I greatly admire professional editorial writers, like the ones in the New York Times, the New Yorker, et al. Even the writers I usually don’t 100% agree with—David Brooks, Ross Douthat, et al, generally leave me me with fodder for thought and a less choleric attitude about the other side. My dad was a newspaper editor who had a gift for writing editorials. That gene eluded me.
Whenever I start to write an editorial either here or on social media, it quickly devolves into a snarky sermon/rant—and the less time it takes to traverse the space between impulse and keyboard, the more preachy I inevitably tend to be. I hate that. I usually delete those posts 5 minutes after making them live. You’re welcome.
So I leave the cogent, reflective, articulate editorials to the more skilled among us. I’ll reserve my editorializing for a medium to which I’m more well-suited temperamentally—making silly pictures on my computer, which is kind of the whole purpose behind this Foolish Fire blog I started years ago…to make mostly nonsense…some of it more serious.
For years I contributed to a website called Illustration Friday, which is a place for illustrators to post work on a specific topic each Friday and get critique and inspiration from other illustrators. For a variety of reasons, I stopped submitting, but I miss the regularity of it, the prescribed creative challenge of it.
So every Friday, starting today March 10, 2017, I’ll try to reenact that same ritual but make subversive political art instead of riffing on some random, abstract concept because it’s important that I do something more than sign MoveOn.org petitions and join the ACLU and because Fridays are favorite days for politicians to slide their most nefarious and objectionable deeds under the media radar, I will post my week’s worth of angst on this blog and possibly other social media, every Friday until our collective existential nightmare has ended.
It’s important to sign petitions, to march, post on Facebook (even if that’s 99% preaching to the converted) and maybe drawing pictures isn’t the most important thing we can do, I guess we’ll see, but it’s something tangible to me. And more fun.
So here’s my first submission. It’s called, “The Puppet Master Remastered”. See you next Friday where I promise…more picture, a lot fewer words.