Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn:
The Denial of Peter
(1660)

"They gladly flee backward into cowboy times when only a few pesky Comanche stood between them and promised Prosperity."

We fear more than we revere Prosperity. Oh, we’re all for decency when it proves convenient, but we have grown to distrust and deep-down fear our future, whatever it once was. We have seen more than enough Faster, Better, Cheaper® promotions to understand that they always propose much more than they ever deliver. Not one of us has ever experienced an upgrade that didn’t perform worse than all its predecessors combined. So, we have become future-phobic, anxious about our prospects. We might be nostalgia addicts, aching for some fantasy Good Old Days. Whatever new days might promise, we ain’t buying, or if forced to buy, we ain’t believin’ for a minute. I swear that every billionaire made his money with some new and improved bait-and-switch tactic. We expect to be cheated, and we even get even by cheating ourselves whenever given less than half a chance. Our Anxiety has come to define us and our age.

Given a decent opportunity, we’ll set about making up excuses why we can’t possibly agree to Prosperity’s terms and conditions. Our past beacons, blinding us to whatever future might be possible. We have become skilled at making up lame excuses, better, even than any tempestuous ten-year-old ever was. We rarely agree to go anywhere novel. If the rules for survival have changed, we choose self-destruction over preservation. Because. Do not delve too deeply into our complex phobia because it carries no coherent explanatory story. We oppose difference as a matter of principle. We oppose Prosperity for the same damned reason. We imagine a history that never once existed, and work hardest to preserve that imaginary mummy. We worship that past more fervently than we revere any possibility. Perhaps we have become a cynical people.

It’s no wonder if we have grown cynical. We have been subjected to ever more insistent bait and switch policies where our government, once of, by, and for, proved beyond most reasonable doubts that it was no longer all that interested in serving The People. The Few have been trying to take over since the Reagan “revolution” horribly devolved democracy in the definite direction of just another run-of-the-mill autocracy. We have earned our distrust honestly, by the serial betrayal of those responsible for upholding trust at all costs. They named their price and gleefully violated their sacred responsibilities, then left us filled with Prosperity Anxiety, clawing at each other’s throats as if we were somehow culpable for a few horrible people attempting to undermine civilization, apparently for their own fun and profit.

The commentators scream that we lack trust, as if trust were just another commodity we might order for free delivery from Amazon. We no longer trust Amazon, if we ever did. We no longer trust ourselves, and we could seemingly easily prove trustworthy to ourselves. Couldn’t we? Anxiety twists senses, turning even intuition into questions instead of at least the tentative, hopeful answers it used to provide. We fear what we’ll find and exist as-if more than in any moment. Our Prosperity has been evaporating since before that Reagan devolution. I figure it’s a genuine wonder that our children haven’t mustered even an attempted revolution. They pine for a past that never once was, instead, trying and failing to make reason out of modernity’s apparent insanity, not even trying to achieve Prosperity, that being absolutely out of the question for them. At least we get to go crazy together, I say.

Our Anxiety might render us certifiably crazy, though our togetherness might render us sane again, even if we never were before. Texas has the same oil reserves as Saudi Arabia and about the same population, too. Texas is a third or fourth-world country compared to Saudi Arabia, though. Texas’s schools might as well not exist. They might be worse than worthless, teaching religious claptrap and actively discriminating against the neediest. It has no functioning health care system or the social guarantees enjoyed by almost every other American. Texas exemplifies exceptionalism, a petrol state run for the benefit of the fewest at the greatest personal cost imaginable. It does offer low taxes for the wealthiest, though. Unsurprisingly, it fuels itself with its past, its so-called glory days that seem more gory than glorifiable when viewed from a safe distance outside. It exemplified Prosperity for the few and amply justified the Anxiety its citizens feel when facing the prospect of even their personal Prosperity. They gladly flee backward into imaginary cowboy times when only a few pesky Comanche stood between them and promised Prosperity.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz