Political Art

I have wrestled with my art ever since I was thirteen. That is the age of self awareness. The timeframe when your peers judge you on new, unclear criteria. The moment in life when you begin to judge yourself with an adult's metrics, but without the understanding of those metrics.

Am I good enough? Is my art any good? Why is their work so much better than mine? Why is this so hard? What is broken in me?

Those are a lot of shitty questions to ask yourself. There is no way around that. They swirl around me like ghosts. They rattle chains and whisper in my ear. As I got older, I learned to ignore them. Most of the time.

These days they mostly just look over my shoulder and make inarticulate noises of disappointment. But back then they were always eating at me. Their voices were loud and insistent.

Two years later, wrapped in my haunts, I turned fifteen and I got two gifts. My best friend bought me Mao's Little Red Book. My brother got me The Communist Manifesto. They thought they were funny.

Turns out that these joke gifts had unintended consequences. Back then, my best friend was a libertarian. My brother still leans that way. I was clearly going in another direction, so they thought it would be funny.

You got to remember, communism was still big E evil back then. We were, as my grandmother used to call it, Kennedy Democrats. So you hate communism and try to pretend the things you fight for isn't a form of socialism, because again, big E evil.

We carried a lot of illusions with us then. Many of us still do...