Goblin Vision Board

Goblin Week day 5, by Jaydot Sloane, “Goblin Vision Board”

The purpose of propaganda is not to convince you of its “truth,” it’s to exhaust you into being unable to imagine things any other way. To put up a poster declaring our leader to be a Great Leader does not convince you he is, in fact, a great leader, but will force you down a path where your head is full of only him and all the ways he is a terrible leader, and leave you feeling helpless and hopeless because you cannot imagine what could be in his place.

So long as we are exhausted, we cannot fight back, and people are rarely as energized by the idea of “anything but THAT” as they are by seeing what things COULD be. Give people something to work FOR, not just something to work against. I think the fascists in charge know this (perhaps not in a smart, fifth dimensional chess kind of way, but definitely in a gut instinct on how to keep a motherfucker down kind of way). Campaigns against a set of ideals never work half as well as campaigns that are for something, and if you are spending all your time exhausting yourself trying to fight against something you will never have the energy to build something better.

All of this being high justification for drawing a goblin farting in a bowl of cheerios. Making art, even bad, weird art (or perhaps especially bad and weird art) is the act of imagining the world as it could be. Showing people that they aren’t stuck with whatever horrible politician that’s trying to ruin everything. That they could, in fact, live in a better world where they have their needs met. Am I saying farting in a politicians cheerios is in the hierarchy of needs?

Yes. At least it is mine. And I know this now, because I drew it yesterday.

I have so many things I would like to do with my time on earth. Last week I imagined getting to build and run a community kitchen once I’m done re-building abandoned houses into affordable housing. There are going to be many challenges and hurdles to ever accomplish such a thing, but it’s now my dream, and if the point of fascism is to take my ability to dream better things away from me, then I’m just gonna double down and dream even bigger.