-Five Pieces
[Ringer Kunst: Fünff und Achtzig Stücke] (1539)
written by Fabian von Auerswald
printed by Hans Lufft
"I suspect this might be you and fear it will be me."
What better way to get your way than to simply ignore the rules as if they didn't pertain to you? The rules, after all, exist as mere agreements, and any associated guardrails are enforced more by practice than by police forces. We mostly police ourselves; when we don't, we tend to let the matter slide until some perfectly predictable accident occurs. Then, if then, the Justice Department might step in. If NextWorld has demonstrated anything, it's been how much civilization still depends upon the goodwill of upstanding citizens. Inject a few ill-willers into the mix, and everyone's world turns chaotic. Our incumbent stands as a cautionary tale in this respect. He always was the sort of personality we build jails to house, yet his brushes with justice found him slippery. He represents the worst our culture produces, unrepentant and insistent upon receiving much more than he's due. It was a huge mistake, if nonetheless typical that The Senate refused to convict and impeach him when they had the chance. I can find no evidence that showing mercy under such circumstances ever produces anything but worse behavior. It's no mercy, even to the offender, to find him not guilty when he's guiltier than sin.
Perhaps most of all, we prided ourselves on being a country of laws.
Nonsense
Unidentified Artist: The Nonsense Seller (1814)
Published by Aaron Martinet
"We will doubtless continue feeling disoriented … "
Ordinarily, following a few months' immersion, a new context starts making sense. I can one morning suddenly properly anticipate again. I rarely feel blindsided or surprised, even when some fresh inanity appears. Here, though, my experience has so far seemed unprecedented. I feel no sense of what might be coming next. My dread quotient sits near the red line, and I do not know how to quiet it. I feel deeply saddened as if utterly surrounded by stupidity, and it's stalking me. I daily learn of some fresh indictments for actions that don't qualify as crimes. Since when was it likely that one might be arrested for insulting a president, for showing genuine disrespect, especially after he'd earned it? Since now, I guess, though the courts seem as though they are already clogging up with what will inevitably be judged as frivolous charges. I expect a record number of disbarments as the Justice Department ramps up to become the incumbent's lap dog. The Nonsense might have made sense had Jonathon Swift, Lewis Carroll, or Mark Twain spun this tale. Instead, a third-rate, unreality television actor with declining cognition seems to have jumped the rails to become his own scriptwriter.
A respectful amount of literature was written to ridicule absurd rulers and their policies.
A_Modest_Proposal
Frans Everbag: Spaarvarken en spaarbankboekje
[Piggy bank and savings bank book] (1915)
"( … can we actually achieve greater before we've even achieved great?)"
How very fortunate we are to find ourselves blessed with an experienced self-dealer holding the office of the presidency. Prior office holders were not so experienced in the fine, if often shady, art of creating personal fortunes through insider trading. Far fewer than one percent of any population ever possess the secret to resolving every problem human civilization has ever encountered, so what were the chances that we'd hit that lotto number in our lifetime? In any lifetime? Probably much less than zero, but here we are with an experienced self-dealer at our service! Just last week, he invited a group of crypto-captains to supper at the White House, where he announced the creation of a Strategic Crypto Reserve to be added to the nation's other stores of wealth like Ft. Knox. He apparently tipped off those insiders as to which currencies he would choose for the pilot program. Over the following weekend, two previously languishing cryptocurrencies experienced dizzying increases in value, suddenly launching whoever held those "currencies" into personal wealth beyond imagination. The president himself, skilled self-dealer that he was, reportedly cleared something north of five billion dollars just over those two days, a return he confidently declared amounted to peanuts. The targetted cryptos reportedly later crashed back to be worth a little less than before they started booming that previous Friday.
In the past, such an admission would have put him into the number one slot for investigation by the FBI's financial fraud division.
Unnecessity
Printed for and sold by W. Bingley, Newgate Street London:
The Fruits of Arbitrary Power: or The Bloody Massacre (1770)
Massachusetts Historical Society Online Collection
"Not a lick of any of this was ever necessary for a second."
NextWorld seems primarily comprised of Unnecessity, absurdly arbitrary insistences. The war on common decency, where our better angels are vilified in favor of long-ago vanquished lesser ones. The absurd attacks of diversity initiatives, equity improvements, and respectful attempts to include everyone in opportunities. Nonsensical complaints about awareness, as if sleepwalking were preferable to acknowledging experience. The forced blindness of refusing to acknowledge genders. The never-existent yet still popular War On Christmas. The belligerent practice of primitive Christianity as if it represented the state religion. The insistence that, despite our Constitution, our sacred separation of church and state amounts to an abomination. Perhaps most of all, the cruel discrimination as if some citizens were naturally more American than others. The vilification of the weakest among us. The criminalization of everyday actions via presidential proclamations. Perhaps most of all, the presuppositions guiding these insanities. These notions go largely unquestioned, though nothing beyond innuendo was ever offered to justify or prove they were true.
The belief that all government spending has always been, by definition, wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive, and therefore, should be suspended.
Whim
Johann Wilhelm Baur: The Ordering of Chaos (c. 1639)
" … an undisciplined eight-year-old ruled by Whim."
The defining element of NextWorld might end up being Whim, our incumbent's impulsive choices. What if there never was a plan, if Project 2025 never influenced a single action by this administration? What if the continuing analysis intending to identify motive and strategic intent amounted to so much wishful imagining? In statistics, sophisticated tests exist to determine if apparent patterns amount to random events or contain potentially useful information. Since we are pattern-seeking organisms, we readily perceive patterns where there might be none. It can be damnably difficult to determine the difference in the real world. We presume strategic intent, whether or not it exists. We imagine that some plan informs action even though much of our own behavior might be best labeled unplanned. But we don't natively seem to perceive randomness, either. We might be incapable of perceiving randomness, especially regarding human events. We might accept that evolution depends upon random iteration without fully appreciating that it influences human events and world history no less.
The booming cottage industry focused on understanding our latest president's behavior never seems to sleep.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 03/06/2025
Charles Green Bush: Let Us Have Peace! -Fortissimo,
from Harper’s Weekly Date: published June 19, 1869
Inevitable Impeachment Trial
With only two more weeks remaining in this quarter—in this over-long winter—I realize that the NextWorld I have committed myself to describe in this series will not fully manifest before I exhaust my allotted time. Three months has been as long as I've cared to focus my attention on any topic. After fully immersing myself in prior series, I have required some fresh perspective. I sense that this series might have been a mistake, for I am not a political commentator or patriot by nature or interest. Yet, I have been watching myself channel my inner Thomas Paine in my writing each morning. I have felt genuine outrage that anyone would try to undermine MY democracy. My relationship with my country has never before been the least bit chauvinistic. I've thought the banner-waving patriots more hat than cattle. I have squelched whatever pride I might have felt, sensing my pride probably would preface some fall. The Mall in DC is lined with monuments to human folly, and thanking others for their service has often felt obligatory. I sometimes plumbed the edges of diversity yet still felt my country was of me. The criminals currently occupying the government disgust me, for I believe we should be gratefully bound by laws. The lawlessness exercised by these clowns might go unpunished, with four Supreme Court justices unable or unwilling to abide by our constitution. I do not aspire to be a reporter, though. I'm just a writer. I have surprised myself with the content of this series so far. I didn't know how deeply I felt about my government, how deeply I respected the patriots who populated the misunderstood bureaucracy until it was threatened by idiocy and lawlessness. There never was any master plan. The tactic was to disrupt, bring down, and humiliate, yet that tactic has been backfiring so far. Even the tariffs turned out to have been unconstitutional. Add that violation to the ever-lengthening indictments. I wonder what I'll write about when the inevitable impeachment trial gets underway.
NoDogBarking
Edwin Landseer: The dog and the shadow (1877)
Engraver: Charles Cousen
"Our antibodies should vanquish this evil infection."
The oath guides the oath-taker to swear to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic, without offering any instruction about how to identify an enemy. The most insidious enemies arrive unrecognizable or, worse, in deep disguise, so they seem friendly. Everyone assumes that they'll know one when they see one, but never having seen one, they have no experience from which to draw. False positives might be common, but false negatives seem far more worrisome. The literature has explored every variation, from the fox in the hen house to the demon born as the son of the American ambassador. Once they're through the door, defenses seem as useless as The Maginot Line. Once the infiltration happens, one faces a wholly different problem. One that might not have a solution, for then it's no longer an attempted intrusion but a full-blown infection, and we're usually loathe to take our medicine. We reason that we did not deserve this illness, that we had generally always been decently intended, but our pleas fall beside some more profound point. We're no longer independent from the threat. It has become us, so to live up to our oath, we must figure out how to defend against ourselves.
When the president commits treason, the defense must stretch beyond what would have once passed for reason.
FutureTensions
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): let the sun shine (1968)
Inscriptions and Marks
Signed: l.r.: Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: LET THE SUN SHINE IN
the creative revolution—to take a chunk of the imagined future and put it into the present—
to follow the law of the future and live it in the present. Waskow
inscription: l.l., in graphite: 68-69-E
"We experience dying."
NextWorld is most assuredly not the present world and never will become it. It exists only as promises never intended to be fulfilled. It exists only as a placeholder to attract and hold attention away from present tensions, which true believers insist will prove to be only as temporary as necessary. We wonder how provisional that might prove to be. They tout the oldest excuses, insisting that nobody bakes cakes without breaking eggs when they're neither baking cakes nor breaking eggs. These are real people involved. Now! They do seem to be cooking up something, though, and it doesn't smell much like dessert. It smells distinctly fishy and not in any alluring way. It stinks! The promises are supposed to separate us from those senses, to fill us with satisfying hot air. It lacks substance, nourishment, and anything even distantly resembling truth. It only tastes sweet if you believe. Those who cannot or will not believe cannot receive the blessings only such belief can bring. NextWorld is nothing and never will be. It still wrecks plenty of havoc.
Those who somehow manage to believe baffle the rest of us, for belief never requires any sort of verifiable basis.
Deflating
Edmond Guilliaume: Bismarck, from Les Génies de la Mort
[The Geniuses of Death] (1870)
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
Edmond Guilliaume’s images are blunt caricatures that combine well-known German symbols, war leaders, and macabre images of destruction. Otto von Bismarck became prime minister of the Prussian state in 1862 and of the unified German Empire in 1871. To a French audience, he was the cruel leader of the Franco- Prussian War (1870–71). With a skull head, pointed Prussian helmet, and Prussian eagle superimposed on his face, Bismarck looms like a poisonous, grasping plant over the destruction of the French countryside. Playing off a noble coat of arms, Guilliaume gave the French enemy a ghoulish image of death.
"We'll see who fills the gaps deliberately carved into our once-reliable safety nets."
When I attended high school, my part-time after-school job paid me $23.50 in today's currency per hour. Further, depending on the season, anyone who wanted a job could find one. Through the summer, even better-paying harvest work went begging. My actual rate of pay was $2.50. The Vietnam War raged in the background, and the economy was booming. As the war started winding down, inflation became a concern. Unemployment became a thing again as the economy cooled. Several shocks to the economy occurred in the early seventies. War in the Middle East spawned a slowdown in petroleum imports, which raised domestic gas prices by over fifty cents a gallon, doubling overnight. Interest rates soared as never before, with mortgage rates climbing into the mid-teens by the end of that decade. The Reagan Administration engaged in almost unprecedented efforts to reign in what was labeled "stagflation," economic stagnation combined with alarming inflation. The effort attempted to cool the price expansion without cratering economic growth. This was my introduction to Deflating.
For most of my life, the economy had hummed along growing.
Consent
Unknown Artist: Nullification….despotism (1833)
LITHOGRAPHER: Endicott & Swett
"Commerce between master and slave is despotism." Thomas Jefferson
"We were founded to instantiate E Pluribus Unum, never the other way around."
Democracy demands that the governed give consent to those who govern. The alternative, however else it might get dressed up, amounts to despotism. To clarify my terms, despotism denotes any form of governance depending upon absolute power to affect that governance. In other words, under despotism, the people do not have a say about who governs them or how that governance operates. It amounts to a Father Knows Best form of government where The People enjoy the absolute freedom to be treated as ignorant children. Many organizations operate under this form of governance, not least some of the more prominent churches. Traditionally, whatever The Pope declared was considered the word of God. It's difficult to imagine any more absolute power than that exercised by God or his duly designated representative here on Earth. Even The Pope holds an elected position, though. A general election of all Catholics might not have chosen him, but a collection of the second-highest potentates, who supposedly represent the interests of all their constituents, come together to select a Pope from a slate of candidates of their peers, effectively providing consent of the governed to the selection process. In this way, not even the Catholic Church fully qualifies as despotism since the power seems to initiate from the consent of at least the governed’s representatives.
Labor unions are founded upon just this principle: workers should properly have a say in managing the operations within which they labor.
TheBreaking
Harold Edgerton: Hammer Breaking Glass (1933)
" … what might really make America greater than anybody ever expected, again."
The dedicated sociopath eventually oversteps his boundaries. He never could color within the lines of propriety, and, eventually, he strays too far over the lines and alienates his primary constituency. His was never more than theoretically anything, anyway. Its reality would, then, have to seem rather radically different from the illusion he so successfully managed to initially project. Making America Great Again couldn't have ever possibly felt like as great an experience in practice as it promised in theory. Once gravity actually engages, nothing seems to fly as easily. Hefting actual mass makes real work. Every action inevitably spawns a roughly equal and opposite reaction, and externalities tend to quickly start inconveniently piling up. Unintended and unexpected consequences burden acceptance. Targets move too close to home. We finally glimpse the long-reviled enemy, and he turns out to more than merely resemble us.
Even benevolent reformers encounter these effects, for old status quos, however ineffective, tenaciously hold their ground.
WhoTurns?
Jacob Jordaens:
The Master Pulls the Cow Out of the Ditch by its Tail (1652)
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
The title and subject of this etching come from a proverb in the Dutch poet and humorist Jacob Cats’s 1632 Mirror of Old and New Times. The proverb explains that it is necessary for a person to take responsibility for his or her own affairs. Jacob Jordaens depicted the proverb literally, showing a cow that has fallen into a ditch and must be pulled out by its master. The crowd of onlookers does not help the man, for it is his duty to care for his animal. The theme of this etching exemplifies the moralizing nature of many Dutch works of the period, and the composition recalls a tapestry by Jordaens in his Proverbs cycle.
"We dare not sit silently while this perverse, immoral minority tries to take over our state."
Our world has always been overfilled with seductions. Depending upon individuals’ proclivities, they might find infinite ways to fall. Some tumble to the ever-popular omission while others prefer to commit something, but none of us were ever impervious to some perverse attraction. Our moral and ethical fiber seem unlikely to ultimately save anybody, but a time will come when one will face a choice. Most choices will not come nearly as simply as any either/or, and many if not most, might manifest more like dilemmas, where your response will appear to damn you, whichever side you take. A moral or ethical compass finally shows its inherent usefulness after perhaps a lifetime of idling. Then, the defining difference might emerge. Then, the underlying purpose of every prior struggle might find meaning. Once one makes this choice, it's likely to be irrevocable. The fate's sealed. Identity is finally revealed. The question was always, "Will you become a Nazi?" You're already done for if the answer isn't "No!”.
The rise of NextWorld harbingered just such a choice.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 02/27/2025
William Delamotte: Resting, Men and Dogs Under a Big Tree,
from the first issue of Specimens of Polyautography 1802, published 1803
An Emboldened Opposition Cheers
How many ways can anybody observe an unsettling situation? Probably an infinite number of ways. I've concluded that their strategy was primarily to scare. My job must then be to refuse to be spooked and to remain self-assured. The howl was never intended to serve as a warning. It was their initial assault, their strategic first step, meant to seem blood-curdling. Those whose blood has curdled produce weaker defenses. Their offense depends upon our weakened defense, so we must muster something other than an, in any way, weakened one. Some insist that we should feel emboldened instead, that we might as well interpret their venom as so misguided as to qualify as self-sabotage. Who's to say it isn't? Who's to say they didn't intend it to be self-undermining? We might be and probably are still witnessing a lemming-like mass extinction event, an attempt by backward-looking Repuglicans to finally do themselves in. They noticed the numbers and have been watching the trends.
No future warmly welcomes them.
Uncle!
Bernard Picart:
Bust of Young Man Resting Chin on Hand (c. 1720)
" … only I hold the cure."
I sleep poorly, if at all, and I can't seem to get hungry. I recognize these symptoms, but only I hold the cure.
Let the record show that after sixty-nine consecutive mornings chronicling the emerging NextWorld, the author croaked out a muffled, "Uncle!"
Imformation
Claes Oldenburg: False Food Selection (1966)
Designed by George Maciunas, Published by Fluxus
"Find friends who will deny your heart's desire in exchange for everlasting innocence."
Subtle differences often go unnoticed. They're part of one of the oldest tricks in the book, employed by charlatans throughout history. Sell somebody the title to a property with a slight misspelling in the description, and you've sold them nothing. Promise with a pinkie pledge while slightly mispronouncing the premise; the other will almost inevitably believe they can trust you. A whole lot of what I might label Imformation exists out there that was only intended to mislead you. The unscrupulous revel in such wordplay. They are playing a game their targets never suspect is even being played. They might discover later, if they ever discover, that they were played in the most profoundly cynical way. Discouragement might be the purpose of this play.
They call them Confidence Men, though that label belies what they should elicit.
Enough
Hercules Segers: Still Life with Books (c. 1618–1622)
Gallery Statement: While Segers’ stack of books looks unassuming enough, it is entirely original, and may even be the earliest still life in European graphic art. While still lifes frequently feature in 17th-century paintings, they are rarely found in black-and-white (in prints).
——
" … they'd never before achieved anything even approaching Enough."
NextWorld seems to contain no Enough. It seems insatiable whether focusing its appetite on the trivial or monumental; it can never get Enough. It wants without regard to availability or means. Using the old addict's excuse, it claims to want what it wants, as if wanting were adequate justification and also as if wanting occurred beyond or before volition. NextWorld seems a victim of its wanting, wanting filling the role of both demon and god. It might be the religion. It is the force behind the non-existent throne. It always was communicable as Hell, perhaps precisely as communicable as Hell, though not everybody seems equally susceptible. I could write an encyclopedia describing the characteristics of those for whom wanting is most disabling, except I wouldn't want to add to the already voluminous literature on the subject. We know who they are and are far too familiar with their dances. The Nazis were famously insatiable. So were Mussolini and his fascists. They each became voracious because they became bottomless. When there's no real answer to the question of how low can you go? a certain kind of gravity seems to take over. One can gorge at every meal, every opportunity, without ever experiencing Enough or even approaching it.
After twenty or thirty years, when vampires seemed to dominate literature and film, we managed to manifest a genuine infestation.
Golf
Jack Gould: Untitled
[woman wearing dice costume playing golf] (c. 1950)
"He's absent without leave or purpose. This might be his greatest gift to us."
Golf represents one very prominent feature of NextWorld. I might be tempted to insist that our Incumbent sought the job for the leisure time it provided, for, despite being one of the Quote, Busiest people in the world, Unquote, he somehow manages to spend three or four days each week at one of his golf courses, playing or playing at golf. I might also be tempted to consider this proclivity evidence of more than an idle interest, perhaps an addiction, for few activities more demean high office than time spent on "the links." The game represents the pinnacle of what economist Thorsten Veblen called Conspicuous Consumption. Veblen lost a series of university appointments because he insisted upon writing unpopular analyses of the world he inhabited. He possessed the temerity to propose that the apparent purpose of success in America was to essentially waste the resulting wealth showing off. Few human activities seem more frivolous than owning clubs dedicated to offering well-heeled opportunities to fritter away hours chasing a small ball around a park. Indeed, the most frivolous possible activities involve throwing away irreplaceable time.
Kurt Vonnegut believed that the true purpose of human existence involves farting around.
Bluster
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: The Mad Cow (1896)
"It displays just how frail you've become …"
As The Incumbent's cognitive decline continues, he seems to become increasingly impatient and threatening. He seems to enjoy belittling others more than he used to, and he used to revel in the practice. He promises trouble for non-compliers, an act in which defense attorneys delight. He pounds his highchair tray, impatient for compliance. He seems to believe that he's owed deference and respect, even though he's only playing at being president. Maybe he convinces himself, between all the venom and firings, that he's the most powerful man on the planet. He maybe could have been that man had he proved to be man enough to fulfill that role. Instead, he's viewed as the 'enfant terrible' and widely mocked. He performs the role of parody president, attempting to exercise powers he does not possess. He imitates Mussolini, who could always pretend to pitch a fit in a pinch. He lacks that certain gravitas.
Don't get me wrong, he still produces plenty of chaos.
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.
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