NEW! (12/5/2024) - For your viewing pleasure: Le Bouffon Orange (The Orange Buffoon) from the brilliant Jeremy Newberger AI collection.
NEW! (12/19/2024) - Sadly, my laptop has died and there's only so much I can do on my little phone. But, while I can't embed videos I can embed links. Here's two new must-see creations via Mr. Newberger: Musk Musk and The Snake.
"It's a reality that needs to be examined with eyes wide open. The path on which Trump, strengthened for his second term by his party's success in the Senate, will take his country diverges fundamentally from the one charted by the United States since the end of the Second World War. It marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower committed to the world, eager to set itself up as a democratic model. It's the famous "shining city on a hill," extolled by President Ronald Reagan. The model had been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump's return is putting a nail in its coffin."
"'Trump promised voters that 'I alone can fix it' Ben-Ghiat recalled.
'This is reassuring to some people,' she continued, calling it 'very sad' because, throughout history, people have all eventually discovered 'that this brought disaster upon the country.'
'The illusion of competency is very important,” she added. 'That’s why they’re going to put their trust in him to solve their problems because they think he’s competent. And that’s one of the biggest scams of all.'"
"Based solely on precedent, the near future appears to be grim. The 2016 Trump presidency was disastrous for arts funding, diversity, and education. He issued a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries that blocked entry for artists and arts professionals, to the outrage of the museum and university sector. Trump repeatedly attempted to defund federal arts funding; his 2018 and 2021 proposed budgets included the outright elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (its budget in 2021 was $167.5 million, markedly low for a federal agency). The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which partially funds PBS and NPR, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services were also targets. The cultural sector, already battling for crumbs with the Trump agency, took a blow during the Covid-19 pandemic and has yet to fully recover."
As much as I hate mixing politics with art - political discourse mars the aesthetic of this blog - every now and then I realize that it is necessary to interject personal and current events within its content to give my trips down the rabbit hole an official-world context.
As it happened, for one manic moment in time (in early October), I almost thought "reality" - a relative term used to designate what is allegedly real (although, ultimately, it fails) - was about to shift in some way... creating a brighter and more bearable zeitgeist than that which America has been experiencing for the past 9 years. This isn't to say I had "hope" (in itself, an emotional,k often delusional response) but I was open to it... I could conceive of having hope. Honestly, I was beginning to envision a new cultural Renaissance... even a new World Renaissance...
