The Cloud of Unreason

Billions of Viruses...(The Onion)

To our minds, the Onion's sublime digitally altered  photograph and painfully hilarious headline,"Billions Of Viruses Gathered Outside Michigan State Capitol Call For End To Social Distancing Measures"  (4.17.20) is a not insignificant work of art. Over the Michigan State Capitol building grounds, where thousands of rightists (some bearing Confederate flags, MAGA hats, and automatic weapons) recently gathered to demand an end to Governor Gretchen Whitmer's stay at home restrictions, an orange cloud floats, bearing some of the the protest signs.
The cloud's orange color is presumably a cheeky reference to the hairpiece and face makeup of President Trump, who has been fomenting these protests by his base across the nation. There may also be a nod to Agent Orange, and the billowing clouds of poison gas dimly remembered from the Great War.  Most pointedly, the blob evokes the mindlessness of the crowd, who have signed on to the current proliferating death cult, apparently willing to follow their dear leader off the precipice into the abyss, all in the name of freedom (among other things, presumably, freedom from science, reason, and expertise.)  The gathered bodies, ignoring social distancing measures, were almost surely hosts for the SARS-CoV-2, and in that sense the picture and headline are an entirely accurate rendition of what happened on the Capitol grounds, as the viral miasma drifts off in search of more hosts in which to replicate and proliferate within the vulnerable bodies of its next victims

Paris 9:30 pm on 11 Aprl: JR

Time Magazine reports on how the artist known as JR was commissioned to create an art work for the recent Covid-19 issue of the magazine.  Titled, "Paris  at 9:30 pm on April 11," the work is a photograph taken from an upper apartment window in the 19th Arrondissement. We look down at a painting created on street asphalt by the artist, on a nearly deserted street (only a masked young woman, perhaps a medical worker, walks by). A zebra style cross walk has been transformed so that the painted stripes seem to bend, as if they are window blinds, or flexible bars of a cell. We see an eye staring out, a blind held back by several fingers.  The simple title on the cover is "Finding Hope."

We see in that tentatively emerging eye, long confined to its apartment, a mirror of our own condition, as new perceptions and apprehensions begin to congeal. What we thought was solid, is now disrupted, cracked upon. All seems unstable.  Here, we have Marx's definition of modernity exponentially accelerated, "All that is solid melts into air."

Street are important in every city of course, but they carry special resonance in Paris, globally known for its vibrant street life. Streets have been battlefields throughout the history of the city, during the storming of the Bastille in the Revolution, when barricades were thrown up in 1871 in defense of the Commune against the French army,  and during the student uprising of May 1968. Artists such as JR have repeatedly made claims to 'rights to the city' through uncompromising street art.  Streets have long been the vibrant arteries of the city, yet they are now empty of life. JR's image can be read  as a long confined giant,  perhaps even Hobbes' Leviathan, the sovereign social order, reawakening and resurfacing from underground up onto the surface of the street.

Having said that, the image is surely more than just a call for a return to normalcy. The old world is lost for ever. We might behold the escaped prisoner emerging from the Cave in Plato's Republic, discovering to his shock that everything he and his fellow inmates had assumed to be real was only the play of flickering shadows. The emerging eye can be read in radical and psychoanalytic registers as a coming to consciousness, a return of the repressed, a fissure in the taken for granted foundations of our world.  A crack in the pavement, and in the closed window blinds, heralds the coming dawn.  Yet just what the new sun will illuminate is, for now, beyond our capacities to envision.

More Murals around the World

USA Today reports (4/15/20) on more Covid-19 themed murals popping up on walls around the world: "Coronavirus inspires world graffiti"

Among the more interesting or witty of these 59 images, in sequence:

• (Third photograph). From Wynwood in Miami  Two masked figures, a woman in a green Muslim headscarf and niqab over her lower face; and a crouching tattooed figure wearing a jury rigged mask made out of an upside down MacDonald's bag, sipping a drink through a straw. Glimpsed are the two figures eyes, gazing in opposed dirctions.  Perhaps indicative of the strange, unexpected commonalities that keep popping up in these unprecedented times. 
• On a Lost Angeles wall, a slouching Prince Harry in a hoody (as perhaps befits his newly deconsecrated station)  bearing the words "Keep Calm and Wash Hands" ( a play on the oft citd World War II official edict to "Keep Calm and Carry On"
• A Baby Yoda in a tiny facemask in Guatemala City, perhaps giving an encouraging blessing to passersby. 
• In Prague: A bespectacled John Lennon, with a bright red bandana mask marked the words of one of his most famous lyrics, "All we need is LOVE" 
• In Glasgow, a walking man is tethered to a ball and chain, the ball in now painfully familiar image of the novel coronavirus. 
• On a London bridge wall, Lionel Stanhope paints a turbaned portait of a amn , copied I beleie from an Old Master, wearing a facemask
• In San Antonio Texas the muralist Colton Valentine has updated his previous painting of the rapper Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar ("Cardi B", to now wear a face mask.  (Might the artist be playfully seekign to protect the performer, by modifying the image?)
• In Berlin, Gollum from Lord of the Rings crouches delightedly holding a roll of toilet paper, over which he exclaims "Mein Schatz (My precious), the same phrase by which the character refers to the Ring.
• In Mumbai, a painted image of a cross legged woman, in mediation postur,  in a sari now wears a blue mask. Her fingers form two mudras, I believe the left  hand forms the
  gyāna mudrā  (mudra of wisdom) and the right hand forms the
  karana mudrā (for the expulsion of ilnnes and evil.
  

It is interesting note that nearly all cases a photographer has chosen to shoot each mural with one of actual persons walking by or looking at it.  This convention, I suggest, is informed by our enduring sense that an image is quasi alive, and best appreciated in relationship to a living person.

Rats in the Bathoom: Banksy

Hakim Bishara  in Hyperallergic reports on international art trickster figure Banksky's latest Instagram piece, a photograph allegedly (one never knows with Bansky) of his/her/their bathroom during shelter in place, festooned with images of rats scurrying about. One rat glimpse in the mirror, is counting off the days like a prisoner scribbling tally marks ("the five bar gate") on a cell wall. Aother rat, standing on the toilet seat seems to be peeing into the bowl. Still another is racing over a precious roll of toilet paper. Banksy;s accompanying texts:"my wife hates it when I work from home."   As of yesterday, something like 2.3 million viewers had "liked" the image, which is I suppose a testament to how so many of us are spending our time these days, perhaps catching up with Banksy's Instagram posts while seated on the toilet.

One never knows if Banksy is ever actually worth writing about, but here goes, briefly: As Bishara notes, Banksy has long used the image of the rat (an anagram for 'art') in his continuing efforts to lampoon, and milk (for every cent it is worth) the art world.  In the current context, rats may allude to the long believed role (now disputed) of these creatures as transmission vectors of the Black Death across the centuries.  There may also be a reference to the uncounted legions of rats that notoriously occupied the sewers of Victorian London, immortalized in Henry Mayhew's masterpiece "London Labor and the London Poor," who terrorized low income 'toshers' (sewer hunters) as they made their dangerous living reclaiming scrap items from flooded sewer tunnels. The rats in Banksy's supposed WC could be read as the return of the repressed, scrambling up out of the metropolitan sewer system during Lockdown, playing havoc in our most private remaining sanctuary, where we can't even, on our modest thrones, "shelter in place" in peace.

The Giant Soul: Penny Siopis

Commentaries by Pamela Allara, Mark Auslander, and Ellen Schattschneider

Overview:  Day 21, the final day of South Africa's The Lockdown Collection features a  new pen and glue work by Penny Siopis, "The Giant Soul" (2020). The abstract image is dominated by a red, orange and yellow configuration ( perhaps a conflagration?), with a white-orange shape in the middle left, an apparent profile of a human figure. Along the right border are swirls of blue, flecked with other cool colors; In the bottom left quadrant of the image are newspaper clippings, arranged it appears to echo the outlines of the white-orange figure: "This is the time of the giant soul," 'The giant soul," "We will rise," "A people of strength, resilience, and compassion."

Artist's Statement:  For lockdown I changed my apartment into a studio.  It’s small and beautiful.

I’m continuing to work with glue and ink, the medium I’ve been experimenting with for years.  It’s an unpredictable process, with the glue changing from white substance to transparent layer as it reacts to the air, ink, water, gravity and my gestures.   You must give over to what happens, a situation full of risk and uncertainty.   The medium has it’s own ‘life’, making it a partner in creating the work, rather than being a passive material on which to impose human mastery.   What emerges from the process are shapes that are open to infinite associations.  In it’s intimate material transformation, and the potential images it delivers, I can imagine larger philosophical questions, and situations of social change.

The title of my intimate painting The Giant Soul is a phrase from newspapers collected during this period.  The Giant Soul struck me as an emotive and poetic way to think about ‘the collective’ as a giant soul.  Solidarity.  In this time of isolation we can metaphorically become one with souls all over the world, as well as those inhabiting the afterlife.

The tendril form of the newspaper clippings echoes Late and Soon a gigantic work I made in 2013 in response to devastating personal loss.  

Penny Siopis
The Giant Soul (2020)
glue, ink, oil stain
and newspaper clippings on paper.
27.5 x 37.5 cm.

 
Pamela Allara: 

A prolific artist, Penny Siopis created iconic Resistance Art paintings in the 1980s and continues today to make powerful work addressing ecological and social transformation. The early collaged paintings in particular were crowded edge to edge with a plethora of detail, suggesting in their horror vacui either the detritus of a failed political system (Patience on a Monument, 1988) or the excesses of personal accumulation that must be disposed of after the owner’s death (Charmed Lives, 1999). In both instances, the personal is intertwined with the collective. Recently, as she began to experiment with glue as a medium, her compositions became simplified and more abstract, though still resonant with the themes Griselda Pollock has described as “the brute forces of history [entangled] with the delicate threads of human vulnerability.”

Although Siopis’ paintings are often monumental in scale, The Giant Soul, despite its title, is an intimate work on paper. On close inspection, however, the space depicted appears vast. As the eye moves from the cloudy right-hand border, we seem to be witnessing a vast explosion. Natural elements seem beyond human control, in much the same way that Siopis’ complex interaction with glue and ink leaves the final resolution of the work open to chance. The expanding ball of flame metaphorically suggests the rapid spread of the coronavirus, as in Kim Berman’s World on Fire from Day 11. In The Giant Soul, the mediums spill over the boundary of the paper, another powerful metaphor for a virus that overwhelms the ability to contain it.

But the work’s title and the words in the newspaper clippings that seem to have been blown by the force of the explosive fire down to the lower left of the composition offer a more optimistic reading: “This is the time of the giant soul,” “we will rise,” “a people of strength and resilience.” During this crisis, solidarity and human connection will also spread like fire.

 ________________________________________________
Mark Auslander: 

A New Star?

Twenty one days ago, The Lockdown Collection began with Gordon Froud's eerie scene of a deserted Johannesburg, over which a new star was risen--the novel coronavirus shining in all its terrifying glory. By a curious coincidence, this has been the period when the planet Venus has reached a conjunction with the Pleiades star cluster, and blazes over all the world, the third brightest body in the heavens. It was hard, gazing at Gordon's haunting image, not to think back to William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming (1919), written just after The Great War and the global influenza pandemic, and wonder, with the poet,  "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"  What precisely does this new visage in our firmament hearken for all of us?

Three weeks later, from Penny Siopis' apartment-turned-studio, we might see an initial glimpse of an answer.  We all know we stand on a precipice, as we try to imagine the post-pandemic world, wondering just what might be in the process of becoming. For the past three weeks, the artists featured in The Lockdown Collection have grappled with this challenge. Will we see a world riven by fear, descending into atavism, ethno-nationalism, xenophobia, and balkanized mini police states? Or might a new global ethic emerge, in which the specific pandemic of Covid-19, during which we have so often been exhorted to join in common battle, be grasped as an opportunity to embrace an enduring new covenant of collaboration, mutual solidarity, and deep compassion?   Might we all join in shared struggle against the multiple pandemics of global climate change, greed, poverty, racism, and all manner of other afflictions?

In the protean, emergent shapes of Siopis' flowing, multi-hued glues, allowed to roam free and only partially directed by the artist's hand, we might discern the outlines of that slouching rough beast, waiting to be born. The scale of the work is both cosmic and intimate. We might see echoes of the vast Pillars of Creation digitally reconstructed by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, allowing us to gaze into a stellar nursery 6.000 light years away.  Equally. we may be in the presence of a kind of spiritual sonogram, gazing into a womb, beholding emergent new life of a kind we cannot yet even name.

Things Fall Apart

We all agree, seeing the manifold failures of national and international institutions to protect us fully from the virus that, as Yeats' famously put it a century ago:  "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  This may be especially true for those of us in the United States:  here in Lansing, Michigan, where I write these words, thousands of rightist demonstrators, encouraged by ceaseless science denialism from the White House and Fox News, yesterday descended on the state capitol to protest the lockdown imposed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Some milled together on foot, some brandished confederate flags and automatic weapons, no doubt spreading the virus. Their jammed cars and honking horns blocked access to our main hospital and awoke desperately ill patients inside, fighting for their lives. A thoroughly sorry spectacle of selfishness and wilful ignorance, as so many lay dying.

And yet, we see so many places, near and far, signs of enormous courage and new forms of affiliation being forged, often in spite of the failures of national leaders. (Michigan, whose brave Governor has been demonized by President Trump as "that woman from Michigan," is today receiving loaned ventilators from the Governor of New York state. At the very same hospital entrance that was blocked by yesterday's foolish protesters,  we went for a test the day before and were warmly welcomed by medical staff, who had ingeniously jury-rigged a way to  maintain social distancing while conducting needed lab work. There are of course thousands of other examples of such bravery and creativity around the world during this emergency.

As a "Giant Soul," this art work heralds the emergence of something greater than ourselves or of any nation.  I provisionally read Siopsis' epic image from right to left. We begin with the watery ocean, from which all life emerged and then enter into the burning fires of the present pandemic, in which we have lost, and will lose, so many loved ones before their time. Perhaps we are meant to recall the old prophecy, in the words of the spiritual, Mary Don't You Weep: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign/no more water, but fire next time."

Then the "rough beast" emerges. The white-yellow figure might be a woman, her face in profile to the left, her hands put forth as if presenting a blessing or an offering. From her outstretched hands flow forth the words of hope and charity, promising the emergence of a new era, the time of the giant soul, of shared resilience and compassion. I find myself thinking of the ancient Sybil of Cumae, honored in William Kentridge's recent opera, "Waiting for Sybil." This ancient oracle wrote her prophecies on the leaves of a tree, at the opening of her cave. A great wind would scatter the leaves, so that those seeking her guidance never knew if a specific prophecy was truly intended for them.

As we look forward to emerging from this firestorm, it is for us, those who survive, to lovingly reassemble these fragmented words (including those left behind by the victims of the virus) and piece together a renewed covenant,  woven out of language, art, science, and compassion.  We must, to be sure,  take time to mourn those who were taken from us.  And then in their honor and in solidarity with one another, we must all be the midwife of that better world yet to come,  ensuring that a new and better star over Bethlehem may shine its light over every one of us,  late and soon, near and far.

_________________________________________________________________

Senju Kannon, 1154 AD,
Bujyo-ji Temple, Kyoto, Japan

Ellen Schattschneider:

Detachment and Release?

Those oriented towards Buddhistic traditions may be inclined to see in Siopis' white-yellow-red female figure the traces of a bodhisattva, a highly evolved being who has voluntarily renounced Enlightenment in order to guide lesser beings through stages of creation, as they strive towards Buddhahood. She might recall the figure of Kannon-sama (Guanyin), sometimes known as the Goddess of Mercy, who radiates infinite compassion (and "hears the prayers of the universe"), as she guides all along a redemptive path. Perhaps the painting's upper white left shape is the sun, indicative of the higher levels of being towards which we aspire.

As Mark notes, the flowing words of hope, made out of newsprint, seem to come out of this being's extended hands, not her mouth. Perhaps her outstretched hands are forming a joint-hand mudra, a Hindu or Buddhist gesture that may convey deep wisdom and compassion, or aid in the focusing and channeling of spiritual energies. Although she emerges out of the flames of our current terror, she may offer the Buddha's promise of extinguishing the "three fires" (or "three poisons") that haunt sentient life, the fires of greed, aversion, and ignorance.  Reborn like the Phoenix out of the current flames of destruction, she encompasses the souls of the Dead, now released from their suffering bodies into an ephemeral being who is beyond flesh, a numinous presence that is both insubstantial  and of profound substance.  Gazing into these swirling, emergent forms we are all enlarged, as we join together with the Living and the Dead in the next stage of our shared journey, becoming one with the giant soul of the universe. 

Rabih Mroué

Rabih Mroué:  Covid-19 Diary

Commentaries by Susan Plath and Mark Auslander

Susan Plath: Rabih Mroué has worked for many years from archival documents, journals, diaries, and newspaper articles to create dynamic performances that cut to the heart of whatever issue he addresses.

Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, Mroué now lives in Berlin. His background in theater means his performances are highly disciplined and scripted, while seeming to be informal and accidental. I have written about his work “Searching for a Missing Employee” in my book Art and Politics Now (Midmarch 2011). It is a complex narrative partially based on newspaper clippings pasted into notebooks. The convolutions of his search for the “missing employee” sounds very much like someone ( in the US) trying to either get tested for COVID 19 or trying to find out the results.

    

Today though we see his COVID-19 diary. Its immediacy speaks to all of us in the creative fields accustomed to constantly moving from one event to another.  He moves rapidly from rehearsals to cancellations. His final gig before everything stopped was to Spain as we see here,  and then in red ink he starts to feel sick.   Anxiety, fear for his family in Beirut, and his own health begin to dominate his life.

But we also read that he is planning a collaborative event "Die Balcone" with friends in Berlin in which they explored the new spatial relationships created by the virus. In Europe the many balconies create a meta space from which to perform.I will discuss it further in another post.

Mark Auslander: Rabih Mroué's 2020 Covid-19 diary diary may be read, whether intended or not, as a contribution to the long history of plague diaries that stretches back at least to Samuel Pepys' famous 1665 journal of the great plague in London, and Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (a difficult to classify, quasi-fictional reconstruction of that terrible year, written from the vantage point of many decades later.)

I find myself thinking of Francis Barker's brilliant reading of Pepys in The Tremulous Private  Body: the new forms of deeply interior self-fashioning and self-surveillance through writing, which for Barker are foundational to the emergence of modern subjectivity, seems somehow linked to experiences of life during an epidemic, when even the most banal and quotidian of actions (whom do we greet, whose hand do we shake, where do we draw a breath) may be a matter, ultimately, of life or death.  So in this sense Mroué's text is heir to a long entangled history of plagues and written self-narration: when the self is most imperiled, something within glows especially brightly.

It is probably only a coincidence that the cover of Mroué's pocket diary is red, but through our current anxious eyes, that seems entirely appropriate, red being the sign of danger, that now infuses every day of our lives. Red is also the color with which Mroué chooses to scrawl the word "cancelled" over his calendar. The word "cancelled" may have a double meaning here: not only are the actual events sudently off the calendar, but the very lives around us risk being "cancelled" as well: we read of friend's deaths, or at least the rumors of death.

It is enormously moving to see that "on a sunny Sunday," Mroué quotes the start of  Octavio Paz's famous poem, in French, a poem which could ibe thought of as the ballad of our strange era:

"A day is lost
In a sky of hurrying
The light leaves no footprints in the snow
A day is lost
Doors open and close
The seed of the sun soundlessly opens
A day begins"


Mroué' doesn't transcribe the rest of the poem, a love poem which concludes:

"A day begins with your mouth
The day that is lost in our eyes
The day that opens in our night"

Above the poem fragment Mroué has drawn what looks like a king bearing a sword, then a  picture frame on a wall, then that same king, with a sun beside him, inside the picture frame. That seems an apt encapsulation of the poem and of life under Lockdown: everything now transpires within the framed-off confines of our immediate dwelling place. We live, in effect, within the frame--the very same shape, as it happens, as the page of the diary, on which each day is written. 

On the right leaf, the artist quotes Plato, "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy is when men are afraid of the light."

The eight drawings above the quote are, appropriately, explorations of light and dark, geometric patterns that evoke an aperture opening and closing

It seems oddly appropriate that on the next page, March 28, the artist contemplates a new way of bringing  light into the world, the Berlin Balcony ("Die Balcone") project, encouraging artists to communicate with the world through art, on the miniature theatrical stages that are balconies in the heart of the city.  The artist writes, "When some of us are cut off from our plans and our loved ones., we reach out to the balconies of the world..not leaving everything in the hands of the virus and the fear it generates."

Here, it seems to me, we see the trajectory of a mode of urgent self-fashioning that Samuel Pepys helped launch nearly four centuries ago: paradoxically, solitary acts of writing let us light a candle against the dark, and even in our times of utmost isolation, lets us spread out and amplify our voice, creating a choir where once only silence seemed to reign.

On the next to final page that Mroué' shares, we see a list of cancelled events,  and then a little spark of hope at the bottom: "Preparing for Die Balcone (Lina and I)," Then on the facing, final leaf, we see a largely empty page, marked only with the filled-in shadow of a standing person, and a phrase in Arabic (discussed  below by Drs. Riedlmayer and Buturovic). The meaning of the image seems clear enough: even in these strange, disorienting times, when everything is topsy-turvy, we somehow endure, and remain standing,  looking out at the world  upon a balcony--even if we are, at the moment, all upside-down!

Note from András Riedlmayer (Harvard):  Two notebook pages have Arabic text:  the sixth page in the sequence (from the top down) has a line of poetry running vertically on the right-hand page, while the last page has the Arabic phrase that you noticed, next to the drawing of the upside-down man.

The vertical line of poetry reads:

بَحْر المدينة سِحِر و بيروت عم تسبح الشعر
"Spell of the city's sea: Beirut immersed in poetry"
-- verse transl. courtesy of Youssef Rakha

The text next to the upside-down man literally reads:

حرقوا دين العالم
"They burned the world's religion"

This is a common expression in the region, the artist explains, meaning they really screwed us over.

Amila Buturovic (York) writes of this phrase: "The expression, from what I remember, goes back to the Mongols: one of the poets used it to describe the situation in Baghdad and it became idiomatic." 

                                                                                                                                                                                

Art About Dr. Anthony Fauci

Andy Andersen. Dr. Anthony Fauci as Saint Pantaleon the healer

Hakim Bishara in Hyperallergic reports that "Artists Across the Internet Make Tributes to Dr. Anthony Fauci' (4/13/20)

Pamela Allara: In the April 20, 2020 issue of The New Yorker magazine, a feature article by Michael Specter is titled, “The Good Doctor: How Anthony Fauci became the face of a nation’s crisis response.” Dr. Fauci has not simply become the face of the response to the pandemic, but, to many, he has become its hero, an individual of knowledge and integrity who courageously speaks the truth, even while in the presence of a President spouting bald-faced lies. Fauci claims to be apolitical and non-ideological, a physician interested only in scientific truth, but in a time of crisis the American citizenry has become dependent on him for a factual analysis of the ongoing situation. The grateful response from the public has included artworks, a sample of which we are re-posting from Hyperallergic’s blog. The images range from ambitious paintings of Fauci as a saint, to an amusing sock puppet.  All are heartfelt. We do owe him a debt of gratitude.

Susan Platt:  Dr. Fauci is our hero! He is providing thoughtful, factual information as a safe harbor for all of us in the storm of political motives, intellectual deficiencies and evil motives. It is no wonder that Trump wants him to disappear. It is clear that Dr. Fauci is the one we are looking to for information. Thank you to these artists. I particularly like the religious overtones, as what Dr. Fauci is doing is to give us a way forward that is above and beyond just information. The Saint Fauci is exactly how we all feel about him, as he has attacks from the right. He calmly stated that the attacks are hard on his family, but he is just "doing his job." The Tarot cards also are right on the mark, another spiritual path. And of course the drawing of the famous gesture of holding his head by Brad Albright, (the way we all feel, as the artist declared), referenced  the event that was the basis for attacks by the ideologues. Such an attack lays bare what we are up against with the virus in the very fibers of our own bodies as well as penetrating our entire social structure.


Mark Auslander:  The images are clearly modeled on votive images offered to saints for many centuries, in a way that is humorous but also with an underlying seriousness of purpose.  In addition to expressing gratitude, my sense is that these work have a mildly talismanic function, aimed at "protecting" not only  the makers or those who acquire them (as in conventional votive offerings), but also, in a comic and heart-felt way, meant to protect the good doctor himself, whom people around the world believe serves at the pleasure of a deeply insecure, narcissistic, and mercurial president. Millions of Americans (and so many others globally) fear each day that his tenure is imperiled, simply for being a fearless truth-teller and unparalleled expert, coping with an administration that, in the eyes of many, seems to be at war with the very concepts of science and expertise themselves. 

I particularly like the sticker of the Doctor famously slapping his palm to his face when President Trump referenced "The Deep State Department" at one of his daily briefings on the Covid-19 crisis, as well as Andy Andersen’s rendering of the doctor as Saint Pantaleon the healer.