Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Earthly Paradise (Sir Lancelot at the Chapel of the Holy Grail)
(1890)

"I once feared and felt cowed by their delusions. No more."

EndDays seem decidedly different than most of the days that came before. They seem crueler and less rewarding. We have a performative idiot spouting unsettling koans we cannot understand any more than we seem capable of ignoring, even though they most likely signify nothing. I feel astounded at how easily I surrendered my sacred serenity, seemingly setting my own hair on fire in defiance. We see ever clearer evidence that this era might signify nothing more than the vanity of a few of the wealthier fools, nothing this world hasn’t seen plenty of times before. I’ve felt especially cursed when I might have been little more than perfectly normally cursed instead. Nothing particularly special. Oh, I wear my hair shirt and suffer right along and right next to everyone else, but I suppose EndDays might be supposed to seem that way. Are they really? Must they necessarily seem that way?

I realized this week that our incumbent has already passed the threshold beyond which no former president ever accomplished anything new. A fresh incumbent gets something like 175 days to accomplish their mission, whatever it might be. After that, distractions overwhelm an administration, especially one that never seemed to catch on to what that whole administering anything was really about. Midterms loom. The backlog of lawsuits stemming from their own inept attempts to impose their new world order undermines whatever remains of their once-grand master plan for world dominion. Cabinet secretaries start disappearing, usually for cause. Their keystone legislation is already backfiring by then, and the likelihood of any further cooperation from a once-loyal Congress seems slim. Whether they failed or succeeded in ChangingWorlds, their ability to continue changing them becomes untenable. We’re now well past that horizon for this one, yet we still seem to be in thrall.

This office seems most capable of hypnotizing both opponent and partisan. It has been called The Bully Pulpit because it carries precisely this effect, depending. Even the most charismatic incumbent loses their ability to influence over time, though their apparent influence often outlives their practical ability to produce anything useful up there. After that narrow window closes, an incumbent can only create noise, hoping to continue distracting those who might not have been watching closely enough to notice the old charisma evaporating. A desperation emerges, initially as increasing fierceness, later as an encroaching impotent meekness. We might not notice. I might have ceded some of my authority to the rampaging cynicism surrounding me. I might have forfeited my own ethical responsibilities in the face of such seemingly overwhelming opposition, which, I seem to faintly remember now, always seems overwhelmingly powerful at the beginning before undermining itself in practice. I still hold almost all of my own cards. I’m no pawn and never was one.

Let’s share a moment of appreciation for Viktor Orbán, former Hungarian prime minister for 20 years, who so recently demonstrated what ultimately happens to all authoritarians who pit themselves against democratic-minded citizens. They all get run out of office on a rail, if they’re lucky, though other, less respectful options sometimes prevail. Orbán had reengineered every democratic institution. He’d championed primitive religious practices. Banned immigration. Loaded the courts with partisan idiots. Corrupted the vote. Packed the parliament with the usual usefuls, yet still overwhelmingly lost reelection. He left Hungary with no remaining ambiguity regarding democracy. They might never again forget its purpose and the reasons it must be defended. Victor Orbán ultimately encouraged that.

Our incumbent, who has never yet once done anything presidential or democratic, has been performing no less of a service for us. He’s shedding former supporters like a dog shedding fleas. He might yet manage to inflict a worldwide economic depression on us, but his days of introducing world-changing initiatives supposedly on any of us have passed. He’s lost whatever mandate his tiny electoral victory might have secured him. He’s headed to become a cautionary footnote in almost forgotten history, yet he will have nonetheless made his mark, rather like the one Orbán made on Hungary. He enjoyed twenty years of increasing paranoia before sacrificing the palace that never really belonged to him in the first place. May the citizens of Hungary remove the palace in favor of another public gathering place, for they have chosen many future celebrations to replace their overthrown oppression, just like always eventually happens.

I wonder why I always seem to give my greatest treasures away under so little provocation. It almost seems that I do not know how powerful I am. It’s as if I believed the bullshit our incumbent pushed, when I was once certain I would never believe anything he proposed. I forgot that I always get to choose. I get to decide. I’m in charge of ChangingWorlds here, and no power in heaven or earth, or anywhere beneath, can ever subsume my authority in this respect, unless or until I somehow choose to forfeit it myself. I am too easily bullied, too quickly convinced. I am not a compliant citizen but a rather fierce one. I have been savagely slandered, sometimes by friends, but I never once lost my authority to make and live by my own decisions. Those damned Repuglicans were always plotting to take themselves and the rest of us to Hell. They were never once not delusional. I once feared and felt cowed by their delusions. No more.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz