Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Madness of Sir Tristram
(1862)

"…maybe we can't help but become terminally distracted."

It must be our blessing or our curse that what we experience as tragedy, our grandchildren will consider simple Silliness. For my grandfather, who enlisted during WWI to “fight the Hun,” that conflict seemed like serious business because it was, to his experience. The event leading up to it, though, the assassination of an obscure crown prince in an even more obscure Eastern European capital, seems trivial when compared to the eventual slaughter of twenty million otherwise innocent people. Any catastrophe of sufficient magnitude seems indistinguishable from a parody of tragedy. Such scales pale in any reasonable comparison. It becomes unimaginable and therefore essentially fictional, as if it couldn’t have possibly happened simply because it seems beyond reason, just as if reason could serve as any sort of reasonable arbiter of even itself.

Our current drama certainly seems more like soap opera. The reporting appears like poorly crafted fiction. The facts appear like so many hijacked excuses haphazardly applied. The result seems far distant from anything resembling reality. Even without the usual benefit of distance in time, current events come across as little more and often even a lot less than mere Silliness. The old adage that it must be true because it couldn’t possibly qualify as fiction holds sway as I review the new but familiar headlines each day. The depths of fresh disparity never fail to impress me. The utter insanity, as if anybody could ever have believed that anybody else could actually believe the offered explanatory backstories. These reports could not possibly be works of fiction, for they would uniformly prove to be genuinely unbelievable. Their very unbelievability, their underlying obvious Silliness, seal them as works of our shared history rather than fiction.

The result of this apparent juxtaposition seems to insist that we live as if embedded within a parody. It requires nearly (and sometimes actually) superhuman focus to attend to the truths playing out before us. They arrive in disguise as if trying to surprise us with their underlying seriousness. Who would believe that such things might later come to gravely harm anyone? They seem so transparently trivial as to hardly hold even the most interested attention. One must more than squint to see through the superficial paint jobs. We are not witnessing Mom and Apple Pie playing out on the big stage arrayed before us, but something much worse. We witness obvious insignificance repeated with such vengeance that it could ultimately utterly destroy our children or us, and thereby all our progeny ever after, Amen. We will not likely come again to such moments. We might well forget to remember the underlying significance we never truly witnessed, since our future arrives like every other’s, wearing a jester’s hat and cracking crude jokes. The slick pulls every trick to make the pea disappear beneath the walnut shell.

Wiser ones than I would offer advice at this point in their story. I know of no advice sufficient to reliably ward off such Silliness. I might caution that the opposition relies upon you to spread your attention across so many flashing lights that the semaphored message they so insistently impart never fully registers. I might also warn that you’re nothing special. The future was never actually stalking you, certainly not in the way that any odd present might. The future does not exist, and it rarely emerges when watched for. Like the proverbial pot that never boils, futures steadfastly refuse to arrive until the witness is sufficiently distracted, usually with some significant-seeming Silliness that could have come to naught but didn’t, due to its obvious insignificance. Our futures stand on trivial-seeming shoulders, only later destined to unavoidably insist upon us following. We ultimately cannot resist that call.

The drama our present incumbent embeds within even the least of his proclamations is, indeed, unavoidably much fuss and many feathers, inevitably about nothing, the perfect medium from which to spawn some horrible legacy. These seem to be normalized too easily, forgiven to a fault, and beyond trespasses that might well carry unwanted consequences. Ultimately, I suspect that the future might just happen. The theories of eventual emergence might just be as empty as the Silliness that ultimately spawned them. We rarely recognize the future even when it arrives with bells on. We’re much more attuned and skilled at denial than we’ll ever become at acceptance. Silliness will always be with us. It was clearly here when the Old Testament was written, as evidenced by the content of many of the stories included then. Silliness remains our eternal traveling companion, pulling our collective attention away from any otherwise probable obsession with watching ourselves age. Present turns into past invisibly, however closely we might watch. Between the Silliness and underlying significance, maybe we can’t help but become terminally distracted.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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