Hans Baldung:
Bewitched Groom
(1544)

This week’s Comeuppance Stories found me ranging across a full spectrum of our incumbent’s unraveling. I considered the cumulative cost of chronic Impropriety, the self-defeating nature of EntanglingWebs, and the parody life our ParodyChiefExecutive has always led. I examined what it feels like to live inside a BatteredNation, watched with some satisfaction as innocent ham sandwiches walked free from our incumbent’s Injustice Department, and concluded by asking what it might be about failing right-of-center politicians that so reliably attracts the attention of supposed witch hunters. The midterms loom just days away as I write, and the week’s writing reflected that gathering tension.

Thank you for following along!

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Weekly Writing Summary

Impropriety
“…Making America Great Again with his sudden and permanent absence.”

Saint Stephen, Patron Saint of Impropriety, sets the stage.

I dedicated this story to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, stoned to death for bad-mouthing his benefactors — a fitting patron for a week spent considering Impropriety’s long tail. Our incumbent reframed impropriety as outsider virtue, then proceeded to violate ten thousand proprieties large and small, fulfilling what he insisted were his duties. A single impropriety rarely carries much downside, but strung end to end, they stretch beyond every horizon. The Comeuppance wave building behind his epic string now seems inescapable.

Julius Schiller: Saint Stephen (Cepheus): Constellation IV from Coelum Stellatum Christianum (1627)

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EntanglingWebs
“Dabble in tangled webs, and you will eventually end up tangling yourself.”

Sir Walter Scott saw this coming.

I revisited my earlier TangledWeb essay, written back in April, and found that little had improved. If anything, the webs had grown more entangling. Scott’s caution has come to fruition: the tangled web wasn’t the problem; the entangling was. Beyond a certain number of strands, no pair of hands can manage the complexity. Our incumbent’s contradictions couldn’t cross-foot; his plotlines betrayed themselves, and his stumping tours cost his candidates more polling points with every two-hour speech. The polls promise a well-deserved bloodbath, said the fly to the spider, for a change.
Thomas Rowlandson: After George Murgatroyd Woodward Publisher: Thomas Tegg The Corsican Spider in His Web!(July 12, 1808)

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ParodyChiefExecutive
“…the boy who matured into a boob from watching too damned much television.”

Our incumbent trades exclusively in Misinformation and Disinformation.

I traced the logical endpoint of a life spent hiding the truth: you become a parody. Our incumbent has always been a fictional character. The rumors about him having character were always fiction. Parody people must live in continual denial, knowing the underlying truths without ever acknowledging them. He wanders between nowheres, mumbling for two hours before empty crowds, releasing fresh rafts of Misinformation and Disinformation as though he alone serves as the nation’s font of wisdom. Woe to any society that loses its ability to distinguish parody people from authentic ones.

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

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BatteredNation
“We must believe our oppressor will ultimately fail and decency will prevail…”

What if we are collectively exhibiting Battered Nation Syndrome?

I noticed it at a local immigrant-justice gathering: the sense that even our lawful assembly felt somehow illicit. Since our incumbent was first elected a decade ago, my public speech has grown more squelched. I found myself guarded with neighbors, suspicious in ways I hadn’t been since Nixon. Our incumbent has always been an abuser of wives, employees, and now a nation, and even those not still under his thrall exhibit the classic symptoms. In a dream, I finally faced him down, and he evaporated. We, children of this terrible father, had better figure out how to stick together. We must believe our oppressor will ultimately fail, or we risk losing everything.

Johan Nieuhof: Chinese men seeking alms by threatening to kill themselves by self-mutilation (1768)

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HamSandwiched
“…inept attempts of his Injustice Department persecutors to inflict injustice on innocent ham sandwiches”

Federal grand juries once indicted in over 99% of cases brought before them. No longer!

I followed the reassuring story of grand juries pushing back against our incumbent’s cynical prosecutions. Sol Wachtler’s famous 1985 quip that a DA could indict a ham sandwich no longer holds. A series of high-profile cases have been thrown back in prosecutors’ incredulous faces. Judges have challenged vicious mischaracterizations. Some prosecutors have resigned rather than embarrass themselves. Our incumbent’s overreach burned through whatever goodwill remained on frivolous cases, leaving little fuel for the persecutions that might have done real damage. As the midterms approach, this presidency’s presumed power has waned to a barely negligible level.

Philippe Rousseau: Still Life with Ham (1870s)

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HuntingWitches
“Who should we believe, failing right-of-center politicians or successful witch hunters?”

It turns out our incumbent isn’t the only one who cries witch hunt.

I noticed that the son of Brazil’s jailed former president used the exact same phrase to explain his flight from justice: witch hunt. So did Viktor Orbán. This got me wondering what it is about failing right-of-center politicians that so reliably attracts witch hunters’ attention. Perhaps, given the severe shortage of actual witches, hunters have taken contracts on failing right-of-center politicians instead, who exhibit many of the same behavioral patterns once reliably displayed only by threatening witches. Or perhaps these witch hunters don’t exist any more than organized witch unions do, and the whole spectacle is simply the plaintive plea of people who know full well they are exactly as guilty as their accusers always insisted.

Hans Baldung: The Witches (1510)


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That’s Worth Writing Toward


A conversation with my Third Party Editor, Claude®:

This writing week seemed quite different to me from earlier writing weeks in this series. I think the pieces became more sardonic. Do you agree?

Yes, distinctly. Earlier Comeuppance installments read more as earnest moral reckoning, as if you were working out the logic of Comeuppance as a concept, often with some genuine outrage underneath. This week, the tone tilted toward dry, almost amused contempt. ParodyChiefExecutive and HuntingWitches especially; those pieces weren’t angry so much as they were dismissive, which is a different and arguably more devastating posture. HamSandwiched had a similar quality: you were enjoying the irony rather than lamenting the injustice. BatteredNation was the exception. That one stayed earnest and personal, which gave the week some tonal range.

How effectively do you imagine this different edge might have been for my readers?

The sardonic register tends to invite readers into a shared knowing rather than a shared outrage. Outrage fatigues; ironic dismissal energizes, because it implies the writer hasn’t been broken by what they’re describing. I suspect your readers will find this week’s pieces a relief, a signal that you’ve found some altitude above the offensive source material. The risk resides in that readers still deep in genuine distress might feel slightly left behind, as though the joke landed before they were ready to laugh. BatteredNation’s presence in the week actually helps with that. It acknowledges the real pain before the more sardonic pieces wave it off.

I think I might have been taking this Comeuppance business too seriously when it might be better considered from an ironic, slightly dismissive perspective. What cautions might you suggest as I consider What Now? and What Next?

This is a genuinely useful instinct to interrogate. The series title itself promises a certain lightness. Comeuppance is almost a comic word, implying the universe has a sense of justice and a sense of humor about delivering it. When the writing gets heavy, it can work against that implicit promise. The ironic, slightly dismissive stance you’re describing isn’t a retreat from seriousness, quite the opposite. It’s a more sophisticated relationship with it. I’d suggest holding onto that instinct. What’s Next? and What’s Now? might end up being less about what the incumbent does and more about how we, the audience for his unraveling, choose to position ourselves as witnesses. The sardonic narrator has survived something. That’s worth writing toward.

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Thank you for following along!

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You can order Cluelessness from Bookshop.org, Powell’s Books, or Amazon. Digital ISBN: 9781977292575 — Paperback ISBN: 9781977279651 It's now more widely available, just as the publisher predicted. There's this Kindle link. Link To Publisher's Website Here

I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” I manually copy-edited each result.


Since June, 2017, I have written a story each morning under the premise that a writer should write. These individual stories have, as parts of a unique series I created each quarter, summed into book-length manuscripts. I began each series with a prompt to focus my writing. I called the first series Another Summer to anchor the stories into the context of my continuing experience of the summer season. I followed that series with Another Fall, AnotherWinter, and Another Spring in the immediately following quarters. Comeuppance will be the 38th series I’ve created over the last 9 1/2 years. Clueless, A Book of Mirrors, published in April of this year, originated as my CluelessSummer series first posted here in 2018. Follow my writing on my PureSchmaltz Facebook Group, SubStack, or at PureSchmaltz.com.


©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz