Statement of the Artist: James O’Donnell III
If one has spent decades obsessively following politics, economic trends, cultural shifts, and global war, as this artist has, one ends up witnessing an infinite galaxy of plundering Orwellian swine murderously choking The Green, Gaea, Liberty, the Future, the Life, out of our planet… gobbling up the biosphere.
In painting this piece — mindful of James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, James Baldwin’s writing/activism, David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ acclaimed essays — it occurred to me that if we were honest about our country’s historical and spiritual essence, we wouldn’t have a Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, but a Ku Klux Klan Memorial, acknowledging our nation’s white-supremacist, Christian Dominionist heritage and dark soul. (In this painting, that “KKK Memorial” is depicted sunk to the bottom of the ocean, decaying, as befits such a monument.)
This painting bears witness to what its author has painstakingly observed over decades: that the absence of progressive/liberal institutions in a period marked by rising oligarchy and inequality — under a brutal, corporatist establishment (serially racist, endlessly warmongering, bankster-abetting, and democracy-subverting) — has contributed mightily to the rise of modern FASCISM.
The moral and intellectual collapse of the institutional left hasn’t merely given us the Bush/Cheney regime, Donald Trump, Theresa May (U.K.), the Le Pens (France), Netanyahu (Israel), Modi (India), bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Bolsonaro (Brazil), El-Sisi (Egypt), Macron (France), et al. — and brought us to the precipice of World War III on a barrage of neo-McCarthyite hysteria — the dismal duopoly has also given us melting glaciers, acidifying oceans, Colony Collapse Disorder, and CO2 levels that no credible scientist considers sustainable. It has ushered in Earth’s Sixth Mass-Extinction event, putting millions of species at risk.
It’s likely that the despotic, frack-happy duopoly has given our civilization and world a terminal prognosis, with little chance of survival for any of us in the long run, let alone the millions of people currently in our empire’s crosshairs (Russians, Koreans, Syrians, Venezuelans, Iranians, Yemenis, Somalis, etc.).
These “PIGS” — today’s fascists — are DEVOURING OUR WORLD.
(A child could see it. Millennials, who are not children, see it clearly: “Ecology 101” is for the woke.)
Last chance to save the planet, people. No more dawdling. Our final exam is today.