The rapidity with which this Trump administration moves — for those who had accepted incremental change, bureaucratic molasses and the long arc of justice as just par-for-the-course of the ‘democratic’ process and social progression in the US — those falsehoods and everything else that has been revealed in these last two months — is both mockery and insult added to our collective American (and global) actual injuries.
Capitalism and Neoliberalism paved the road for — and then engineered and constructed the super highway to, oligarchal fascism.
political&ideological opposition is meaningless now
Billionaire JB Pritzker, the current Governor of the State of Illinois in an annual constitutionally mandated “State Of The State” address of February 19, 2025, questioned the near and long-term State of the Union — of the United States of America,
the relevant paragraphs are excerpted below with a link to the full transcript:
While US President Donald Trump né Drumpf floats the possibility of annexing Canada, acquiring Greenland by force or finance, and “taking over” Gaza creating a diaspora of 1.7 million Palestinian People, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov diplomatically re-invokes the Yalta-Potsdam system of agreements in his latest essay for “Russia In Global Affairs” with a re-invitation to the US — to reject its unsustainable and too-long unbridled path of global hegemony — and join the future as an equal nation of a multipolarity center along with China, Russia and nations in every quatrasphere of the World:
If birthright citizenship granted by the U.S. Constitution will be bastardized or revoked; to potentially exclude 574 Federally recognized Indigenous Tribal Nations;
if the U.S. is leaving WHO;
if the NIH, CDC, FDA and USDA are intentionally incommunicado during an endemic, debilitating chronic virus — with another potential pandemic on the global horizon — and may be permanently silenced or defunded;
if the U.S. Government won’t recognize, adhere to or enforce the United Nations International Criminal Court findings, rulings, sanctions and warrants on human rights violations and war crimes;
if the U.S. Government has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement both by action, inaction and officially; if the U.S government is abandoning climate mitigation and bio-diversity loss mitigation both by action, inaction and officially;
if FEMA is to be dissolved and defunded amid increasing, expanding and worsening anthropogenic-caused or accelerated climate catastrophes;
if Federal income tax collection may cease, to be replaced by tariffs or other regressive tax; or the working classes will be further over-burdened by Federal income tax collection even as the Federal programs that crucially and critically support or supplement life and lives are weakened or eliminated;
and granted, these institutions, agencies and policies are deficient, mismanaged or corrupted in some way or many ways;
if the two political parties in the U.S. Government are entrenched without possible legitimate political, military or civic challenge; if the three separate branches of the U.S. Government are in virtual lock-step as an autocracy; and, if there is de facto rule of the United States of America by oligarchy;
“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
a white-tailed deer drinks from a bird bath, which was presumed to be of exclusive use of songbirds — especially, eastern bluebirds, on the land the author occupies Halloween 2024 “all treatery, no trickery”
Regular firearm, deer hunting season began yesterday in Michigan, United States of America, and the crack of rifles and the blast of shotguns destroy both peace and life.
When you finally realize that the solution to the economy — rent and groceries (not the stock market, not your investment portfolio), to health and healthcare, bodily autonomy and reproductive rights, the climate crisis, to environmental destruction — of land, air, and water and biodiversity, to wealth inequality, to systemic racism/white supremacy, to colossal, empire-sized military and police budgets — and endless overt and proxy wars and ongoing GENOCIDE — CAN NOT and WILL NOT be found in the BALLOT BOX — blue or red,
— then what?
then, what will you do? will you hope to ride it out quietly with whatever measure of privilege you possess (white male, white adult, middle-classed, usefully employed in the systems of government or institutions of political or corporate power)?
Will you finally rise up and do the necessary-yet-awful, brave, brutal and hard work to resist and fight — like every dignified human collective across history and even today — like the Palestinians? Like the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho? Like the Maroons of Haiti — or will you be like the Germans — roll over, fall in line, bide your time — hope they come for your neighbor or coworker instead; maybe even turn them in?
This “nation is a massacre”, it always has been
for tens of millions of people right here of and on this land — and for hundreds of millions globally — even if that excludes you and yours (for now).
fwiw: admission to the Krasl Art Center is free. I didn’t pay to enter the exhibit.
Shepard Fairey no doubt has a seminal presence in street art — that is, art in public space — in sticker culture, in wheatpaste postering and in muralism. But, he’s also problematic as fuck — problematic to “fair use”, to social movements — and to art itself. I want to be more precise and say: he has an ejaculative presence in art in public space: his stuff is ubiquitously and frequently splattered — and sticky in the public consciousness — like a true Mad Men, note Ad men and marketers and PR consultants are not artists: they are not even tricksters — they are influencers, marketeers, cons, liars and grifters.
Fairey perhaps most famously helped to elevate Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign with his iconographic HOPE image — Fairey, (perhaps) like tens of millions of us, including myself, bought into Obama’s community organizer/activist history and “hope and change” schtick back in 2008. The shame and pain of decades of systemic, racialized disenfranchisement and inequity were transformed into an incredible electoral energy that was earnestly and hopefully deposited into Obama’s candidacy and presidency; it was then almost immediately disregarded and wasted — and ultimately, profoundly regretted by progressives. Only after his first term was nearly complete did “we” learn and process that Obama was a neo-liberal capitalist centrist cloaked in folksy voice and progressive-populist clothing — we witnessed him betray us again and again — and become a prolific drone-strike-executioner-in-chief as well as Wall Street’s and Rahm Emanuel’s punk-ass bitch.
I want to be more precise and say: he has an ejaculative presence in art in public space: his stuff is ubiquitously and frequently splattered — and sticky in the public consciousness.
The Obama HOPE image stands as a reminder and a joke of hope placed in any Democrat or Republican politician — any. Thank you for that, truly, Shepard Fairey.
Fairey has also reproduced and exhibited images of actual, bonafide Black power and liberation icons (Angela Davis notwithstanding) — and has been rightly interrogated about his cultural appropriation. On the surface, his work may pass as homage to great People and powerful movements, but it can also be interpreted as an artistic “black face” — and as an attempt to co-opt that which is not his in order to elevate his own vanilla, half-woke vibe — and of course, to cash-in. He remains defiant in his approach to cultural appropriation.
Today, on the feast day of La Virgen de Guadalupe, from the valley and river of the wolves,
who is and always was Tonantzin, the Nahuas’ Universal Mother of Earth, they being one and the same parthenogenetic Creatrix-entity of Life —and of Death, here on Earth:
art by @lala_wera
In the name of Tonantzin, I rebuke the State of Israel and the United States
— both nations stand defiantly in their ongoing slaughter of 18,000 human beings so far — nearly all of those killed — are Palestinian civilians and more than half of them are children — hundreds of thousands more are injured, maimed — in tremendous pain, suffering from unfathomable loss, from hunger, thirst, and disease — and dispossessed of and displaced from their mothers, families, beds, kitchens, homes, pets, art, schools, toys, lifework — and land,
and the Western and Eastern global capitalist powers — in their protracted genocide, mass exploitation, enslavement and dispossession of the People of Congo,
I call to and incant unto Tonantzin for the downfall of these two seated governments, and of the despots and oligarchs, that are a scourge on this good Earth and all Lifeupon it.
Tonantzin Tlalli Coatlicue
May these demons be stricken by Her snakes and devoured by Her wolves and may their bones be cast into the eternal infernowith not one cinder or ash remaining. Forgotten Forever.
my ancestors will not let me forget this, 2019 Neon, aluminum, insulated wiring, mechanical components 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow Museum purchase from the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2019“every american flag is warning sign”
“This is the way settler-colonial trauma settles into the body of the colonized We unconsciously re-live the genocides and brutalities inflicted against our ancestors
The shame the rape the beatings the enslavement The white bodies with their killing machines and unholy structures of
torture and discipline
The distrust the disease the disgust the deceit the miseducation and
immoral fixations
The flamboyant uniforms
My ancestors will not let me forget this and every american flag is a warning sign
Even the one my grandfather was given as a Code Talker.”
-excerpt, “An Infected Sunrise”
by Demian DinéYazhi’
In addition to a career in visual arts, DinéYazhi' is a spoken word poet, who in the fourth grade, fell in love with writing. Exhibited at the 2019 Honolulu Biennial, my ancestors will not let me forget this, references Diné Yazhi''s childhood hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, which is less than twenty miles from Church Rock, New Mexico. United Nuclear Corporation milled uranium in Church Rock, which borders Navajo reservation trust-lands. In July 1979, its disposal pond for tailings breached its dam, causing at least eleven hundred tons of mill waste to spill into Puerco River. Today, Church Rock is the largest recorded radioactive spill in U.S. history and is an EPA Superfund site.
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 