Tag: history

Another Political Bestiary, Ep. XXXIII

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The Rollout (2020). Acrylic and ink on paper. From my book, Another Political Bestiary, available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Rollout

Wide but severely contained; prone to colorful language, but lacking intellectual depth, the Rollout is often conceived in fertile seasons when policy wonks become aroused by blooms of receptive political polling data. It is often presented to society with much fanfare – a savior baby befitting visitation by rich men, mostly lobbyists. Its uncoiling during its lifetime provides the illusion of length, but the Rollout is finite, short lived and stunted, a pale impression of what is to come. Indeed, this first blush of impression is often so misleading that Rollouts are mocked with the passing of time: think healthcare in 1993, or infrastructure week in some recent years.

-Danny Grosso

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My Amazon author’s page: amazon.com/author/dannygrosso

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Out in the Street V

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Untitled (2003). Ink on board. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso. From my book, Out in the Street, available at Amazon Books.

The memory is lost in time, like a lot of memories, over time, but also differently, because time is sometimes hard to place in cities. Part of the scene could have been Victorian. Crumbling brick facades, a long-locked, frock-coated man running the snowy midnight street, chasing somebody, maybe a lover, maybe Jack the Ripper. One might expect a horse-driven cart to appear around the next corner. However, looming in the distance is the modern city, all aspiration, skyward and projecting, its lights visible for miles but its menaces hidden. The foreboding captured in the image that does not fade with memory and is not lost in time.

All of us have lived in interesting times. The Roaring 20’s were great, unless you were poor, or black, or a woman trying to work. Try to find a seat on a bus if you are black, living in the south, and it’s the 1950’s. Images and memories can be timeless, but so can kindness which is a form of courage, and integrity, as a form of respect, and all of the things propelling us through the nighttime snow to chase somebody else, or ourselves.

-Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

Buy books! My Amazon author’s page: amazon.com/author/dannygrosso

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Another Political Bestiary, Ep. XLVII

Cloture (2020). Acrylic and ink on paper. From my book, Another Political Bestiary, available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Cloture

Robed in a Byzantine frock, Book of Spells in hand, the Cloture haunts the aisles of legislative chambers and holds enormous power. The Cloture can, with a mere whispered incantation, rob the legislators of their reason for existence, the continuing dalliance and debate of matters on the floor. This blunt power is all the more hard for the elected to take because it emanates in short order from this soft spoken and opaque creature. The Cloture’s deed is devastatingly quick and lethal, and invariably leaves one side of a legislative body panicked, frightened, traumatized. A friend to the majority, mostly, the Cloture can be vexing as it sometimes switches sides in times of crises or need, proving that it has no ideology but its own mystery and power. By that infidelity, the cloture is at times the ultimate foe of elected officials who, left unable to speak on the matter at hand, are left to cry about it on the prime time opinion shows.

-Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

My Amazon author’s page: amazon.com/author/dannygrosso

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