Toiling In Obscurity, Part Two

Recently, it’s occurred to me that there’s an aphoristic quality to cartoons in that an artist might compress a great deal of background material into a very small sample. I’ve also considered that explaining things in "Toiling In Obscurity" may have helped any possibly interested parties to see some of the thinking behind "Thus Spake Steve Bannon." So, I thought I'd publish some essays I began about a decade ago that now serve as backing information and inspiration for what I’m doing with the "Scum (Back) On Top" series. But first, I’ll elaborate on some of the themes and references in my most recent cartoon.

 

Panel 1:  The current president is represented only as 1) a mostly featureless orange head with a black oval for the mouth, a vertical black line in the middle top, a right ear with a 2" x 2" white bandage (as worn in public appearances after the assassination attempt), wearing the black Bearskin hat with MAGA in red letters given to him by Russian ruler Vladimir Putin in the first Trumprussian regime; and 2) an unattached right arm raised with fist clenched in the gesture he made after said attempt. (Along with his exclamation, "Fight! Fight!" this made some see him as a “champion.”)

He is lying in bed as his (now iconic) raised right arm unintentionally suggests that he is stretching while yawning. A recurring dream begins with him giving a great (of course) speech at a packed (of course) rally, with good people on both sides. (Alluding to his statement trying to condemn violence in the aftermath of the torch-lit rally of Brownshirts in Charlottesville, Virginia on 11-12 August 2017. He seems to have understood he was supposed to condemn violence as such but constantly gave away the impression that he mostly wanted to lay the blame on “the other side” -- i.e., the counter-protestors who were NOT Nazis and Klansmen.)

Panel 2: POTUS has bothered me for a long time; it's too reminiscent of Caesar (which was a standard, informal "title" for any Roman Emperor -- viz., "Render unto Caesar....") and is also an example of the "telescoping" of words (as identified by George Orwell) in twentieth century political language, of police states in particular -- viz., Gestapo, USSR, USA, etc.

The specific satire on "home schooling" involves it (along with "private schools") as symptomatic of conservative reaction against public schools in the United States, and mainly the racial integration thereof (under the guise of better school standards and "moral [religious] instruction"). So, such teaching might ensure proper spelling for specialized "Biblical" terms but not be so strong on civics. And of course, there’s an allusion to what the current president said during an "Access Hollywood" interview.

Panels 2-3: In September of 2009, President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of the US Congress to propose a national healthcare plan (which became the Affordable Care Act). Feeling provoked by the darkness he observed in the vicinity of the president, and further emboldened by Koch funding, a Republican Representative from South Carolina named Joe Wilson upset the decorum and respect traditionally given to the US chief of state by standing up and shouting, "You lie!" I've been highly amused at the idea of something similar (but perhaps ambiguous) occurring to the current president.

Toiling In Obscurity

Now that I'm 60, I assume I've earned the right to complain about a few things. For instance, unless whoever is in charge of the UFOs means to save us from ourselves, all of this could be an odd cosmic accident in which a planet teeming with life had one species somehow get lucky, populate the hell out of it, take it over, and finally ruin it, killing themselves after killing off everything that was not themselves. (That is a complaint about -- among other things -- global warming due to our industrialized overkill, as the planet Venus is our ultimate but rapidly approaching fate.)

Or I could engage in more stereotypically crabby behavior befitting the elderly and mention my surprise (over the past decade) to learn that people in their twenties and thirties know everything there is to know about everything. (So, I'm sure they know that a tendency to "telescope" language -- FWIW, LOL! -- was some of what Eric Blair was talking about in his mid-twentieth-century warnings about totalitarianism. The idea is that debasing language of meaningful content can help to limit anyone's capacity for more than superficial thinking. You could look that up in books if you can still find a "library" with these "books" things.) But we all think we know it all in our twenties and thirties, and since I've hardly been able to stand the political realities of the past few years, I can only imagine how awful they must seem to young people.

I should note that I've not been completely idle in addressing a few of those painful realities, and this toiling in obscurity can be a pain in the ass. But while I'm not a good salesman, you inevitably want some regard for what you're trying to do. So I will give a little background on the "Thus Spake Steve Bannon" cartoons I started over a year ago -- to indicate some of what I've been doing the past twenty years or so -- to what effect, who knows?

 

1) An original inspiration for "Thus Spake Steve Bannon" came from comments made by Nigel Farage at a political gathering in Louisiana, at which he introduced Bannon as a kind of intellectual savio(u)r of the West. (That would be silly enough without someone from the United Kingdom expressing it in so incongruous a setting; did Farage win a free gun?) I also read that Bannon had an affinity for certain ideas of Lenin and a quirk of reading a passage from one book and then reading another from a different book. So, I called him a "bibliomancer." I carried over the "cyborg" aspect from depicting Dick Cheney as one in "Is The Dow Rising?" (with a cast iron stove seeming funny and more "rustic" – i.e., Bannon wants "Country" [white] folks to know him as one of their own). I wanted him to be a fan of GWF Hegel and surrounded by images of various Rightist and Fascist theorists, like Heinrich von Treitschke, Giovanni Gentile, and Carl Schmitt.

2) Having a regular job and other aspects of life to deal with, it takes a lot of work to make cartoons using only Microsoft Paint. For instance, in "Is The Dow Rising?" I did six panels per episode (the better to tell a story) and had to stop sooner than expected because the Bush Administration ended before I could go on. So when I started "Scum On Top," I initially went with three panels, then found that was still too ambitious; I wound up limiting the episodes to 1-2 panels each.* With "Thus Spake Steve Bannon," I thought to cut the workload even more by having cyborg Steve in a standard illustration without much background variation, appearing as a pompous soothsayer shelling out tidings of woe worse than any Fox News broadcast.

*(I worked doggedly week after week, month after month, during the Trumprussian regime. [Religious themes became increasingly prominent as the series wound down.] The biggest problem with the work is current events constantly outpacing planned drawings and episodes. When I kicked off "Thus Spake Steve Bannon," I felt immediately obligated to address another round of gun massacres along with the US Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade.)

3) The title is in homage to early English translators of Fred Nietzsche's work, Also Sprach Zarathustra: they took it so seriously as the work of a prophet that they felt the need to present it in the language of the King James Bible. The introductory exposition under the title is in homage both to Superman and to Marvel Comics of the 1970s, the latter having (at the top of the splash page) a brief presentation of the origins or raisons d'etre of character(s) starring in the comic book. (A representative sample: "Five hundred years ago he was killed...but he did not die. Today, Quincy Harker, Frank Drake, Rachel Van Helsing, and Blade, the Vampire Slayer -- stalk him...as this unliving Lord of Vampires spreads his reign of terror across a twentieth century world." from Tomb Of Dracula, Vol. 1, No. 61, November 1977.) And Bannon's dialogue in Part One is from "The Phantom Of The Opera" (1925).

4) I don't know how much more I will do with it, if any. At this point, I'm just getting rid of drawings I've had a while.

So You Lost Some Twitter Followers..............

So you lost some Twitter followers, and now mean people are talking shit at you. At least you're not having bombs falling from the sky in your neighborhood. And you're not in prison for criticizing dictators. And you're not little more than a baby, getting shot to death in your elementary school.

Assuming (for the sake of the argument) that 44 billion US dollars is an awful lot of money no matter how rich one might be, how would it be worth buying Twitter if the goal were not to somehow make money off it? That is, in the short term, one could cope with losses in anticipation of long-term financial benefit, but if the thing goes under completely, how can a purchase of $44 BILLION be justified?

As someone pointed out, Twitter has brought lots of people together in many ways on a global scale. And whatever one can say about that in a critique (for instance, Western affluence affords greater access than that experienced by most of the people of Africa), it's simply true that I've been able to follow events in the Philippines and other places by following accounts from there, and even in less open countries by following human rights and journalistic and political opposition accounts. (And it's not all happy discoveries, either. Some of our friends in Hong Kong were very open to right-wing ideas – evidently, due to the PRC carrying the label "Communist" and their taking its ideological verities seriously.)

But while it would be a shame to lose opportunities to draw attention to Russia's War on Ukraine, how much impact have various Twitter campaigns had on the political situations inside certain countries? If one is inclined to say "very little," Turlough's point may strike at the heart of the matter. The ruling powers in Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Turkey, and so on, could be extremely uneasy at the continued prospect of a global network of humans no longer limited to having to "Think Globally, Act Locally." Why would various agencies try to disrupt such platforms (and their inhabitants) if they feared nothing from that direction? And as they've had their intelligence services attack and infiltrate those platforms to disrupt them in many ways, it would obviously benefit them to have a useful idiot to serve the same goal, especially if one says he's going to do things for positive reasons (like "liberating free speech").

But that's only for public consumption, yes? We can now see that the "positive reasons" are limited to a specific ideological stance (called "libertarian" – seemingly, more individualistic, but fringe right-wing in the US) with no objections to white supremacy and other ideas held dear in Far Right circles. And that's also in keeping with what various governments would like to see, whether only in shit-stirring, or in encouraging extensive social conflict, or in installations of friendly regimes like the one in the United States from 2017 to 2021. To some of us, all this doesn't seem so complicated. Turning Twitter into an updated, normalized version of 4chan or The Daily Stormer would serve both to "get the [Far Right] word out" as well as eventually destroy the "threat" that the platform represented all along.

"Thus Spake Steve Bannon"

An ALL-NEW, ALL-DIFFERENT comic strip from the House of Some Ideas! It may make you laugh! It may make you cry! It may make you Question the Values of your Peers! It's........

"THUS SPAKE STEVE BANNON"

 

In his rôle as a public intellectual, disguised as a mild-mannered pod-caster, he sets forth his dogma and stratagems in a never-ending battle for wrong, fabrications, and Far Right world dominion......

Kingmaker.    Chaos Bringer.    Übermensch.    Cyborg Bibliomancer.

He is.............STEVE BANNON!!!