Beast

Beast

I don’t want to remember Jamal Khashoggi this way, a giant brown recluse electricuting his innocent face, a Saudi Arabian sword at his neck, but it was all I saw for months after his murder. It symbolized everything the Trump administration stood for – corruption at the highest level for financial gain, retaliation, and satisfaction of ego. It demonstrated that allies of the United States know they can get away with murder because Trump’s international leadership has no moral backbone. His murder was ordered and carried out because accountability at the highest levels of office is nonexistent. Leaders can go rogue with impunity and they know it.

Our government responded to his murder by agreeing to stay in a financial relationship with Saudi Arabia, whose leader ordered the murder. Turkey, where the murder took place, criticizes our silence, but they are known for the systematic use torture and imprisonment of people who speak against the government. Their hands are dirty too. This portrait holds all three countries responsible. The red stripes reference the flag of the United States, as does the star, positioned in relationship to the moon from the Turkish flag. The sword comes from the Saudi Arabian flag. As for the brown recluse – the most deadly and feared spider in all three countries. Along the bottom is Khashoggi’s last editorial, printed post-mortum. His editor Karen Attiah notes, “his column perfectly captures his commitment and passion for freedom in the Arab world. A freedom he apparently gave his life for.”

In a private email, Khashoggi called the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia a beast. He couldn’t have been more right – but Khashoggi underestimated the reach of the Crown Prince. Hiring an entire hit team including a body double who walked out of the Saudi consulate pretending to be Khashoggi, the Crown Prince is responsible for silencing one of his most vocal critics – via death by dismemberment, with a bone saw, chemicals to coagulate his blood to reduce the mess, and loud music to make the process more bearable for the witnesses. His body has yet to be recovered – one theory is that it was burned in an underground oven while the Prince held a massage bbq on the property to disguise the smell.

Buried deep in the etymology of the words beast and corruption, I bet there is some overlap.

For sure only a beast could do this, but it’s corruption that killed Khashoggi, corruption approved of by the leaders of my own country, among others.

Beasts. All of them.

2020

2020

I started this early in 2020, back before things became 2020’s new version of intense, and then paused. Inexplicably, I couldn’t understand the piece anymore, and therefore couldn’t work on it. I felt like the piece had a life of its own and abandoned me.
I knew I had at one point wanted to create an image that represented the communication between the brain and the heart, and my fascination with the electrical current that runs through the brain. But while my own brain short circuited under the pressures of 2020, that connection went dead, and so did my ability to create an image of it. It sat in my garage, untouched, for over 6 months.

At the end of 2020, I started being drawn back to it, and in December, I finally added the electrical current connecting the brain and the heart. It kinda (totally) felt more than just symbolic that I could work on this piece again. I was thinking straight again.

I’m not going to remember 2020 as the sh*t-storm that it felt like it was for most of the year. I’m going to remember it as the year we gained another grandkid, I became a runner again, and Eric’s mom survived heart surgery. I’m going to remember it as the year we beat a tyrant, protested the heck out of systemic racism (and made some massive progress) (but we aren’t done), and the country learned to cook sourdough (I didn’t). It’s the year I made a ton of friends, ran a half marathon (and got my first black eye in the process), camped a bunch, and proved that love multiplies faster than hate when dealing with the small but strong contingent of racists in Petaluma (and the hundreds who have stood up against them). And, it’s the year I patched up the connection between my brain and my heart. Not all bad.

If I were to do it again, I would add a stomach, and some lungs too. Our breath and our gut, connected to our brain and our heart… and then I’d figure out something to represent our spiritual selves too. But meh, that’s enough deep thoughts for now.