What Is There To Celebrate? - and - Will The Flowers Grow Again Some Day?

 

                                                  Will The Flowers Grow Again Some Day?

                                                  An original acrylic painting

 

 

     As the final hour and minutes of the year 2025 counted down in my city, celebratory gunfire

erupted, and it increased in volume and intensity as the midnight hour drew near.  No doubt

the revelers were being fueled by some of the traditional alcoholic drinks which are most often

served on the last night of the year.   The sporadic gunfire was expected to last for several 

hours or more.  But what is the point of the celebration?  Do they feel like they are killing off

some of the bad luck or evil spirits or demons which have troubled them during the past twelve

months, or is it just an opportunity for them to show off the heavy fire-power of their weapons? 

     In the meantime, in Ukraine, parents put their children to bed that night, not knowing 

whether they would all be killed in their beds, by a Russian drone crashing into their building.

 And there will be no bright-light sign of hope for changes in the world, on sunrise of the first 

day of the new year, because the same people will still be in charge of world events in the 

year 2026, who where there in 2025, trampling on human rights and creating death and

destruction around the globe.

     The majority of people in the world live in countries which are ruled by powerful 

autocracies, dictatorships or military regimes.  The people who are more fortunate, live in 

countries where democracy flourishes.  But democracies are fragile, and the autocrats are 

always trying to destroy them, in order to gain increasing power for themselves.  Vladimir 

Putin, the autocrat/dictator of Russia, is a notorious mass-murderer who does not allow

freedom of speech or any objections to his iron-fisted rule;  anyone who objects is killed.

But Putin wasn't satisfied with owning just Russia; his greed for power is unlimited.  He

decided that he wanted to own Ukraine as well.  So he invaded that fragile democracy

with the intention of annexing all that land into Russia.  It is estimated that one hundred 

an forty thousand Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the Russian invasion began,

and there have been over fifty three thousand civilian casualties with over fifteen thousand

 deaths, including women and children.  But Putin doesn't care how many Ukrainian people

he kills in his conquest, or how many young Russian men he sends to get killed, just to

satisfy his greed.

      The Ukrainians have put up a stubborn resistance to Putin's invasion, despite being

overwhelmingly outnumbered and lacking in the proper weapons to fight back and

recover lost territory.  They were doing better when our president Biden was supplying

them with an increased supply of weapons.  And they might even be able to win, if 

Donald Trump would do the right thing by applying strict sanctions on Russia and

giving Ukraine weapons which would match those that the Russians are using against 

them.  That is what should be done, but it is not, because Trump is also an autocrat.  It

doesn't occur to him that Ukraine is an innocent democracy being invaded by a ruthless

tyrant; he places blame for the fighting on both sides, because he places no value on 

democracy.  He tried to overthrow our own democracy by force, and he would have 

been convicted of that treasonous crime, if his endless court delays had not prevented 

that trial from happening.

      Trump wont take any proper action against his pal Putin, because they are like

two-birds-of-a-feather.  Trump admires Putin because he sees him as powerful.  He 

simply overlooks the bloody history of Putin and any other villainous dictators or 

kings who have enough wealth and power to impress him.  His idea of ending the

war, would simply be to give Ukraine to Putin, without letting the Ukrainian people 

have any say in there own future.  The idea that the fate of the Ukrainians may rest

 in the hands of someone like Trump, is a sad thought for everyone to ponder.

     In the meantime, while Putin continues to kill Ukrainians, Trump has been busily

trying to destroy our democracy from the inside.  He is working hard to try and 

eliminate the freedom of speech, while like all typical dictators or kings, he is putting 

his name and image on everything from federal buildings and monuments to coins.  

He's trying to eliminate our two-party political system by making it more difficult 

for Democrats to be elected, by gerrymandering some Democratic districts out of

existence, and also eliminating some voting rights.  To give comfort to his racist

base of support, he is busily trying to remove our founders declaration that all men 

are created equal.  So, now it has become easier for a new generation of Republicans

 to go around comparing major-league, black athletes to monkeys playing ball at the

zoo, and also saying how much they "love" Hitler and his idea or removing unwanted 

people from the nation.  To give comfort to his right-wing religious base, Trump is

continuing to support the elimination of a woman's right to chose her own best health

options, and also progressing in his efforts to eliminate equal rights for the LGBT 

community.  He is also trying to eliminate any progress we have made in our efforts

to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, which if left to increase, will make our 

planet uninhabitable for human beings.  He is more interested in personal profit

than he is in what will happen in the future.  

     So what does all this say about our education system, that we were so willing

to elect such a known, lying fraudster and convicted felon, to the highest office in

the country, simply because of his impossible promise that he would reduce the 

cost of living,on his first day in office?  How stupid have we become? 

     So, as I was saying, when I heard all of crazy gunfire starting, what do we have

to celebrate about the new year?

                                                         Eugene P. McNerney 

Killing The Messengers - and - Burning Man Number 4

        

                                                           Burning Man Four, original mixed media

                                                          8.5" X 11" , unframed    

                                

     Dictators, kings, emperors and autocrats do not like to be contradicted by anyone 

or have their decisions proved wrong.  Their minds are made up with inaccurate or 

incomplete factual knowledge and an excess of personal prejudices and hatreds, and

they do not allow anyone to question their intelligence or their ability to rule.  But of 

course, inevitably and sometimes even frequently, they do receive factual messages 

which often contain enough truth to make these egocentric men feel uneasy about 

maintaining their grip on power, or even angry enough to punish the individuals who 

simply delivered the true but unwelcome messages.    

     History is full of stories, going back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, about the

 messengers who were killed by the tyrants who received their messages, simply because

the tyrants didn't like to hear the bad-news truth which was delivered to them in the 

messages.

     Donald Trump is a fascist autocrat who continues his drive to destroy American

democracy, first by an armed insurrection and now by whittling away our constitutional

rights.  The latest part of our Bill Of Rights he is destroying is the freedom of speech.

Our founding fathers made the freedom of the press the first priority of our constitutional

rights.  But crooks like Trump, and Nixon before him, do their best to eliminate any news

source with journalists who tell the truth about the administration.  Nixon used to 

repeatedly tell his secretary of state, "The press is the enemy!", because the newspapers

were exposing his crimes.  Trump has de-funded Public Television, because its news

reporting was fair and balanced and a truthful examination of his administration.  And he

is laying outrageous lawsuits on the most truthful newspapers we have, in an attempt to

stop them from telling the American public the truth about his crimes.  And he is now 

directing his FCC chairman to try and revoke the broadcast licenses of the TV networks

which have late evening talk shows featuring comedians, who use comedy to reveal

Trumps  crimes and failures.  Trump doesn't like his ignorance to be exposed every night

 for the amusement and benefit of the American public. 

    Trump is also continuing to fire anyone in our government who tells the truth about

anything in contradiction to Trump's stupid decisions questioning the truth of science, 

and the scientists who advance our health care and protection of our daily lives.  

Perhaps the most crucial of these firings, as far as the future of our survival on this 

planet, is his firing of the scientists who were monitoring the ever increasing rise in the 

percentage of the poisoning, greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.  They were fired 

because they were telling the truth about the growing danger to the planet, and he can't 

stand the truth of the science and the factual information because it contradicts his 

ignorant declarations that global warming is a hoax.  I believe he also even plans to 

turn off the satellites which provide the actual, growing measurements of carbon in the 

atmosphere: he is killing the innocent messengers because they are delivering messages 

he doesn't want to hear.   

     The 2025 Burning Man Festival has just wrapped up on Labor Day.  As I have said

before in previous posts to this blog, I have never attended that festival, but the annual 

publicity which that name, Burning Man, brings to the public, is an important reminder 

that we could all end up as burning men, if we don't do something to drastically  reduce 

our use of carbon fuels.  And since Trump is doing everything he can to kill the sensible,

progressive climate legislation of the Biden administration, the fire is coming ever closer 

to all of us, every day.

 

                                                               Eugene P. McNerney    

 

                                                                     

A Republican Motto - and - The Parable Of The Good Samaritan, In Paintings By Rembrandt, Giordano, Moreau, Roosendael, Bodinier and Etty

                                                             Autore Luca Giordano

                                                       Gustave Moreau   1865

                                                          Nicolaes Roosendael   1665

                                                    Guillaume Bodinier    1826

                                    

                                                    William Etty

                                                     Rembrandt

     Since before the start of the Twentieth Century, the motto of the Republican 

Party has been, "The business of government is business!"  The unspoken half of that 

motto is, "People are expendable."  Republicans have exploited the natural resources

of the Earth without regard to the environmental harm they have done to the planet 

or the people who live on it.  For them it has always been profit before people.

     In recent weeks, the Trump administration has cut funding for vital research into 

finding cures for cancer, as well as further cuts for health and education services 

for the American people.  And now the Republican Congress is preparing to pass 

a bill which will ensure that new drastic cuts in healthcare will be put in place in order 

to provide more tax cuts for Trump and his billionaire supporters.  Trump is the 

personification of the philosophy which says that greed is good and empathy for 

others is a sign of weakness.  He thinks only of himself; he is as devoid of empathy

as a sociopath murderer. 

     Now is the time when we should be remembering the story of The Good Samaritan,

which has been handed down to us by the Gospel of St. Luke, in a book called The

Holy Bible.  That is a book which Trump claims to love, but he has never read it, and

he only sells copies of it for his personal profit.  But for the past five hundred years or

more, this story of the compassionate man who had empathy for a suffering stranger, 

has resonated strongly with artists, and many of them painted moving images of the

humanitarian who provided life-giving care for a fellow human being.  (A half dozen

of these paintings are shown above.)

     The story in the Saint Luke Gospel is the tale of a lone traveler who was attacked

on the road, by robbers who severely wounded him and stripped him of everything he

owned, including his clothes, and then left him for dead, lying bleeding by the side of

the road.  As the suffering man was lying there, cold and bloodied, two self-righteous

religious men passed him by without offering him any comfort or assistance.  The first

one was a priest and the second was a Levite but neither one stopped to help because 

it did not profit them to provide him with any aid.  But then the Good Samaritan came

along the road and he rescued the stranger, dressing his wounds and clothing him.  He 

then took the man to an inn, to be fed and cared for by the innkeeper until the man was 

recovered, and the Good Samaritan paid for the man's stay at the inn.

     The story was another of the parables intended to show the importance of always 

treating other people the way we would want them to treat us.  That is generally called

the golden rule.  Right now, a majority of our Republican Congress members who call

themselves Christians, do not see any profit for themselves in following the golden rule.

They proudly wear their little gold crosses and proclaim their true faith, while at the 

same time they they are voting to take away healthcare for millions of Americans and

close rural hospitals all across the country, just to make the super-rich even wealthier.

     Trump doesn't allow any Good Samaritans in the US Congress. 

                                                                                Eugene P. McNerney

Pope Trump - and - A Comparative Image By Francis Bacon

                                      Portrait of Donald Trump, As Pope Of The World's Catholics

                                             Photo Of One of Trump's Tantrums

                    Francis Bacon's  Study After Velazquez's Portrait Of Pope Innocent X

     Catholics around the world have been mourning the death of Pope Francis, and

celebrating the installation of Pope Leo XIV.  It seems difficult to believe that anyone 

who holds the highest political office of any powerful nation at this time, would

want to mock the head of this religion's membership of approximately one and a 

half billion people, but one president was just stupid enough to do it.

     Donald Trump was in attendance at the funeral services for Pope Francis, and after 

he returned to this country, an AI portrait of Donald Trump, dressed as the Pope, was 

released to the world.  Why would he chose to thumb his nose at the religious beliefs 

of so many people? This is just further proof that Trump's gargantuan ego far outweighs 

his very minuscule intelligence quotient.  When he was asked about the portrait, he 

pretended to know nothing about it, but I have not heard him issue any kind of statement  

denouncing this image as the disgusting mockery of a religious faith that it is.  He sees

this image as no different than his other portraits, dressed as comic book heroes, which 

he prints and sells on his worthless trading cards.

     In the early 1950's, a British artist by the name of Francis Bacon, who became known 

for painting twisted and distorted images of human figures and faces, painted a series of 

paintings based on Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.  The paintings became 

known as his "Screaming Popes" series.  Bacon claimed that the paintings were simply

his reaction to the colors in the Velazquez work; art critics praised the work for capturing

"raw emotion" in paint.  If Bacon were still alive today, he would have a ready made 

model for a raw emotion screamer in Donald Trump.  The photo of Trump caught

having one of his tantrum screams, is an almost perfect match for that of the Screaming

Pope painting, and it is a much more honest image of Trump, than that of a saintly and

revered leader of a religious faith.  

     I don't know how the Catholics are feeling now, about such a repulsive image as 

that of "Pope Trump". but I should think that it is stirring up plenty of "raw emotion"

for many of them.  

                                                                   Eugene P. McNerney 

  

The MAGA Cult's Gifts to America - and - Goya's Vision

 

                                                   Francisco Goya, one of his "Dark" paintings

                                                   Wall mural from residence                                       

     The report on the first quarter of the year is in, and the Trump administration has taken

our economy into a nose dive; the economy has stopped growing and is now shrinking.

Economists are saying that if the second quarter is as bad as the first, the country will be 

in a recession.  Under the Biden administration, our economy was showing renewed 

growth and was the envy of the world; but now Donald Trump, the leader of the MAGA 

cult, and his totally inept cabinet are destroying all of the policies which were truly making 

America great again, while at the same time they are removing the personal protections 

for our health and welfare.  Trump's cabinet members were not chosen because of 

extraordinary training or experience or ability; they were chosen simply because of 

their lap-dog loyalty to Trump.  His cabinet meetings are nothing but an opportunity 

for each of these sycophant toadies to worship Trump with love and lavish praises.

     Goya's darkly satirical view of cults, as seen in the wall mural above, clearly shows

his low opinion of the intelligence of the human race, and our willingness to worship at 

the feet of whatever false profit comes along with an empty promise to cure all of our 

problems.

     We should all remember that cult leaders are just con-artists, selling another brand 

of snake oil.  Cults have been with us since the beginnings of civilization; they can be 

religious or political or a combination of both.  Political cult leaders often rely on 

portraying themselves as being like a savior: the only person in the world who has the 

ability to give his followers all that they need or desire.  Popular cult leaders such as 

Trump, often speak to their followers for hours without ever saying anything sensible 

or even logical, but filled with repeated doses of hatred and lies about those "others" 

who are the cause of all of the country's problems.  He promotes xenophobia and

homophobia and any other kind of racist phobia which amplifys the fears of

the MAGA followers.  Hitler did the same thing at his rallies, blaming his countries 

financial and social problems on the "wrong" kind of people, who he said were 

poisoning society.  Nazism and Magaism are two sides of one coin.  

     We should all be familiar with the great cataclysm of World War Two, which

resulted when Hitler gained complete control of his country, and caused the deaths 

of many millions, and massive destruction around the globe.  Then in the end, 

when he was faced with giving up control of the lives of millions of people, he 

blamed his losses on his countrymen and shot himself.  That is a familiar pattern 

with cult leaders.  When Jim Jones was faced with the prospect of giving up 

control of  the followers in his Peoples Temple, he had them all drink poisoned 

Cool Aid, and shot himself.   And when David Karesh was being forced to 

give up control of his followers, in the Branch Davidian cult compound, he 

shot and burned them to death, and killed himself.

     Like Hitler, Trump has no interest in public service, he is a fascist who only 

wanted the presidency for self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement.  Now we hear 

that he is planning for a military parade for his birthday, which will cost the tax-payers 

about a hundred million dollars.  Perhaps he is jealous of the Chinese premier, who 

gets to celebrate his power by reviewing military parades with thousands  of troops, 

tanks, missiles and rockets, rolling past him in the grand public square in Beijing.   

     It should have been obvious to any rationally thinking person, that the fascist 

Trump was lying when he promised to reduce the price of groceries and reduce 

inflation as soon as he was elected president.  It should have been equally obvious

that he was lying when he said that he would end Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 

day one of his presidency.   It should be obvious to everyone by now, that 

everything Trump says is a lie and he is incapable of telling the truth about anything.

And yet his cult of followers voted for him because they think those "other" kinds

of people are getting too big of a slice of the American pie.  It will be interesting 

to see how many of the MAGA followers begin to realize that Trump is not

working for them, when they begin to see ever higher prices on everything they

buy, and rows of empty shelves when they go shopping. 

     So what has the MAGA cult given us?  Our government which was designed 

to serve for the good of the people, is now being chopped off piece by piece, 

until it serves only Donald Trump and his billionaire pals.  What a gift!

                                                         Eugene P. McNerney

A Hope For Spring

 

                                                Hibiscus blossom, with original ballerina painting  

     The weather during January, here in the center of our country's forty eight, contiguous 

states, has been colder than in the city of Anchorage Alaska.  But here in our snowy, 

deep freeze, I sometimes get little reminders of Percy B. Shelley's famous line, "If winter

comes, can spring be far behind?"

     There is a hibiscus tree here, which was started from a cutting brought back from 

Arizona, over half a century ago.  It is in a large pot, and is heavier than a person of my 

age should be carrying around, but last fall, I dutifully brought it back inside for the winter 

again.  It doesn't receive proper sun-light in the house, but it still offers up it's little, 

cheerful flowers. Hibiscus blossoms are a bit like the ballerinas of the flower world, with 

the delicate pleats of the petals, and also, their one-day life-span, is a reminder of 

the relatively short careers of most ballerinas.

    The colors of the blossoms of this hibiscus variety reminded  me of a little painting 

of mine, called Topaz Ballerina, so I set one in front of the painting, a took the picture

for this blog posting.      

     The older we grow, the more rapidly the seasons come and go, often before we

we are able to take full advantage of the opportunities of the warm months.  But

some little blossoms in the winter are a reminder that hope still springs eternal.

                                                              Eugene P. McNerney

Climate Clataclysm - and - Burning Man 3

                                                          Burning Man 3,  original mixed media

                                                         10" X  8", unframed

 

     Los Angeles has been burning for days now.  Eighty thousand people have been 

required to evacuate from their homes.  Entire sections of the city have been reduced

to ashes, including schools, churches, grocery stores, pharmacies, service stations,

and all business related buildings, along with over twelve thousand houses.  The home

owners who escaped the fast moving fires, often fled with nothing more than the clothes

on their backs.  Those who were not able to escape in time, perished in the flames!

     In this blog, on August thirty first, and again on November twenty fourth of last year, 

I spoke about the looming peril of the climate crisis, for all of humanity, and I speculated

on our almost suicidal denial of what is coming for us.  We continue to buy gas guzzling

vehicles and continue to burn coal in our power plants.  But the most disturbing, of all of  

the offenders, are the people who have the power to make significant changes, but prefer 

to put profit ahead of what is best for our country and for the world. 

     The Biden administration made significant efforts in moving us toward renewable 

energy and electronic vehicles, but those efforts my well be erased by the greedy 

motivations of the expected Trump disasters.  President Biden removed much or our

nation's coastline from environmentally hazardous, off-shore oil drilling, but Trump has

already vowed to let big oil exploit those and other areas as much as they want, all

in the name of profit, and in continuing denial of global warming.  It's going to be

business as usual forTrump: drill baby drill, and burn baby burn!  

     We are all familiar with the way Trump handles national climate disasters.  Who 

can forget the images of him opening a carton of paper towels, and tossing a few rolls

to a crowed of hurricane victims, and then later on he withheld their hurricane relief

funds, which were approved by congress!

   After this new disaster in Los Angeles, the question now again is, are we going to

be able to fight the profiteers and save our planet, or are we all going to end up 

walking into the final fires.

                                                Eugene P. McNerney