The Kamala that Broke the Strawman's Back

The Brilliant Circumstance of the Current Moment

I was watching Stephen Colbert and enjoyed this set of clips about plastic straws as a argument against Kamala Harris as the new presidential candidate showing how flat footed the Republican MAGA/TRUMP gang has been caught with this amazing shift in the presidential race. They don’t seem to have considered that Biden would drop out of the race. But now that he has and how seamlessly Kamala Harris has taken up the baton and how her candidacy has been embraced by the democratic party and the base, it is a whole new world of possibilities.

When you think about it, the fact that Biden dropped out after the Republican convention and that there is still plenty of time between now and the Democratic convention, it seems like absolutely perfect timing for Harris to build a pretty shiny and fairly bulletproof campaign with only three months till the election. I personally really like the Prosecutor and the Convict angle.

There will be all kinds of trash slinging but, considering that I think we can all see what we get with Trump, most will ignore this slinging and be able to stay focused enough for three months to pull off a strong victory for Harris.

I think the shift to the younger generation will play a huge part in putting Harris over the top, possibly by a big margin. While it has been tough to not be a white male as a presidential candidate, the circumstances seem to be adding up to a perfect storm for Harris to be fully embraced as the majority candidate of choice.

I am an artist of course so, as artists, we are in general a very small minority group in terms of how we think about and look at the world so I am certainly no reliable source for understanding how people think whose main interest in life is to aspire to be average.

I like to keep up with the general political/cultural scuttlebutt on podcasts on a daily basis while I am working in the studio just to feel the weather in the country. As artists we can be pretty isolated. But I don’t like the idea of having things sneak up on me either.

I have been apolitical most of my life. However, since Sept 11, 2001 while at my Exhibition is Fort Worth, Texas and the twin towers falling and the borders closing (we lived in Mexico then and couldn’t go back home for a couple of weeks) I decided that I needed to keep up with stuff.

Politics always have seemed boring and tedious to me, endless bickering and busywork. If you ask me it should stay that way especially the boring part. However we have been living in consequential times when big things are happening or I am just paying more attention. I am not sure which.

I am an independent since no party represents my views and probably more of an anarchist when it comes down to it. I want to keep it that way but it does depend on a certain amount of general stability. When things become unstable or authoritarian that is an inconvenience for artists to be able to go about their business making art and dreaming about how the world could be. That is our job, proposing the kind of future that we are willing to live in.

Anyway, it is election season so I might have to write a little something now and then over the next few months. It is my sense of civic duty. I hope you will forgive that but I will try to keep it in the context of artists since that is all I know anyway.

and by the way…