Think Draw - Picture - going . . . going . . .

Title: going . . . going . . .
created on 18 Sep 18

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Comments on this picture (56):
1. hjjr wrote: you still astonish
2. hjjr wrote: this is so beautiful
3. hjjr wrote: instead of 'still' i should say 'always', and 'beautiful' just seems lame as a way to comment on your exquisite portraits. makes one want to howell!
4. katidid wrote: Gonna have to try this technique! Very nice!
5. chelydra wrote: Thanks all. This one has a long, long backstory, going back to a New Yorker article about the Australian labor unions' Green Bans circa 1973. This guy was PM at the time, and he not only supported labor and eco-causes, he also pulled Australia out of Viet
6. chelydra wrote: Nam. He was deposed by Queen Eliz II of all people, perhaps with CIA instigation, and the aussie people even now are not allowed to know why or how their elected leader was kicked out of office. His name was Geogh (as in "Jeff") Whitlam.
7. chelydra wrote: The Green Bans dude was Jack Mundey (still alive & still green-banning a bit in his spare time) but he too was deposed (from union leadership) in a coup that is probably still a bit of a mystery.
8. chelydra wrote: Jack Mundey attended a global commie convention where he called for "a new kind of communism with an ecological heart" which sounded good to me...
9. chelydra wrote: and just now in looking for the exact quote (from the mid-1970s), I found this insteadâ€”https://ro.uow.edu.au /cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https:/ /www.google.com.au/&httpsredir=1 &article=1784&context=alr
10. chelydra wrote: anyway, the other commies didn't much care for Mundey's hard-hat union tough guys hobnobbing with gentle cultivated ladies from the nicer neighbourhoods of Sydney and forming coalitions to save old places and natural coastlines ...
11. chelydra wrote: So in the Great Reaction that accompanied the deposing of not only Geogh Whitlam and Jack Mundey but also every viable leader who was not a reliable puppet of the globalist establishment (from Nasser to Allende and even Nixon whose economic nationalism wa
12. chelydra wrote: nationalism was a threat to the financial elite's agenda)... (I forgot to mention Sukarno, Nkrumah, and many others, all replaced by puppets or by chaos)... anyway... where were we?
13. chelydra wrote: Does anyone else remember the Jehovah's Witnesses coming to their door to say the world is going to end in 1975? Am I the only man (or woman) alive who not only remembers, but knows for sure they were right?
14. chelydra wrote: I'm getting old and forgot to finish the sentence I started at Comment #11... My portrait here of the late G. Whitlam at 90 or so is sort of an indirect (subjective, inner) self-portrait of me at 70 ... where were we? did we ever find out and forget alrea
15. chelydra wrote: ...already, if we did? Anyway, I spent the rest of the 1970s and most of the rest of my life trying to fathom where we went wrong, and how we let the bad guys get away with it... The Great Reaction keeps metastasizing, changing and spreading... The simpl
16. chelydra wrote: ... The simple notion of organizing a planet where people manage to get along okay with nature and each other seems more and more elusive and illusory with every passing year...
17. chelydra wrote: And I saw all of that in this image of Geogh Whitlam in old age. (An author named Jenny Hocking just lost a lawsuit to get docs released from govt archives in the UK & Australia; some judge basically just told her to get lost, it's private personal corr
18. chelydra wrote: ... correspondence betwixt the Queen and her Governor-General, so it's none of your business why a supposedly democratically-elected Prime Minister got yanked out and replaced from above)...
19. chelydra wrote: ...which seems a perfect summation, condensation, archetype, epitome, whatever of the whole business, the global trends of the past 50 years r more... Our lifetimes... which are now drawing to a close...
20. chelydra wrote: Once we were full of ourselves, robust, charging ahead, knowing the solutions were at hand and if he kept our will strong and out minds sharp and our hearts in the right place, we'd get where we were going, and take the world with us...
21. chelydra wrote: (he>we, out>our) sorry for these and many other typos but who has time to fix typos when the planet has barely a generation left before the Great Reaction segues into the Great Extinction? where were we? Let's see, oh yeah...
22. chelydra wrote: Bubbles... we'e turned into bubbles... and if we still have (or ever did have) will, minds, hearts, where is the evidence? Glimmering and shimmering... floating... adrift... going... going...
23. chelydra wrote: I had already started work on a picture of Whitlam for a coming exhibit (at the humble cozy venue where I teach my Serious Cartoons course to anyone who shows up, and lately it's a very special occasion when anyone does) when I realized Whitlam was lookin
24. chelydra wrote: ... looking quite bubbly in his dotage... but not in the giggly upbeat sense, more like transparent, wobbly, thin-skinned, unstable,not long for this world.
25. chelydra wrote: But before you dismiss all this as just another echo of the traditional lamentations of every generation as it fades from middle age to old age and beyond... think about this...
26. chelydra wrote: This generation is different... not because we were boomers from the huge influx of babies post-WW2... not because we were acidheads, peaceniks or would-be revolutionaries preaching love and tossing bombs...
27. chelydra wrote: ... not because our trajectory from youthful optimistic delusions to mature reactionary mediocrity (two Clintons, Al Gore, GW Bush, and now the Donald, all my age!) has been even more spectacular and pathetic than most generations experience
28. chelydra wrote: ... but because this time the planet really was counting on usâ€”the sand in the hourglass, yielding to gravity. carving a wider and wider bore, accelerating its emptying out into the next world or into nothingness...
29. chelydra wrote: ...and we really did have all the numbers, the prosperity, the information, and the ideas we needed to turn things around, and make it right...like no other generation ever had or ever will...
30. chelydra wrote: ... the problem wasn't that we were too relaxed, too good-humored, too determined to hang out and enjoy life and turn everything into a joke â€” those were not our weaknesses but our greatest strengths...
31. chelydra wrote: What was the problem then? Was it Neptune in Libra? That always produces a bumper crop of flower children who blossom and fade and bear little fruit). Well, maybe. Sometimes I think so. When I looked over the previous crops of Libran flower children (e.g.
32. chelydra wrote: (e.g. 1783-1795) 51 years ago, I saw this coming. But it's not just Neptune-cycles, because people born before 1943 and after 1956 haven't saved the world either.
33. chelydra wrote: Jack Mundey and Geogh Whitlam, for instance, were born in 1916 and 1929... The easy-going Barack Obama was 1962 vintage. So this isn't about a particular age-group, more about everyone who's been alive and capable and presumably willing to make good stuff
34. chelydra wrote: ...happen during the past half-century or so, but didn't pull it off... just got outmaneuvered and undermined and deposed (or else seduced) by the Great Reaction. And is now drifting passively into neverneverland pop pop pop pop pop
35. chelydra wrote: And the hourglass itself, too... The Earth enclosed in its atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere, shimmering and shimmying through black space, drinking in sunlight...
36. chelydra wrote: ...The World trapped inside its global economy, global trade, global finances, global legal systems and military forces, enough H-bombs stockpiles to end it all many times over...
37. chelydra wrote: ...in a thermonuclear fission-fusion firestorm a bright and hot as the sun itself... but even if peace prevails, more or less, the other doom trends keep accelerating as never before...
38. chelydra wrote: ...and so no matter how we define ourselves... as individual personalities who are supposed to live threescore years and ten... or as a collective identity of human culture that;was supposed to keep going for many generations, or as a planet that was supp
39. chelydra wrote: ...supposed to live and evolve for another 3-5 billion years... we are turning into bubbles ... going ... going ... as one hourglass chamber sucks the life out of the other, and the world grows fast and furious, fueled by the stolen earth...
40. chelydra wrote: we go pop pop earth goes, world goes, we all go, not just the weasels but you me and the worms in the good black ground and the fishes in the deep blue sea...
41. chelydra wrote: Which is exactly what the Green Bans were starting to challenge... a workers' movement fighting to save a living planet... demanding economic justice, preferring prosperity to poverty, but seeing no reason to kill off the planet underfoot. "Stand up for w
42. chelydra wrote: "Stand up for what you're standing on!" as Earth First! signs used to say. Were they demanding to have it all, gimme gimme â€” cute fuzzy wild animals hopping around freely as well as nice fat paychecks? But if the world's billionaires and multimilli
43. chelydra wrote: ...â€”es were content to live as mere millionaires, ecology and economics could get along just fine; the 1% of the 1% has appropriated the funds (from us and from nature) we need to make the planet work well enough...
44. chelydra wrote: ...It's not just inequality of course; there's also land-use patterns, too much bad wasteful technology, too little good efficient technology, mass miseducation producing artificial morons, but nothing we couldn't solve...if we were will to be smart and s
45. chelydra wrote: ... and strong and do it... as Geogh Whitlam was doing, along with Jack Mundey and many others... Whitlam was one of the few few heads of state anywhere ever who really was determined to do what was neededâ€”not perfectly of course, but it could've b
46. chelydra wrote: ... good enough, and could've been a big step in the right direction. Instead his removal from office (for reasons we still are not allowed to know) was a particularly egregious and ugly step in the wrong direction...
47. chelydra wrote: And before this rambles repetitiously into oblivion (pop) we'd better have a moral of the story... Put not thy faith in bubbles...
48. chelydra wrote: and if even an elected national leader has no power over the global elite string-pullers (who won't even let us find out their secret reasons for pulling the plug)... then I fear we must regard free elections and democratic government as a bubble the pupp
49. chelydra wrote: ...puppetmasters have decisively popped, over and over, in country after country (Australia, Haiti, Guatemala, Iran, the USA definitely in 1876 and arguably also 1974 and 2000) ... If we cannot defend democratic institutions from the puppetmasters, we are
50. chelydra wrote: ...all in a bubble... and because democratic decision-making is what puppetmasters (left and right and center) fear most, letting them get away with popping our belief in our own power is perhaps the most unforgivable sin of all...
51. chelydra wrote: PS: The reason the story begins with the New Yorker article is that it was where I first learned that there were other people thinking like I was and acting on those thoughts a lot more effectively (than I'd managed to.
52. chelydra wrote: ...and seeing those thoughts drifting away like bubbles (pop pop pop without a sound or a visible trace) is not so easy... or maybe it's too easy...
53. AFSOUTH wrote: Brilliantly done!
54. swimer wrote: This is great,and it is also cool!
55. mum23 wrote: Remarkable portrait,as always. The eye is so convincingly 'old'... amazing how you do it. (BTW it's Gough, and rhymes with 'cough')
56. clorophilla wrote: Thank for your piece of knowledge, how much has been conceived from us (or just not talked about). A well deserved homage