Unknown Artist: Portrait of a man (Mid-3rd century CE)

Gallery Notes:
The irregular shaping of the wooden board here helps us imagine the original placement of this portrait over the mummy’s face, affixed with complicated wrappings. The portrait is painted using the encaustic technique, in which pigment is mixed with beeswax, allowing the artist to achieve complex gradations of light and shade and sometimes a luminescence that has been compared to the sheen of oil painting. The man’s hair and beard are trimmed short in the fashion of the mid-third century.

"We'd rather ride the slow train to oblivion."

The Muse, in her role as Port Commissioner, asked me to attend the Port's bi-monthly Economic Development Information Meeting (EDIM) in her stead, since she would be attending a commissioner-only meeting convened by the Washington State Association for the Prevention of Port Commissions in a far corner of the state. I had not attended one of these meetings in nearly twenty years. It typically offers a free lunch and attracts a wide variety of interested parties. It usually features a speaker who holds forth on some topic and enough minutiae to satisfy anyone with a severe spreadsheet dependency.

I arrived a little early so I could wish the conveners well and grab a choice seat waaaaay up front along one side. From there, I could see almost everybody attending, just as well as the presenters could. I passed on the lunch, not just because it was free. I seldom partake of the free lunch because it distracts from my purpose for attending. I was to pay close attention so I could inform The Muse of anything important she might be missing. I prepared to enter into one of those mild comas one enters when subjected to somebody else's statistics. I understood that some lived and breathed those numbers. I also understood that I didn't.

The categories had remained unchanged over the past twenty years. The number of visits to the small business counseling office and the number of jobs saved by their service, as well as the mildly alarming decrease in sales tax revenues —the primary source of funding for both our county's cities and the county itself —over recent quarters. Stores have been closing. Nothing terribly alarming, but the trends seem worth continuing scrutiny. The Port's Executive Director noted that some of the data seemed questionable. Everyone promised to stay on top of this trend, and we proceeded to the presentation.

A state highway engineer reported on the progress of the four-laning of our primary access highway to our valley. This effort began more than twenty years ago and might be completed in four more years if funding appears. The feds contributed the largest single grant ever given by a rural development administration. It required matching funds, and the combined amount didn't quite cover half of the projected expense for completing the project. The likelihood of additional funding and the timing of its arrival consumed the balance of the presentation.

I sat through the following brief presentations that sparked few questions from the audience, and never really noticed the elephant dozing in the middle of the room. I knew for certain that the funding for four-laning our highway would not be forthcoming, certainly not within the next four years. I also knew with crystal clarity that sales tax revenues would continue falling, except at an increasingly alarming rate. No, the data will have been proven correct, though one presenter reported that the Feds had stopped gathering data on "Underserved People", whoever that was. The Port's Economic Development Director reported on a lead that could potentially develop into a green manufacturing plant employing 1,700 full-time equivalents once fully operational. I suppose that could happen.

Everyone has been asking what they would have done back in the early days of fascism. I suspect they would have done what I caught myself doing, later, in reflection. I didn't mention the missing representative of the local college who had been laid off to cover a budget shortfall. Nobody remembers that college ever laying off anybody before. Ever. We're busy going broke. Our incumbent in Washington and his representatives have been insisting upon it. There remains precisely no chance, as of this writing, the morning after I attended the Port's Economic Development Information Meeting, that we will not experience a severe Republican-induced recession over the next quarter. One goes broke excruciatingly slowly at first, before, in a shocking burst, it starts going faster than anyone can respond. Faster than anyone can bear to watch, like a house of cards or a glacier birthing an iceburg.

The dream had been that austerity would induce prosperity. When it finally does, it will be the first time in history that it has. It won't, though, because it always reliably produces poverty instead. For those who find this notion counterintuitive, this effect probably has much to do with leverage. Those who spend, receive. Those who spend more receive more. Those who exhaust their time finding ways to cut expenses to trim deficits tend to produce the most unsatisfying results. Check the generally accepted accounting conventions. What balances virtually every successful corporation's budgets? An imaginary entry titled Goodwill. It's the presumed dollar value of the good that the corporation believes it contributes to the world. If our nation's budget carried such an entry, it might have been balanced without all the recent mindless budget cuts. It appears from here that DOGE targeted exclusively what would have been Goodwill. Oh, they didn't save anybody any money, either.

Later, over a beer, I caught myself asleep, dozing through that lunch of which I chose not to partake. I cursed my inattention. I imagined myself taking the mike and declaring that the next EDIM would probably be the most memorable one ever, and that the one just ending might be the last one, looking at those tired old metrics. By the next meeting, we'll no longer be discussing the possibility of funding but rather the certainty of our local governments shutting down. The situation is more dire than we can imagine, and I'm complicit. I doubt that my declaration at yesterday's meeting could have accomplished anything but pissing many people off. It would have dinged my reputation. Nobody wants or needs a prophet when catastrophe's coming. We'd really rather ride the slow train to oblivion.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz