Just Get a Job and Somewhere to Live 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 18"
I had to say something to strike him very weird,
So I yelled “I like Fidel Castro and his beard”
—Bob Dylan from Motorpsycho Nightmare
Those lines must have made some ornery Bull Connor wingnuts purty angry back in ’64, while the liberal parties honed their messages of anti-war, anti-segregation, anti-injustice, anti-pollution, anti-government and anti-greed. Dylan knew he would ruffle some feathers of the mysogynistics ascribing to the hate and fear platform of the John Birch Society—a non-hooded band of counter-revolutionairies who hated taxes and communism so much that they proudly supported their local police and fire departments, state jobs shoveling snow, and public lands to go shoot the faces off tame bear and wussy deer. That crafty Castro was a big, burly Cuban making it unsafe for other Latin dictators to receive their cut from the Brooklyn and Washington D.C mafias. And he made the CIA look so foolish with its exploding cigar syndrome and Bay of Pigs fiasco (fiasco here defined as “a popular euphemism used by governments and media friends of state power to explain away the killing of lots of peasants”).
Break for another happy painting to offset my persuasive essay. If I was a government or a multibillion dollar media conglomerate, this would be a single person’s pure propaganda:
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Nuclear Family 2020. Acrylic on paper, 12 x 16"
This latest state propaganda about Russia and the Ukraine has got my blood boiling. What on earth do these mortal plutocrats and their semi-immortal shadow governments want so badly in exchange for the tenuous continuation of all life on earth?
Can it be just another day at the obsolete office for failed child men to express their petty fears of creeping irrelevance, presaged by the great resignation of their maids and pool cleaners?
I think it might be. Flippant about death on any level, even nuclear annihilation, these child men (mostly men—there are some three-fourths paid women playing “catch up”), are threatening our lives through TV channels and radio we pretend are free enough, but that’s just propaganda working its tried and true magic. NBC has a slew of ex-CIA, FBI, NSA, and Pentagon on the payroll. Should that concern us? How about this fact for geopolitical consideration? Horse whisperer Vladimir Putin once fell in love with media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife. How are our brains to unravel that mystery? Where do they meet up to fall in love? What parties aren’t you getting invited to where Vladimir and his sexy new crush (the underpants of an ancient perverted billionaire creep) can eye each other from across the room?
Questions to be considered as we’re being propagandized to by the government we prop up with our protection money—those paycheck taxes we fearfully give to the Pentagon so they’ll just leave us alone until they decide to kill us.
Which is this week or next I think.
Time for another propaganda painting from the singular nation of me:
Hedgehog and Colander 2016. Acrylic on paper, 15 x 22"
I gave this as a wedding gift to an artist friend working and living at these coordinates:
59.9311° N, 30.3609°
The old, and a few of the brainwashed young of the world, would call this spot on planet earth, “Saint Petersburg, Russia”. They are the state-worshipers, the terribly confused masses of people with no sense of human history who are going to get me killed. They listen to state radio, watch state TV, and click into the clique of their Internet world to pick a side in a fight where every single child and cat whom they love is melted in a split second. They accept a leader who is the exact type of person to rise to the occasion (which is anyone who is one of 1,083 worst human beings on earth).
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A convenient phrase to hurl at the enemy while our leaders point annihilation guns at our faces.
Here’s my mantra. It’s from the Joseph Heller novel Catch-22:
“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed.”
My friend, the painter living north of the arctic circle, is not going to get me killed. But Joe Biden is. As was Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and etcetera, right down the politically and powerfully inbred presidential line, to the original insane killer, Franklin D. Roosevelt (and all his past, present, and future henchmen and women ever involved in the 78 year race to wipe out millions of earth species). These are the dead and living monsters, my enemies, who are going to get me, and you, vaporized. There are many more in power, along with their armies of sycophants residing at other global coordinates, having their underwear washed and pools cleaned.
I’m Franklin “Hot Pants” Roosevelt and I Set Toddlers on Fire in Dresden Thinking Battles Were Little Tall Ships in the Tub With My God-Dammed Nanny, and Not the Mass Murder of Innocent Life 2021. Acrylic on Roosevelt-owned naval print, 13 x 9"
Oops. Not a very happy painting. I got off track.
Old Dick Cheney and company were very good at using the the illusory effect to dumb down a nation in the build up to the internationally illegal and war criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq. You’ll recall that the illusory effect is the tendency to believe a lie if it is told over and over again.
Well, I work on the same premise, but with the twist that to repeat a truth over and over again might actually make it true—hopefully in the minds of many, but I’d take just a single human being whom I can relate to.
Here is the truth I repeat over and over, until the afib stroke knocks me out for good:
Nuclear weapons waste everything. Their existence is the only earthen threat to all life in the Milky Way. Neither a caldera eruption nor global warming come even close. Life goes on after mass extinctions. No matter how many times we leave the light on in the kitchen, the earth will only get as hot as it ever was when there were parrots and hippos lounging at the poles. Humans might not be around, but the way things stand now, who really gives a shit when merely mortal prostate engorged men and menopausal women, are allowed a free pass to pursue the only true path to the final extinction?
To repeat a truth over and over again might make it true:
Nuclear weapons waste everything.
That’s my repeated truth. True like the five fingers on a normal hand, 2 + 2 = 4, and the sky is high—even when it’s lit up with thermonukes wasting all the plutocrats, their pool cleaners, and you.
The state of Russia is no more or less my enemy than the state of the United States. They’re both enormous lies that have been repeated over and over again. So I’ll change up Dylan’s lyrics to ruffle the feathers of those neighbor yahoos who have switched roles with the John Birchers and believe the FBI and CIA are now our friends on TV.
I had to say something to make him change course,
So I yelled “I like Vladmir Putin and his horse”
Dick Cheney is Vladimir Putin is Barack Obama is… (you fill in here your favorite power hungry killer):
Dick Cheney Doing His “Clean Air Act” In Pretend Hell 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 52"
I’ll end today’s life-preserving rant with life-preserving rock music to get the viscera churning. Two living and one dead artist whose truth powers continue to give direction every second, every hour while some of us sit in chairs and watch the FBI talk at us on TV:
Neil Young: The Restless Consumer:
Lou Reed and Sex With Your Parents (substitute Rush Limbaugh for your Federal government and any media talking head today):
And finally, Ani Difranco with Sepentine. For this one, pour a stiff drink, shut the door, and turn off the lights:
Thank you for reading!
P.S. Nuclear weapons waste everything.
P.P.S. U.S. and Russian state goons of false power…
Don’t you dare fuck with my “Russian” friends!
