THE Grand Wizard – 2025
Oil on canvas H80 x W62 cm
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
(George Santayana – The Life of Reason. 1905)
“Although tyranny…may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” – Hannah Arendt
As we come to the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century we are experiencing a paradoxical deja vous. In the most technologically advanced country, at perhaps the zenith of its standing as the empire which succeeded the downfall of the British after 1945, a pathological liar, a convicted felon, a racist, a misogynist bully, a real estate two-bit grifter and mob boss has taken the reins of power in the USA for a second term of office.
“… the Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity.”
He has unleashed an immediate grab for totalitarian power on every conceivable front. He is indisputably a wannabe king in a Democracy that was created specifically to avoid the unfettered dictatorship of a monarch. He operates by decree.
As Commander-in-Chief with personal control of the USA’s nuclear arsenal he represents the most dire threat to the World’s already vulnerable equilibrium.
Drawing inspiration directly from the Totalitarian textbook, it is of great instructional value to defer to Hannah Arendt’s seminal book The Origins of Totalitarianism on the subject and I unapologetically quote liberally from her in this descriptor.
As a cult leader/guru/messiah he has surrounded himself with underqualified sycophantic enablers and influencers, whose essential and only valued quality is loyalty to him personally.
On the hustings he vowed to drain the (perceived corrupt) swamp in Washington. He has succeeded in this endeavor – but then filled it to the brim with pus!
“The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.”
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.”
On the maltreatment of people of colour: “Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”
And the net result is that “Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.”
Furthermore, “The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
“And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.”
This is the warning that Hannah Arendt so accurately pinpointed and it happening now in plain sight in the United States of America.
My work is based on the artist Zurbaran’s suite of Veil of Veronica paintings wherein the true Image is embedded in the fabric. This antonym for veronica is painted deploying a trompe l’ oeil (no pun intended) technique. I have appropriated his much-vaunted State of Georgia’s Fulton County Police mug shot for my portrait. This was after all, an individual indicted on multiple treasonous charges until he was granted immunity in his new role as President.
In homage to his orange make-up and hair colouring I have loosely but distinctly brushed his visage in bright orange.
In this case the apple never falls far from the tree. The Grand Wizard takes his racist cue from his father who was involved in KKK activities in the 1920’s. This is alluded to in the cut-out eye holes of the drapery and the indication of a hood – formed at the apex.
A cruel despicable, mendacious man, a tyrant with no empathy. His rule will be marked by unnecessary suffering and death – but will end in snot and trane (tears). As an individual he is best summed-up by the colloquial Afrikaans term – gatbek’. (arsemouth)
