Back in the late nineteen-sixties, I clipped a cartoon from The New Yorker, at a time that urban renewal was doing its worst in a variety of Boston neighborhoods. The picture was a pair of little old ladies sitting on a train, one speaking to the other. The caption read, “I must tell you, my dear, they have taken down most of Boston and put up something else.”
I wish I still had it. It summarizes perfectly how I feel about the State of the Union: “The GOP and MAGA have taken down most of our Constitutional democracy and put up some dystopian broligarchy instead.”
First Fourteen Days
“Spines On Loan”
It seems the plan to replace our democracy with Christo-Fascist, theocratic autocracy was in place long before Inauguration Day 2025. Felon47 has been signing one executive order after another—how he does love his oversized black-sharpie scrawl—eradicating whatever he finds objectionable about American culture and laws.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the alpha-broligarch, whose security clearance was bestowed on him in the absence of any investigation, has started stealing the most private and sensitive information belonging to American citizens in the name of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. The richest man on earth is deciding how much support he can divert from those whose lives rely on it, to his own benefit.
In this chaos, I am seeing the critical need for art, all kinds of art, but especially for visual art. Political cartoonists are eviscerating the second Trump administration. Artists follow in the footsteps of their predecessors in calling out corruption and brutality.
Some models.
Victims of Imperialism
Consider the Third of May, 1808 (1814) by Francisco Goya.
The Third of May, 1808
Two massive formations of men face each other across a narrow gap. The light from a lantern cuts through the darkness and pins the Madrileño rebels against the wall. The firing squad is impersonal, unidentifiable, in fact, as it is seen from the back. The peasants facing them are unarmed, defenseless, terrified. It is an image of martyrdom, an ugly subject painted in an ugly way, down to the dead head at the foreground left, that is simply and inertly dead.
Yet this picture is more than a political polemic. As the late and marvelous Sister Wendy Becket points out, it is not the French that Goya condemns but our communal cruelty. It is human kind that holds the rifles, but humankind at its most conscienceless. The victims, too, are Everyman, the huddled mass of the poor who have no defender.
Victims of Fascism
On Monday, April 26, 1937, people crowded into the Spanish Basque town of Guernica for the weekly market. Without warning, German bombers flew overhead, releasing one hundred thousand pounds of bombs. Behind them, fighter planes strafed the town, shooting at those who ran or tried to hide. When it all was over, over 1,600 townspeople and their children were killed or wounded.
Guernica
In Paris, Picasso read the headline, “A thousand firebombs dropped by Hitler’s and Mussolini’s planes reduce Guernica to ashes.” On May 1, he made the first sketches for the masterpiece known as “Guernica.” Picasso described the bull as “brutality and darkness.” The horse, which has been pierced by a spear, “represents the people.” Below the horse, a fallen warrior clutches a broken sword. When the enormous canvas went on exhibition, it was attacked by representatives of both the political left and right.
Voices Today
Events That Can’t Be Erased or Whitewashed
Contemporary art addressing injustice, political corruption, imperialist aggression, and crimes against humanity takes many forms: Banksy’s guerrilla graffiti; Hugh Hayden’s exquisite wood carvings and assemblages; and the wicked pens wielded by cartoonists like Mike Luckovich. Easel painting, with its reliance on allegory and appropriation, will, I think, meet the challenge.
The painter Gary Horn, better known as G Gray Thorn https://ggraythorn.com/, places issues of truth and the nature of American society at the center of his art. In the painting, History is a Chain of Events That Can’t Be Erased or Whitewashed: The Blood on Our Pen Poisons Our Words of Freedom Justice and Equality (2023), he offers an apt quotation from Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in Federalist 51 (February 8, 1788):
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
How prescient. As we enter our third week of the second Trump administration, with Elon Musk energetically disemboweling the government, we see the pure evil of unprincipled narcissism.
How do we understand the disaster unfolding at warp speed around us? We just have to keep at it, keep holding on to the facts. John Trudell (1946-2015), artist, author, poet, musician and American Indian Movement activist, offers insight into the dilemma:
When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.