Hiroshige II (二代目 歌川広重, Ni-daime Utagawa Hiroshige
Chōmeiji Temple (Chōmeiji), from the series Miracles of Kannon
(1859)

"What begins as slander always eventually ends as ashes,
once the epic heroes show up to ReClaim their birthright."

We live in a time that might have been specifically designed to spawn one of those immemorial epic poems. Ours would be known as ProsperityLost and written by someone hopefully far more secular than Milton and less reckless than the probably apocryphal Homer. Ours would be no less epic, however, for we lost something far more precious than even a biblical Paradise or an ancient Greek empire, for our Prosperity had the decency to aspire without explicit expectation that it would result in any physical manifestation. We were free to believe without regard to the likelihood that any of us or our progeny would ever really realize the promise, yet that promise held. Hell, it was born self-evident! With it, we could succeed as a mere matter of birthright or adoption, for we were largely, by design, a nation of immigrants, citizens by some designation superior to race, creed, or even religion. We shared a dream of Prosperity rather than any individual lording over any other. We aspired to equality rather than any dominion over.

The enemies of this curious state were with us from before the fabled American Revolution, in which a minority asserted rights no nation had ever once guaranteed before or had any idea how to uphold. We made our civility up as we went along, often getting it wrong on the first few tries, so we’d try, try, and even try again if necessary. We were defined by our acknowledged imperfections and grievously wounded by repeated attempts to whitewash or otherwise gild our humbling history, for we were always still a nation founded on pure aspiration. One properly aspires by aiming a ways beyond one’s range before taking chances. Sometimes, fortunate accidents deliver the prize with little effort, though that was never the usual method. The more usual way to achieve a decent aspiration required making an absolute hash of it first, maybe even losing faith in the possibility of realization, then reorganizing the mess and making another, perhaps teensier bit wiser attempt. One achieves a resulting Prosperity through iteration, much of which must be attempted blind and result in deeply wounding disappointment: a mere dedication test. Prosperity was never once achieved by appointment from any king or potentate.

The enemies of Prosperity seemed to be incapable of dreaming, big or otherwise. They were interested in sure things and certainties, both of which have always been avowed enemies of the faith Prosperity utterly relies upon. Curiously, one of the primary tools these opposing fools employed was religion, which I must designate here as another historical foe of faith and Prosperity. Religion might have begun as faith-based, but it came to become faith’s antagonist, in another example of Paradise Lost. Who needs mere mustard seeds when they might muster Onward, Christian Soldiers or fearless White Nationalist insurrectionists, Hell-bent on spending eternity with virgins? Who needs faith when the money behind your movement ensures you can purchase the fealty of anybody fooled into following any false-faith religion? Remember, Milton worked for Cromwell, a cynical politician who leveraged the Church of England to foster a punishing revolution against faith and Prosperity, while ultimately managing to lose his life as well as Paradise in the process.

Prosperity’s enemies were largely financiers, people who fancied themselves better than others by dint of the lucre they’d managed to swindle out of those whom they considered less worthy. The Gilded Age gilded lilies while millions sweated and starved pursuing the Prosperity they were deliberately denied by their cynical “betters.” Later, the Robert Tafts and his Supreme Court harassed Roosevelt, who was only struggling to put a chicken in every pot and thereby achieve a Prosperity the ruling class had long proclaimed impossible. He decisively proved their founding assertion wrong and fostered generational Prosperity which the modern Repuglican Party took as their cue to do whatever they could to undermine. They employed racism this time, along with a religion equally as perverse and any Cromwell and Milton pursued when they lost Paradise that first time. They called Prosperity Communism or Socialism, or some handy -ism or another, trusting that these essentially meaningless labels would confuse and enrage enough of the populace into voting against their own best interests. They conscripted the Charismatic Christian sects, which had about as much in common with the Main Street Presbyterian and Baptist folks we imprinted on as representing religion in our youth, as the Main Street crowd had with those who actively practiced perversion. It turned out that many of the leaders of this stalwart opposition actively practiced perversion as more than a hobby in later infamous places like Epstein Island.

These born-again Christian Nationalists were born into a world utterly unfamiliar with Prosperity, for their faith relied upon their accumulation of grudges and the pursuit of what they labeled divine retributions. One cannot meaningfully pursue Prosperity while trying to get even or gain unfair advantage. One must abandon petty differences to enjoy the many benefits Prosperity bestows. Likewise, those seeking to reform or punish forfeit the possibility of enjoying the many fruits naturally accompanying Prosperity. Evangelism in its many forms amounts to just so much jingoism. The separation of church and state remains one of Prosperity’s sacred preconditions for damned good reasons. Those who trade membership in any church for the liberties Prosperity brings betray the Paradise they insist they’ll one day inhabit. Wasn’t it Jesus who insisted that this was the Paradise we would ultimately mortgage, and that ours had always been the hands of God? We were well on our usual inept way to realizing these ideals when these fucking Christians finally succeeded in their insurrection and started undermining our Paradise Found with predictable self-sabotaging vengeance.

This must be our story because it includes us in the plotline. Our heritage has never not been inept evolution fueled by unshakable aspiration. This situation seems little different. The heathens dressed themselves up in American flags this time and railed against life-affirming vaccines, but we’ve seen these self-hating clowns in action many times before. Our job has always been to ReClaim the Prosperity the latest iteration of Sons of Bitches tries to steal from us: We, The People. The robber barons that bedevil us today might believe themselves to be Christian soldiers, but we readily recognize the devil when we encounter him in action, just like even Milton eventually could. Any enemy of decency becomes the eternal enemy of Prosperity; no amount of supplemental gilding ever compensates for the degrading results these bastards produce. Our epic should easily outlive the ages, for the aspiration we employ was always timeless, more timeless than religion and politics combined, if largely unrealized until our time. What begins as slander always eventually ends as ashes, once the epic heroes show up to ReClaim their birthright. Now must surely be that time! We must just as certainly be those heroes.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz