Thomas Rowlandson
Publisher: Samuel William Fores
Blue and Buff Loyalty
(December 31, 1788)

"…the boy who matured into a boob from watching too damned much television."

Our incumbent trades in only two types of information: Misinformation and Disinformation. The difference between the two might be worth noting. Misinformation can be fairly characterized as mistaken, while Disinformation must be understood as deliberate. Neither form can be fairly characterized as anything more or less than lying, just different classes or grades. Our incumbent has never traded in anything but lies, for he has always been a fictional character, partly meaning the rumors that he has character have always been fiction. He has been one of those characters who decided early that he needed to keep the truth about himself from full public acknowledgment. This strategy pretty much guarantees that one creates a parody life, one resembling an extended I Love Lucy Episode where ultimately everybody from cast to audience knows the truth, but must pretend that they do not know it to maintain the entertainment value, I guess. Those who don’t feel they can afford to be known live parody lives as fictional characters.

Woe be to any society that loses its ability to distinguish between its parody people and its authentic ones, for it might end up with a parody President who can’t afford to tell the truth about anything. Even the smallest details must be treated as state secrets, simply because the incumbent’s presence as parody President makes it absolutely necessary. Of course, we all know the truth by now, or enough of it to understand his motive for trying to maintain that secrecy. He personifies villainy and, apparently, always has. I suspect his father sent him to that military academy for good reasons, and his years there still live on in whispered infamy. He left a slime trail wherever he traveled, and nobody’s the least bit surprised anymore when another “revelation” surfaces. He responds with another shovelful or two of Misinformation or Disinformation, fertilizer piled atop an already steaming cesspool.

He spends most days fleeing his past. He flies away at much less than the drop of a hat, spending untold billions on ultimately senseless travel. I suppose he imagines this behavior somehow keeps up appearances, making him look Presidential because he continuously travels. He rarely, if ever, conducts state business on these excursions, and even when he inadvertently stumbles into some conference session, he inevitably embarrasses himself and his nation before releasing a fresh raft of Misinformation and Disinformation, as if he alone serves as the nation’s font of wisdom. He seems to have only bad days and worse these days, having perhaps already bartered away any hope of fresh good days ever appearing again. His truths seep out between his poorly maintained gaskets, except on his failed social media network, which he labeled TruthSocial® because it’s the most ironic container for his continuing Misinformation and Disinformation. We, The People, don’t really need the underlying truth to come out anymore. We have enough corpus delicti to identify the victim and the perpetrator. Parody people must live in continual denial, knowing the underlying truths without ever acknowledging them. Their truths distill into nothing more than lies in hiding.

That sense of impending salvation around him also amounts to more Misinformation and Disinformation. He will experience no clarifying revelation on the road to anywhere, for he travels exclusively between nowheres now. Sure, he claims to be traveling to help some underwater Republican retain his Senate seat, but he knows that hapless candidate no better than he ever knew Adam, Cain, or even Abel, for that matter. He wanders lonelier than any cloud, mumbling for two solid hours before an empty crowd, then returns to the White House he defiled, only to find a press corps there asking even more fundamentally unanswerable questions. He responds like a five-year-old with some variant of, “I know you are, but what am I?” or just by replying that they’re “stupid” and he’s not. Excuse me, sir, but your parody is showing again. Swallow some more Misinformation and Disinformation and call me in the morning. The patient seems both sick and tired.

He doesn’t rest. When they say there’s no rest for the wicked, they must mean him. Withholding the truth serves up a self-defeating fate. Our Self-Saboteur in Chief, our Parody Chief Executive, exists in only two states, both gaseous. He exists as Misinformation or Disinformation, both mis- or disrepresentations of an underlying truth nobody has the stomach to uncover or reveal. Who knows what sin first drove the child inside, to cower and hide behind ever more grandiose representations of his phoniest selves? Who even cares now? My folks used to insist that if I didn’t stop watching so damned much television, I would turn into a boob. Maybe that’s what happened to him. He might have contracted a case of cathode ray tube poisoning in his youth, rendering him only capable of living as a fictional character, like a bit player on My Mother the Car or some similarly silly sixties sitcom. Now, as an adult, he delivers his lines as fiction, the boy who matured into a boob from watching too damned much television.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz