Aubrey Vincent Beardsley: The Scarlet Pastorale (1894)

"…those of us daily struggling to live decent lives in these extraordinary times."

What does Decency demand of me now? This seems to be the question reverberating in my head most mornings. I find no definitive answer. If I were a martyr, I might more easily find such a response, for I would know without a doubt that Decency desperately desired me to become a victim to whatever provocation I might encounter. But Decency does not seem to want me to be placating situations. It wants me to be true to myself, too, to stand up for something. It sometimes seems that my Decency and I are witnessing especially horrible provocations, ones specifically engineered to elicit something approaching my very worst responses. They seem to desire my anger. They frustrate me with double-binding insistences. They do not appear above outright lying just to bring out my worst responses, and, believe me, I have been frantically sorting through alternatives. The Decency question resonates even more strongly the longer I consider my options.

The eight-year-old in office has mastered nothing more interesting than fabricating. He seems to live in a fantasy world of his own making, one within which untruth and injustice exemplify The American Way. Our allies a little too readily agree that they’ve always seen these tendencies in their relations with us. We’ve apparently always seemed a little too self-centered, a little too convinced of our own righteousness, of which, they agree, we have not always been wrong. We did not always take our victory laps humbly, and sometimes attempted to impose our perspectives on other countries that could never have experienced what helped us shape ours. In this way, we could sometimes seem gaseous and self-righteous. We were not always what they considered to be perfect allies, and yet, allies we were in most circumstances. They would manage to bite their tongues and hold their breaths, hoping for the best, which sometimes even came after a sometimes lengthy period of discomfiting duress.

Now, we have foisted that presence upon ourselves. We have an incumbent that seems to embody the very worst that liberty and freedom have always had to offer. Both liberty and freedom demanded considerable forbearance from our incumbents, discipline to prevent outright despotism, for despotism also appears on the same spectrum as all the other freedoms, and so it demands certain discernments to avoid a leader’s freedoms from oppressing those who should enjoy coequal ones. Now we experience unreasonable oppression, the side effects of continual regressions, ever further away from our accustomed means. Between outright lies and shady assertions, we feel the oppression growing. We rightfully wonder when that terrible attention might point in our direction and prove uninterested in truth or justice for us, but apparently seeking nothing more inspiring than spitefulness. We have a poorly tempered eight-year-old in charge.

And so I catch myself asking myself, dozens of times each day, What does Decency demand of me now? That Decency seems to demand anything of me identifies me as someone who, to my mind, might have been raised right. I was not raised by bullies or ego maniacs, but by more or less humble people who wished pretty much everyone well, even those who had more than once trespassed against them. They held no grudges and were uninterested in even thinking about getting even. They’d both inherited a deep sense of their place in the world. They believed that if they worked hard and maintained a reasonable moral code, they’d receive an adequate reward. They didn’t pine after anybody else’s achievements. They found satisfaction in their own. I was not raised to become a cut-throat competitor.

Now I witness an incumbent who seems to crave conflict, one who appears incapable of operating within anyone’s law, even his own. Injustice seems to be his primary motive, and he seems indifferent to whatever collateral damage he inflicts with his ineptness. While I agree with our allies that these behaviors seem disquietingly familiar, I still can’t seem to hold myself back from continually asking, What does Decency demand of me now? Decency can be a dauntingly difficult taskmaster. It administers exams that seem, on their faces, impossible to pass. Further, it often appears that no satisfactory answer could ever exist for many of her disquieting questions. Decency demands something of me. I believe it surely must demand similar things from everybody, even our continually erring incumbent. However, I suspect that he’s lost track of his still, small voice capable of asking him this most crucial question.

Decency demands that we each ask ourselves this question, that we not forget our sacred responsibility to keep asking, even when—ESPECIALLY WHEN—we only seem capable of mustering pathetic responses. The Decent might not answer this question any differently than anyone else might. Their difference lies in the fact that they remember to ask this often unanswerable question before they go off half-cocked and spill something important down their shirtfront. It might be that asking this troubling question makes no physical difference in the average person’s response. People will still fly off the handle sometimes, but they will not have gone completely unconscious. For the true danger we face from these ideologues comes when we stop asking ourselves unanswerable questions and begin believing that we’ve found the definitive answer to this and all our other fundamentally unanswerable questions. Their relative unanswerability says nothing about their underlying power and importance to those of us daily struggling to live decent lives in these extraordinary times.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz