One Artist's Brief, Unnerving Brush with Rabid Right

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Monday September 25, 2017 · 3:44 PM PDT

2017/09/25 · 15:44

A couple of months ago, some rightwing knucklehead tried to start a boycott campaign against me because I painted a picture of Donald Drumpf.

A little background: After getting laid off from a large tech company a few years ago, I decided to reinvent his life in the most rational way possible: I picked up a pen and began drawing portraits of every single U.S. vice president with an octopus on his head. For some reason, it struck a chord and a bunch of people gave me money on Kickstarter to turn my portraits into a single volume called Veeptopus: 48 Vice Presidents with Octopuses on Their Heads. The book is now available on Amazon.

Since then I’ve been looking around for ways to expand and deepen my work. So I’ve started oil painting.

“Oil painting is serious,” said my dour, thin-lipped teacher when I took my one and only oil painting class in college back during the Clinton administration. And thanks to that class where a spent a semester painting dismal bowls of fruit, I’ve always been daunted by the medium. In spite of that, I picked up a brush a couple of months ago and attempted to paint a more realistic version of a drawing that I did back in 2015. The picture was a lot funnier back then.

Considering I had no real idea of what I was doing, I was pretty pleased with the results. So I posted the image on my Instagram and Facebook pages. People seemed to dig it too. Late one night, I posted it onto a Facebook group innocuously named something like “Watercolor, Acrylic and Oil Painting.”

It honestly didn’t cross my mind that people might find this painting offensive but holy shit they did. See, what I realized when I got back on the web the following morning is that Facebook group should have been called “Angry Drumpf Supporters who Sometimes Paint Watercolor, Acrylic, and Oil.” There were roughly 900 comments on my painting, many were so vitriolic that they were kind of funny. The administrator of the group took down the picture before I could make a thorough record but “Asshole” was thrown around a lot. “California” was used as an epithet. And one guy who liked to paint pictures of his truck said I had no talent. Some other guy even photoshopped me against a Soviet flag which still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And one irate snowflake tried to launch that Twitter campaign to boycott me. It didn’t really take off. And good thing too because without the support of Trumperistas, I might just go out of business.

At the time, I laughed off the kerfuffle, promising myself to be more careful on where I post my work. But since horribleness in Charlottesville and the ugliness of Drumpf’s NFL rants this past weekend, I’ve felt more and more unnerved by my run-in with the rabid right. I painted a mildly satirical picture of a sitting U.S. president that would not have received more than an eye roll in the past from people on the other side of the political aisle. Now, I get a barrage of personal insults and an attempted internet boycott. It’s chilling what’s happening to civil discourse in this country. I am more committed than ever to speak out.

After all, oil painting and art, in general, is serious.

I Can't In Good Conscience Vote For Obama

mondale

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Sunday March 13, 2011 · 11:30 PM PDT

2011/03/13 · 23:30

[Warning: Some swearing]

I campaigned for him in '08. And I was deliriously happy when someone named Barack Hussein Obama actually got elected as president. Like a lot of people on Kos, I hoped that we were at the cusp of a new New Deal. A progressive resurgence.

But then, over the past two and a half years, I've watched with growing disappointment as Obama repeatedly sold out progressive principles in favor of big business and the military-industrial complex. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that in areas that really matter -- y'know, the basic health of the democracy in the republic -- Obama is not much better than Bush. Obama has not indicted a single bank exec for the '08 economic collapse. Obama has refused to roll back the civil liberty abuses of the Bush administration and in some cases expanded the abuses (hello Pornoscanners). But what broke the camels back for me is his assertion this weekend that the obvious torture of Bradley Manning was "appropriate." Who the fuck is this guy? Not the one I helped get elected.

The immediate response when I say that I'm not voting for Obama is '12 is that I'll be handing the presidency to Sarah Palin or whatever bed-crapping, mouth-breathing neanderthal that the Republicans manage to nominate. And that might be the case. But I'm getting sick of being forced to choose between a crazed lunatic and a duplicitous jerk who holds liberals in contempt. It's the different between voting for shit-flavored curry and curry-favored shit. I don't want either of them.

There are 300 million people in the country and if the polls are to be believed, most people want more government spending on social programs. They want the cut the out-of-control military budget. And, though I haven't seen any polls on it, I suspect that most Americans would prefer the TSA to stop touching their junk. There's got to be someone out there who's willing to represent, as Howard Dean said, the Democratic wing of the Democratic party. Maybe Howard Dean. I hope he runs. If not, I'm voting for FDR's zombified corpse.

The Left Need's a North Star

mondale

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Thursday November 04, 2004 · 11:38 PM PST

2004/11/04 · 23:38

As depressed and angry as I am about the election, I'd like to argue that this is a gift. And not just in the way that many have made, arguing that Bush will have to deal with his mess in Iraq, ballooning debt, and about a dozen other fuck ups. You see, in these next four years with political involvement among educated liberals at an all-time high, we must deal with THE fundamental problem with the left: we have no vision. As crazed, delusional and wrong as it might be, Bush has a vision and it seems to speak to a surprisingly wide swath of the populace.
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