It’s Secret Russian Independence Day, so here’s a patriotic/Kafka-esque image of Uncle Gregor Sam-sa waking up on November 9th, 2016 to find his half-metamorphosed body on the way to full Bannon. His face and body are loosely based on David Bowie’s Lazarus video from early 2016. This is a 48″ by 24″ acrylic painting finished in oil. Like our democracy, it is for sale.
A few weeks ago, STBISPLPV* made the astonishing assertion that Vladimir Putin is to be respected as a world leader because “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”
This week’s new batch of Wikileaks (whose founder, Julian Assange, is a fellow Putin-apologist/alleged sexual predator – notice a pattern?) showed us how similarly evil our CIA is. We spy, they spy etc. etc. and let’s all forget about the golden showers.
But even if you control for the fact that Putin’s foes die with alarming regularity, or that Russia has recently hacked sovereign nations, or butchered thousands of civilians in Syria, or conducted a military invasion of its neighbor Ukraine, or tampered in our election, the fact remains that people in Russia for the most part aren’t free, while Americans for the most part are.
Today is International Women’s day. In Russia, a bill recently passed reducing punishment for domestic battery to 500 bucks. Putin’s Russia already bans “gay propaganda.” Russia seems like a modern superpower at times, but in fact has a GDP smaller than Italy’s, and a human rights record of a Middle Eastern oil kingdom. The life expectancy for men in Russia is 64 years, in the bottom 50 countries in the world for that metric. Last month, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister said that up to 20% of the alcohol drunk in the country consisted of medicines and perfumes. That’s weird, but partly the result of devastating sanctions imposed on the country for invading Ukraine. If the world had taken away our Doritos in retribution for the illegal 2003 Iraq invasion, we might be eating cardboard. Who knows.
But for all these reasons, Russia isn’t a fellow superpower to be treated with mutual respect. And here’s another one that really sticks for me: They don’t celebrate Independence day.
It’s today.
In fact, it’s their centennial Independence day. Today marks the 100th anniversary of the first of the two revolutions in 1917 that gave birth to modern Russia. And Putin isn’t celebrating. After all, he can’t celebrate the doomed reign of Tsar Nicholas II, nor can he celebrate Lenin (or any other revolutionaries, troublemakers or Riot Grrrl bands such as Pussy Riot). Nor can he celebrate the interim period between the February revolution and the October revolution, where the provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet government competed for power, and rule wasn’t locked down by a single man.
So they don’t celebrate at all, but instead yearn for the days of Stalin, who had a bigger mustache than Hitler and killed about 10 million more innocent people than his German counterpart. Stalin was one of history’s greatest monsters, eclipsed only by Mao in terms of bodycount. But Putin has been busy rehabilitating the image of the strongman, closing Gulag museums and praising the mass-murderer through his recently created “Russian Military History Society.”
It would be sort of like Americans celebrating Custer’s Last Stand but working on July 4th instead of BBQing.
So no matter what lies spew out of STBISPLPV’s hate-filled blow-hole, remember that the false equivalency he draws between America and Russia is about as legitimate as a degree from Trump University. Our nation celebrates revolt and freedom every year…whereas Russia is a second-world autocracy that venerates a mass murderer and ignores its independence day…a place where people seem willing to accept death in lieu of retirement and drink perfume instead of Vodka.
So on this 100th anniversary of modern Russia, let’s (not) raise a nice cold glass of CK1 and toast our differences – for our benefit as well as for that of the poor wretches suffering under Putin’s fist…
…May we never join them.
*Six-Times Bankrupt Illiterate Sexual Predator who Lost the Popular Vote.
(I drew this around the last time the electoral college failed America.)
The Century of Fear so far: 9/11: the Towers fall. 11/9: the rise of the man in the Tower.
The day after the 2016 election Harry Reid reminded us that Donald Trump is “A sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate.” Once I had ceased vomiting, I took up a brush and painted this take on the famous Goya mural.
Possibly the most frightening aspect of all of this is the extent to which Trump seemed to be caught off guard by both his victory and the extent of the job. “The Rape of Lady Liberty” is an over-used and shallow trope in American Political cartooning, but here it is an (appropriate) afterthought to Saturn’s own fear; he seems to be terrifying even himself.
I think my process was sub-consciously inspired by this Nation cover from 16 years ago, where Brian Stauffer depicted George W. Bush as Alfred E. Neumann, before the result of the 2000 election had been decided. Damn, do I miss the Twentieth Century.
Let’s do some math: US population is 320 million. Of voting age: 250 million. Turnout is about 57%. Thats 142 million. Trump will likely win the votes of about 60 million of these people. 60 out of 320. Fewer than a fifth. So when the “news” talks about a “fractured nation” imagine this: You have five children, and one of them starts throwing garbage everywhere, torturing animals, swearing all time…and you look at your 5 kids -one of whom is behaving badly- and say “we have a fractured family,” That’s creating FALSE EQUIVALENCY.
That’s an insult to the other four. Lowering the discourse of the other 4 to appease a bad apple is to reach out to a bigoted minority. Historically, appeasement when it comes to fascism is a cowardly strategy that leads to the death of innocent people. So if the 18.75% of this country who are rotten children and need to commit hate crimes before they are forgotten, let them act out.
We already pay for their roads. We’ll pay for their prison cells too, and as we open up cells previously occupied by non-violent drug offenders for these people – these armed occupiers of federal buildings, these church bombers, these voter-intimidators, etc.etc.-they will slowly choose to remove themselves from the conversation. And when they come out, they won’t be able to vote, because they voted to disenfranchise ex-cons.
See how that works?
If you honestly believe that Hillary Clinton, a woman who has climbed to the top of a mountain of compromise to join a pantheon of 44 Indian-butchers, oil-men, drone-warlords and egomaniacs – is worse than all those men – then you’re off the hook. No celebrating today. If you really think that her shale oil initiative could end the world, or that she’s murdered her bodyguards, then please don’t join our celebration that the “nigger of the world” (John Lennon’s term for womankind) has finally eked out small purchase up there with the thousands of Popes, chancellors, princes, kings and CEOs.
But if you’re one of those who mentions her clothes, or that she “talks down like a mom,” -but you didn’t point out the patronizing entreaties of W to “keep shopping” as he set fire to Babylon -or if you just can’t sense the smiles on the women in your Facebook feed who are of a certain age…then you, my friend, are a sexist who has infiltrated a labor rally, and you’re no help to us.
I, for one, would like to welcome my sisters to the devil’s bargaining table. You made it! And in just under a hundred years after the 19th Amendment. Cheers.
In 1988, I was too young to understand what it meant that Jesse Jackson’s ancestors were slaves. By 2008, I was old enough to understand that for most white Americans, having a black friend (or better yet, an African immigrant’s kid who has no plantation-slave guilt to impart on his caucasoid beer-buddies) is a far more attractive option to wearing a This Is What a Feminist Looks Like T-Shirt.
One issue is cultural; the other as old as biology itself.
Some Bernie Bros say she is too warlike. But If she’d been a dove, she’d have been disqualified as a woman who can’t fight with the men. (Or vote with almost all of them after being deceived by a crooked war cabinet.)
As a New York Senator, she represented the interests of Wall Street banks. Because Wall street is still in New York, despite the Hair-ed One’s insistence that it now resides in China. I despise vulture capitalism, but here’s the way Congress works: you do two things; represent your constituents and you fight for your reelection. Where was everyone else? And why did the Y chromosome Clinton get no flak for de-regulating the banks in the first place?
I voted for Sanders in my state’s primary, and I hoped he would create the national dialogue he did. But let’s remember that the crimes of the super rich have become so egregious, that even without a leader there was a movement to address wealth inequality. Where for art thou Occupy?
I was there with the Bernie Bros when it seemed as though CNN was rigging the coverage. I was there when it seemed as though both Clinton and the Hair were pandering to black voters, and I even posited that the two New Yorkers were colluding on a DNC wrecking operation to bring down the GOP faster than Building 7. (DT’16 was an inside job?)
I was there because Sanders confronted the wealth gap that I believe has come to define – and cripple – my country. And I watched as kids too young to have been able to take part in Obamarama turned their youthful vigor to creating revolutionary art about the old man, trying to catch a ‘lil bit of that Shepard Fairey-dust. Others took to calling Hillary “the devil.” Even young women I know called her horrible things, but seemingly had no such vitriol left for the 535 voting members of Congress.
White 20-somethings suddenly cared a hell of a lot about income inequality.
And did Bernie offer a solution? Not for black folks. As was pointed out yesterday by Vishnu Sridharan in The Nation, neither Bernie nor Hillary have proposed much to help with the racial wealth gap, because universal access to education still doesn’t fix the problem.
“While access to education does have many benefits, it is not a “great equalizer” when it comes to wealth. Research shows that white families with household heads that have a college degree have over $180,000 in median wealth, while similar black families have $23,000. In fact, black families with a college-educated head have less wealth than white families headed by a high-school dropout.”
I hope that when this sprawling saga of an election cycle comes to its conclusion, the Bernie Bros will still pay attention to labor issues, deregulation of Wall Street and the Midterms. Or maybe they’ll send each other vintage “Hillary is a seething Giger Alien” memes.
To these fine young men I’d say one thing:
Welcome to progressive politics – we lose a lot. If your most salient issue is winning, there’s a candidate just for you.
Since 1968, guns have killed almost 1.5 million Americans. That’s more than we’ve lost in all our wars combined, even including the 750,000 killed on both sides of the Civil War. We’ve lost six thousand troops in Afganistan and Iraq this century, a number you’d have to multiply 77 times to arrive at the number of people shot during the same time in our homeland.
But it’s tax day, so let’s talk about the money. All that gun violence is expensive. Doctors are sworn to fix “bad guys” too, and since those bad guys usually don’t have health insurance, you and I pay to mend them via taxes. Fixing bad guys, burying children, ambulance rides, lost income – this all adds up to a staggering $238 Billion (yes, with a “B”) per year.
That comes out to about $800 per American per year.
Universal free college costs about $250 per American per year.
So you could have free college to train America’s youth to go kick ass in the world marketplace AND get a $550 tax rebate – or we can pay $800 a year each to bury another 30,000 inventors, musicians, athletes and doctors – Americans who could have been.
20,000 are suicides, where there is no criminal to stop. No “bad guys.” Just American futures cut short, and a bill the size of 45 Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. (It took decades to build the ten we have.)
To make burning money seem like freedom, you’d need an army of P.R. people and lawyers – which is why the NRA is the biggest lobby around. Responsible gun owners are victims here too. Because the N.R.A. insists on making guns available to criminals, a gun enthusiast’s hobby now costs everyone else $800 per year.
So that giant, big-government, big-tax D.C. lobby has turned honest American gun owners…
…into welfare queens.
(And yes, that’s a Walther P99 in the graphic, because it’s important to remember that the NRA is also in the business of protecting criminals’ access to foreign-made guns. The rest of the world has guns too…they just don’t have the NRA.)
SOURCES:
http://www.businessinsider.com/gun-violence-costs-america-more-than-229-billion-every-year-2015-4
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/15/459673828/looking-at-violence-in-america-with-a-financial-lens
kandero 