Tag Archives: greed

Rude Guests at the Divine Matinee Rude Guests at the Divine Matinee Rude Guests at the Divine Matinee has a subtitle: “Greed Exploitation and Perversion with Innocence Unsupervised”. It was painted in 1999 following my frustration and observations in trying to improve school safety following the school shootings in the new, and the World Trade Organization incidents in Seattle where the media painted a very inaccurate picture. The painting shows three characters (Greed, an ugly man with a cranial motem, Exploitation, a Camel with an eyepatch, and Perversion, an alligator in fishnet stockings. They are cutting up a baked Alaska Earth Cake upon a cage table where helpless and rare animals are imprisoned. In the same room, where evidence of pollution and misuse of natural resources is apparent, three impish children watch a pornographic cartoon. Separated from this indoor scene, one child looks out a window to see the natural world looking beautiful, faraway and vulnerable. This painting speaks directly to overuse and misuse of our planet by big business and the wasteland created by excessive consumerism. It was created as an illustrative reminder that we should appreciate the beauty and gifts of our planet and look closer at how excessive lifestyles are having a negative impact everywhere in the world.

Rude Guests at the Divine Matinee

 

Rude Guests at the Divine Matinee

Rude Guests at the Divine Matinee

Rude Guests at the Divine Matinee has a subtitle: “Greed Exploitation and Perversion with Innocence Unsupervised”.  It was painted in 1999 following my frustration and observations in trying to improve school safety following the school shootings in the new, and the World Trade Organization incidents in Seattle where the media painted a very inaccurate picture.  The painting shows three characters (Greed, an ugly man with a cranial motem, Exploitation, a Camel with an eyepatch, and Perversion, an alligator in fishnet stockings.  They are cutting up a baked Alaska Earth Cake upon a cage table where helpless and rare animals are imprisoned. In the same room, where evidence of pollution and misuse of natural resources is apparent, three impish children watch a pornographic cartoon.  Separated from this indoor scene, one child looks out a window to see the natural world looking beautiful, faraway and vulnerable.  This painting speaks directly to overuse and misuse of our planet by big business and the wasteland created by excessive consumerism.  It was created as an illustrative reminder that we should appreciate the beauty and gifts of our planet and look closely at how excessive lifestyles are having a negative impact everywhere in the world.

The Tea, Pot and Toast Party of Southern Oregon

They say “politics make strange bedfellows” and this is definitely true in Southern Oregon! The Tea, Pot and Toast Party is where the far right and the far left meet the middle! It’s about time!

What do these groups all have in common? First off, they all need to eat! But while one group is hoisting tea and hope overboard, and another is clipping bud and awaiting society’s collapse, the middle class is sitting and pondering a plate of burnt toast.

Burnt Toast of a 76 year old Vet who sees on TV that Congress is about to remove every scrap of his income. Burnt Toast of the 27 year old artist who says he doesn’t pay much attention to anything. Burnt Toast of the 18 year old college freshman who reports “we’re all socialists anyway, we don’t care” and shows me his text book about Communism. Burnt Toast of the 35 year old single mother of two who just found out funding was pulled and she can’t complete her nursing degree. Burnt Toast of the former Realtor and multiple clients immobilized by foreclosure, depression and powerlessness. Burnt Toast of the sick woman can’t afford medical services. The hard, scorched crust of the restaurant owner who can’t sell enough pizza to pay his rent. Burnt Toast of the businessman who 
can’t find a loan to continue or expand. Burnt Toast of all who invested and saved and saw their hard earned money disappear in a financial meltdown orchestrated by Wall Street. There’s so much Burnt Toast around that we must consider it our “Daily Bread,” even with tea or pot to ease its going down!

The polarizing issues being advanced by the greedy few are just excuses and the means to get the right, left and middle to “eat toast and die”! Don’t fool yourself into thinking it matters if we “don’t ask, don’t tell”, whether we believe marijuana should be legal or not, whether you’re Code Pink, Green Man, Rainbow Coalition, a Knight of Zion or of some other stripe. These are our costumes, our banners, “gang colors” that the power elite have grasped onto and are now manipulating. Just as they divided and conquered people in the ghetto prior to Civil Rights, and even since, these are the ways they get average citizens from the right, the left and/or the middle to fight against each other, while they steal from all of us! Even those staid or well-heeled individuals sitting on fancy or shaky fences, don’t you know these elitist dogs will dig a hole and bury you like bones along with everything and everyone else they’ve taken off the table?

We must look beyond the polarizing issues to the true sources of solutions. Bringing to justice those who stole and went unpunished must be addressed for the “Re-set” this society and the world needs. We must restore morality, integrity and consequence in order to move ahead. Also we must recognize how our common ground of jobs, food, water and healthy use and distribution of resources should be our common cause, and not let side issues blind us from 95% of the agenda we share. This is supposed to be the Post racial, Post sexist, Post elitist, Post greed AGE. We are the Tea, Pot and Toast Party and we shall reclaim a sense of fair play and restore the American Dream, where those who work hard can gain a degree of safety from want. If we don’t undo this political polarity and protect our daily bread in common, we’ll all be Toast!