I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news. At present, I am alive and relatively healthy. I have a very fluffy hamster named Otto who is a total sweetheart but can often be a handful. Also, my extremities are all in working order. Hands, legs, all good for a fifty-two-year old.
That’s about it.
Now for the bad news.
The thing about being a functioning artist is, you become a barometer for the well-being of society. Artists thrive when their community is thriving. When a community is suffering, there is no need for art or artists. When people struggle to provide for their families, artists are useless and displaced. Art has no logical purpose. The creative mind is shuttered to make room for survival and pragmatism.
During these times, art is all but forgotten.
The infestation of dominant left-wing politics in the world of art and entertainment has officially destroyed it. I’ve screamed myself hoarse for four years trying to reason with the unreasonable, and here we are.
Newspapers and magazines are gone. If not, then all their creative personnel have been replaced with free AI. Skills I have honed since my teenage years are as useless as tits on a boar. There is no conceivable, plausible way I can make a living as an artist anymore. No one is offering the amount of money I would require to live for another month, for anything I can do. Even if I managed to snag an entry-level job stocking shelves, it wouldn’t help. I don’t know how to make this any clearer for people.
I have begged and pleaded and bartered with people to get them to see that things are on the way out for me, and anyone like me, due in no small part to the bad political choices they insist upon making. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care. I don’t even think they care now that the world is literally falling apart around them. People are a lost cause. Like I say, the best I can hope for is that fifty years after my death, someone might say “gee whiz, it sure sucks that we didn’t see more output from this guy.”
Who am I kidding? In fifty years everything I ever created will be vapor. Everything I’ve ever accomplished in my life was for nothing.
There’s no getting through to people that what happens to me will eventually befall them, as well. They’ll all be scorned, replaced, and summarily forgotten. I say “them” because I’m trying not to scare you. Because no matter what you have, no matter what you think you’ve earned in this life, it’s all about to be taken from you.
Count your blessings. If you have children, how often do they choose some product of mass media over you? How often do you capitulate to their desires, which were implanted in them by forces that wish to annihilate your family, just to have a moment of peace in your home? How often have you been forsaken by blood relatives over a matter of political disagreement? If you’re like me, and old enough to be around grown folks who are half your age (or younger), how often do they laugh at your wisdom and tell you you’re full of shit? How often do you see them do things that you know to be harmful, from experience?
How often do they tell you that you made the wrong choice in life, and that your dreams are worthless and untenable?
I tried to warn you. I tried to convince you that my Constitutional rights were under attack. I tried to tell you that enemies of free expression are all around us now, everywhere from the corner store, to your job, to the highest levels of government. I tried to warn you that your sainted presidential messiah had made it legal for your own government to use propaganda against you. Over and over and over, I tried to make you understand that the entirety of the mass media complex was corrupted, right down to the newspapers that barely exist anymore, and that not one single news media outlet was telling you the truth.
You fucking laughed in my face.
When my enemies are female, you call me a misogynist. When my enemies aren’t white, you call me a racist. When my enemies are part of the ultra-rich global elite, you call me an anti-Semite. You never miss an opportunity to take the side that opposes me. You treat me like a loathsome deviant while you celebrate insane people who mutilate themselves, or who humiliate women by crudely mimicking a grotesque caricature of womanhood.
If I disagree with a famous celebrity, whose side do you take?
If I disagree with a politician, or agree with one who happens to be the subject of your “Two Minutes Hate” (READ ORWELL’S 1984, G.D. YOU), which side do you take?
Do you think my motives are purely contrarian, like a pathetic atheist? Do you take offense at my calling atheism “pathetic”, even though it’s no more respectable than nihilism, and atheists are worse than vegans with the condescension and smug, incessant lecturing and tongue-clucking?
Do you think I make art or humor just to fuck with you?
Where, exactly, is the money in that?
I liken myself to the “canary in the coalmine” because what you see befall me will eventually befall all of you, unless we reverse from the path we are on. When the miners see that the caged bird is on its back, that means that the gas in the mine is lethal, and it’s time to get out. If you continue to work you will die.
The benevolent, fatherly publishers of old are long gone. The alternative weeklies that once printed cartoons like mine are all shuttered. There are elected members of the US government who actively oppose the Constitution and work in secret to dismantle it. You probably voted for one or more of them. You probably ugly up your lawn with campaign signs promoting them.
I shudder to think what life will be like for you when reality hits. Once you see the scale of what your ignorance has wrought upon this world, as well as your own existence. Imagine your life’s work becoming obsolete and unimportant overnight. Imagine expressing your personal opinions, and receiving only indifference from your audience. Not disagreement, not agreement, nothing.
When people are troubled and suffering, they don’t buy art. They don’t buy comic books, or any books at all. They sure as hell don’t commission artists to create great works.
The artists are the first to go, historically. We just die. That’s the future that awaits me, thanks to the choices made by people like you. That’s why I’m always angry with people, because I’m all too aware of the fate to which their ignorance leads. And people have never, ever been more ignorant in my lifetime. Once people start attacking the Constitution and siding with AI, my days are numbered. Taylor Swift, Disney+ and Starbucks are all the art and beauty you need in your lives. I honestly don’t know why I ever bothered.
Enjoy your weekend.