What would George W. F. Hegel make of the puppy paintings of George W. Bush?
After the hack of a few weeks back, the weekend's news revealed an interview with the lady who got tapped to come to an undisclosed secure location and teach W how to more properly participate in our surreal age by slowly releasing images directly from the infantile, wounded segments of his brain.
These images arrive almost exactly a decade since U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad and found the chainmail bikini fantasy art of Rowena Morrill and others decorating the bachelor pads of Saddam Hussein.
Is it too much to imagine a reality in which a platoon of Force Recon Marines dig their way through the post-Shock and Awe rubble into the underground bunker and find Saddam's love nest decorated with nude shower self-portraits of W.?
Saddam, of course, wrote genre novels.
[Pic: Cover of Zabibah and the King, an 8th century romance novel by Saddam Hussein.]
Perhaps, with the hour that disappeared overnight, we lost an alternate time stream in which W., Hitler, Saddam, and other world historical figures who wreaked substantial havoc on the planet in the past century lived out their lives as artists rather than rulers. The threads of the sweater holding together your reality pull much more easily than you think. That's why Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un are laughing at you.
Do we have the courage to really examine how our popular culture shapes the frequently defective personalities of the people who govern our world? How much distance is there, really, between the outsider Magritte shower stall self-examinations of W., and the clown paintings of John Wayne Gacy?
[Pic: Georg W. F. Hegel watching how things are playing out at the nexus of art, culture, geopolitics and personality, 300 years later.]
[Extra credit: Some premonitions from 2003.]
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