I could riff on what led me to arrange the latest issue of Time on a dinner plate, below. All I know consciously is that when I just picked it up at the mailbox I felt a sense of revulsion. Perhaps it’s because I just finished watching Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix….. Drew Barrymore eating people...
I’d love to hear from the photographer about what it was like to have him sit for a portrait, and hear the story about why Time selected this photo. He’s the Jewish photographer who took this cover:
From “Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art” Forward.
Taken together, these elements add up to a profound portrayal of anxiety for the coming years. We have the implicit placement of Trump in the mid 1900’s (looking through the Time Magazine cover archives, no images really resemble this cover, save the one seen on the left [a purely visual comparison]). We have a suggestion of the scheming, sordid underside of power. We have the crumbling facade of wealth, which, like “The Picture of Dorian Gray” suggests more than just a physical deterioration. As a photograph, it’s a rare achievement. As a cover, it’s a statement.
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Sometime in the early 2000s, Bannon was captivated by a book called The Fourth Turning by generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book argues that American history can be described in a four-phase cycle, repeated again and again, in which successive generations have fallen into crisis, embraced institutions, rebelled against those institutions and forgotten the lessons of the past--which invites the next crisis. These cycles of roughly 80 years each took us from the revolution to the Civil War, and then to World War II, which Bannon might point out was taking shape 80 years ago. During the fourth turning of the phase, institutions are destroyed and rebuilt.
Take a deep breath, this is more disturbing:
(Time author who interviewed Bannon 10 years ago Neil) Howe, too, was struck by what he calls Bannon's "rather severe outlook on what our nation is going through." Bannon noted repeatedly on his radio show that "we're at war" with radical jihadis in places around the world. This is "a global existential war" that likely will become "a major shooting war in the Middle East again." War with China may also be looming, he has said. This conviction is central to the Breitbart mission, he explained in November 2015: "Our big belief, one of our central organizing principles at the site, is that we're at war."