Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Madness of Sir Tristram
(c. 1892)

“…Make America Meaningful Again, please!”

I think of myself as a serious person. Neither particularly pious nor frivolous, I try not to take myself too awfully seriously, but still seriously. I am not trying to fritter away my life. I think of myself as someone who supports worthy causes. I maintain a high moral standard without being prudish. I can be crude, but prefer decorous. I never mind a little pomp if not necessarily very much embellished with circumstance. I read, but not to the point where I consider myself especially well-read. I prefer a well-written novel to pretty much any other form of entertainment. I do not very much like movies, for I find them to be too theatrical and often simply too long for me to bear sitting through. I prefer audio over video because audio reproduces color better. I maintain a low tolerance for unserious performance, the sort our present incumbent seems to prefer and exclusively engage in. I find it offensive, anything but entertaining or informative. It seems a Parody of something real rather than being something real itself.

It irks me to be surrounded by such unserious business, as if it might infect me. I believe it does infect me, and has. Close association with such superficiality poisons my spirit. It materially affects the quality of my existence. I worry when I really should be singing. I fuss when I should be celebrating. I sense the wasting away of something unspeakably precious. I fear my here and now. The patterns of behavior seem hyperpredictable. No mystery accompanies any initiative. I can reliably predict that whatever this administration touches will be perverted and much, much worse for the experience. Not an ounce of beneficience accompanies even the least of their initiatives. If they were evil incarnate, they couldn’t produce worse results. I feel sick from it.

The sheer frivolity disgusts me. This is not intended to be anything like Parody. It’s every inch serious business engaged in by people who’ve never once had to experience seriousness. They were apparently protected from the harsher, more humbling realities when growing up. Rather than respect, they absorbed its opposite and learned to administer it with something approaching genuine relish. They crush dreams the way most people consume ice cream. They disassemble works of great significance as if they never existed. They cannot see what you and me experience. They seem blind to what binds us together. They seem socially feral, and they imperil much more than our sacred way of living while they imperil our sacred way of life.

I have no antibodies to deflect their negative energies that I feel encroaching all around me. I simply feel threatened again this morning, as I have felt threatened every morning since these sonsabitches rose to relative prominence. These are not Americans, though I have become wary of what I might properly characterize as un-American, since it seems every possible human behavior, and a few of the even more bestial, seem to have been practiced by those who claimed genuine American heritage. I will insist that these do not represent the potential that has always defined our American experiment. We might have always fallen short of our loftiest aspirations, but we more or less steadfastly maintained those aspirations. We failed to lose faith through a thousand threatening perturbations, but these clowns deliberately abandoned that faith for what? Fun and profit?

This sidetrip lost its allure for me before it began. I cannot quite see where or when it will cease, but I continue counting days, praying each new one might prove to be the last. I pray that day will come before our future dissolves into frivolous Parody, long before that arch of absurdity despoils Arlington National Cemetery, before these imperialist bastards utterly undermine our historical credibility. I pray that we might insist on some serious nonfiction from here on out, leaving Parody to light entertainment, enjoyed sparingly. The Fake News generators, whose best intentions were never stellar, the silly self-dealers, can go back to their traditional dens of iniquity for all I care, as long as they leave the living to make their own choices when it comes to performances. When life becomes a Parody of itself, life itself seems meaningless. Can we get serious and Make America Meaningful Again, please!

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz