Drink and Draw: Dayton - Potalitarianism 3: Don't Shred on Me

It is a well known fact that authoritarian propagandists are not terribly creative. You could argue a lot of reasons for this. The idea I support most is that the cycle of perpetual disempowerment and victimhood they found themselves in at an earlier point in their life made them feel it was necessary to distort external realities to protect themselves the point where they discard that all important ‘fragment of truth’, that thing that makes the work seem anchored in the shared experiences in a culture or subculture, that thing people always say good art has to have to be meaningful to others.

Lacking that core in their own work, the strategy of the propagandists is to co-opt messages, slogans, and symbols which have proven in the past to have significant meaning to the people of that time, like any modern marketing agency may do. Then they start rewriting those messages until they serve their own purposes.

In the case of some particular symbols of solidarity, like a yellow flag that represented the collective desire of towns and cities to resist oppression by a monarchic government that kept changing trade and tax rules on them and sending enforcers into their neighborhoods and homes to put people in harm's way, the new people feeling connected to that yellow flag can find themselves doing the same harm the symbol was created to oppose.

Most important to the propagandist though, is that people take them seriously, because they know their message has no substance, is not relevant to you. So if other people make the messages and stories that the propagandists are trying to tell too absurd to be taken seriously, that leaves them only with messages and acts of oppression to influence people, and that no one wants to put up with that.

So I am choosing to be a silly person. Few things are sillier than drawing still-lifes of potatoes, better yet, as potatoes as small, round animals, or in compromising poses, or replacing the head of xenomorphs and other things that are meant to scare you. If you wish to be silly as well, come out to Toxic Brewing Company and do it as a group.

I apologize for the rant. I have been distracted recently.