Artist, writer, designer. I create collages, sculptures, books of art, fiction and essays, wearable art, journals and amusements for adults. My work tells stories about how we humans relate to our world.
How to stay hopeful when it all gets to be just too much seems to be the question of the day, at least among the Youtubers and pundits I follow. How to weather the slings and arrows, pick yourself up and dust yourself off, and all that.
Well, honestly, I’ve always been too bloody-minded to lose hope for very long. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of dark nights, but I get too angry at the effrontery of upstarts to meekly accept whatever they want my fate to be. To me, hope has never been the thing with feathers fluttering in the deep recesses of the heart. Rather, it’s the thing that spits out a bloody tooth and wades back into the fight for another round.
Life has been a real fight lately, hasn’t it? We’ve all been well and truly in it, and there’s no end in sight. Here at the house attached to the studio, we’ve been dealing with medical crises and all the attendant crises that come along with needing urgent help. Don’t worry, it’s working out. Life was saved. Sickness was cured. Needed work is being done. But this past month has been scary and exhausting and expensive, recovery and caring are not yet finished, and neglected work, home, garden, etc., knocked into the proverbial cocked hat by personal disaster, are demanding to get back on the agenda. Time is ready to march on even if I’m not.
So, when all has fallen into confusion, when I’m hopelessly behind on every task, exhausted to the point that I can’t even sleep, and the 10,000 things rush to fill every hour of the day, I open my eyes and look for the patterns in the chaos. This is what I call magic. To find the hidden structures that reveal the sense of it all. Thus I orient myself, ground and center myself, and gradually regain control of my reality.
Art and storytelling are my arcane methods for that.
I cast spells to shine clear lights on dark things, draw boundaries, invoke powers, steer and shape energies, and explore mysteries – until I feel pulled together enough to stand stably on my feet again.
And this year, because we’re all really going through it, I’m sharing my magical explorations with all of you. From now through at least New Year – maybe to spring, I’ll see how it goes – I present “Finding Magic,” a small works series celebrating the winter months of 2025-2026.
Talismans and amulets, tiny things to accent a threshold or guard a book. Symbols of power, resilience, prosperity, emotions. Worlds in the palm of your hand. Portals to other realms. Small wishes to bring good things into challenging times.
In the northern hemisphere, where I live, winter is the season for new beginnings, containing as it does not one but four new years – the solar new year of the winter solstice, the astronomical new year at the close of the calendar, the planetary new year at Earth’s perihelion, and the lunar new year in February. It’s a season for resting and resetting, for looking back and ahead, for personal transformations, for the quiet inner work of healing and growth.
With “Finding Magic,” I invite you to come along with me as I do that work for myself and offer what I find to you.
There seems to be a trend – or I’d like there to be a trend – of artists celebrating the end of the year with affordable small works series to tell the story of the year that was. “Finding Magic” is about pulling ourselves together to wade back into the fight next year, stronger, refreshed, clear-eyed, and empowered.
It will be all small items in various media, priced for any budget at under $50 and under $100 depending on the piece. Follow this site for updates as new pieces are finished.
Jen Fries, Eye Amulets, pastel, watercolor, and ink on paper, roughly life-sized, $25 each, part of “Finding Magic.” Display, carry, use for ornament, journaling, or to ward off unwelcome pests and gossips. Email me if interested.
And if you happen to be in the Boston, Massachusetts, area this weekend, stop by the Brickbottom building in Somerville for our Open Studios event, November 22-23, 12-6pm. Info here. I’ll be in Unit C322, showing the first of the “Finding Magic” pieces along with larger works on similar themes.
I’m writing this at the end of Veterans Day. Ten to midnight. Not the key time of the holiday, which is properly the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – the precise time of the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. Hence the original name of the day, Armistice Day. It was changed to Veterans Day under Eisenhower.
And that makes sense because our veterans deserve the recognition. It is literally the least we can do for them, after all, considering how we, as a nation, routinely renege on all our other promises to those who put themselves in danger in service to us.
But to me, November 11 will always be Armistice Day. The day the War to End All Wars ended. Of course, that didn’t hold, did it? Another good reason to change the name.
But hear me out on this. Maybe we should keep the old name.
I’ve always thought a wonderful way to honor our veterans would be to make fewer of them. To be less eager – even cavalier – about sending our young people out to fight, possibly die, for what are, increasingly, political or, worse yet, financial causes. It would definitely show respect for our veterans to quit extending wars indefinitely, at the very least.
Rather, I’d like to work towards a world in which those brave enough to risk their lives to fight for others are honored by not wasting their courage. By avoiding conflict as much as humanly possible, minimizing it when it cannot be avoided, and ending it quickly and completely.
So I think I will always celebrate Armistice Day on Veterans Day. A holiday dedicated to ending war. To agreeing on peace. To stopping the violence between nations.
Because of Armistice Day, 11 is a lucky number to me. An auspicious number. In western numerology, it is one of the Master Numbers, double-digit numbers which amplify their inherent meanings and energies. 11 represents spiritual awareness, a profound connection to higher wisdom. It carries the harmony, sensitivity, and empathy of numeral 2, and multiplies the innovativeness, focus, willingness to embrace change of numeral 1, empowering both with spiritual energy.
One might say that numeral 11 symbolizes the power to end wars, not by conquest or defeat, suppression or suspension, but by actually ending them. That strange and vast power that can get people to agree at last to just stop fighting each other.
I think that’s a power worth celebrating – worth cultivating – especially in a world so angry and full of people eager for war, whatever their reasons may be.
By the way, in tarot, the 11th card of the Major Arcana is Justice in the Waite-Smith deck. Justice is the balance of right and wrong and the power of natural and secular law. In some other decks, the 11th card is Strength, aka Fortitude, which teaches us to master our angers and fears, to tame them and put them to good use. The number 1 card is The Magician who uses the tools of life to make stuff happen, and number 2 is The High Priestess who offers insight into inner truths.
Interesting things to consider when seeking peace in a time of conflict.
Notes:
Illustration: “Judgment,” mixed media assemblage referencing the return of the dead of WWI as climate change melts the glaciers of the Italian Alps, releasing the remains of soldiers lost in ice all this time.
This essay’s word count is 542, which adds up to 11.
Yesterday, what passes for the US Congress these days sold our country out for fascism. Not to put too fine a point on it, you know.
The DC Democrats put up all the fight they could. Some will claim they did nothing at all, but those people are wrong. The fact that the Dems could do so little is not their fault – this time. In the end, what may turn out to be the most disastrous bill in US history passed the Senate strictly along party lines by only one vote, and the House by just four votes, also strictly by party. One vote and four votes. Let no magaist say the word “mandate” ever again, especially where I can hear them.
I won’t go into all the details. Let’s just say the 2025 tax and budget bill will, in broad strokes, promote eugenics by slashing access to health care, housing, and food assistance for the most needy, inflict terror and violence by turbocharging the size and budget of the masked goon squads hunting immigrants and protesters in our streets, throw the US economy into total chaos, and consolidate even more power into the hands of that stupid orange dirtbag they’ve made their god.
Said stupid orange dirtbag will sign this piece of shit into law today, July 4th, America’s Independence Day, just to add insult to the injury.
It’s easy to feel discouraged and cynical about the irony of celebrating the 4th of July in the midst of fascists actively dismantling democracy before our very eyes, but consider:
Wasn’t the United States of America created out of revolution against tyranny?
Hint: Yes, it was. That’s kind of what we’re about as a political body.
Have we been perfect at it? No, never. Have we lived our professed ethics? Not even close. Have we also acted like tyrants against others and against our own? Yes, we have and do.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the US was indeed created specifically to throw off the chains of tyranny. Our failures only show that we’re not done. The revolution is ongoing.
So on this July 4th, 2025, I invite you all to embrace the ideal of what the USA is supposed to be about, and to take your stand on it.
Last winter, I blogged about new years and fresh starts, and how we actually get multiple chances to start over as the cycles by which we measure time complete and begin their loops. We get a solar new year at the Winter Solstice with the restart of the Sun cycle, a planetary new year in early January with the start of a new Earth orbit, and a lunar new year after that with the restart of the Moon cycle.
Plus, each of us gets to claim a personal new year on our birthday. I decided that for everyone in the world. You’re welcome.
That’s four chances every year to take stock, measure growth, celebrate accomplishments, refresh goals, and start next chapters.
I’d like to add a fifth annual fresh start – a civic new year on the nation’s founding day.
Every country can do this on their own national anniversaries, of course. For us Americans, our civic new year would be the 4th of July, obviously – the day when We the People of the United States take off from work, have a bbq, some parades, fireworks, and I propose from this year forward, take some time to assess our progress towards building a more perfect union, towards realizing Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
I would like to add political action to our Independence Day celebrations. I don’t mean conformist pantomimes of red, white and blue cosplay and singing our unsingable anthem. Rather, I want some good, loud marches in addition to the parades, with lots of signs calling out the unfinished work of the Republic. Impromptu town halls where we call our elected officials to account for themselves – again. Strongly worded letters to the editors of legacy media to remind them of the responsibilities that come with being protected by the First Amendment. Social media progress reports by everyone with any interest in anything, showing the status of boycotts and labor actions, the scorecards on the issues in contention, and lists of how our Senators and Representatives have been voting lately.
And I’d like to add the positive ideals of civic life to the holiday as well. Let’s normalize no longer taking our public services for granted in this country. Let’s make the 4th of July a day that celebrates the practical things we gained by our revolution – our courts, public libraries, and schools, our civil servants in all the departments, the Post Office (everyone loves the Post Office), our lands, waters, and parks, and of course, our Constitution.
We don’t need another military holiday in the US, or another day for capitalists to exploit national myths to push sales. We need a holiday that reminds us of how we got this country in the first place, what it’s supposed to be, and why it matters enough for each of us to do something about it.
We need a We the People Day.
And we have one. We call it Independence Day, and it’s the day when Americans were invented and defined as a people who cannot be oppressed because we will not be oppressed.
So, here we are on Independence Day, our civic new year. Where do we stand, and where should we go next? What resolutions should we make to become better citizens over the next twelve months?
Okay, no sugarcoating. Where we stand is in deep shit. We have completely botched our job as citizens. Sorry, but it’s time for some radical acceptance starting with tough love.
Everyone knows this country suffers from a chronic infection of racism, violence, and social dominance ideation. All we ever do about it is treat the symptoms when they flair up, while never addressing the underlying condition. We ignore it until it builds up enough, and oopsie-whoopsie Civil War. Then a little soothing cream and a Constitutional Amendment, and oh dear, decades of KKK violence. Look, just keep it covered so it doesn’t spread and we can keep going to work, okay? But it does spread until thank the gods, another crisis interrupts it. Yay for world war, eh? Oh, but dammit, now they’re murdering civil rights workers. Ugh. Okay-okay, we’ll take this seriously. Pass a bunch more laws, and actually enforce them this time, and look, it’s working. We all feel much better now, right? Let’s get back to work and forget it ever happened. It’s in the past.
Only it’s not in the past. It’s in the bones and muscle of our society. It’s a condition America was born with, and because we don’t deal with it honestly to neutralize it – make the required behavioral and structural changes for our civic health – it keeps coming back again and again and again. Each outbreak of it is potentially lethal to our body politic.
We understand this when we’re talking about diabetes or cancer. When will we understand and accept it in the context of the society we depend on just as much as our own bodies?
So the assessment of our progress is that we are in the midst of another acute outbreak of our societal illness. We’re not the only ones. This toxic, destructive, antisocial mindset of fear and aggression is rooted deep in the US, but it’s common among humanity. Many countries are dealing with similar situations right now, and it’s spreading like political covid. Our outbreak is one of the worst, though, so we really need to deal with it.
Where do we go next? Well, we are in crisis, so this year, we need to focus on the crisis. But we can’t fall into our traditional habit of only doing the short-term fixes without thinking about long-term reforms to prevent future flair-ups. We must transition off simple suppression of active symptoms and move towards intervention and preventive management for life – for the sake of our lives.
From today through July 4th, 2026, let us focus on breaking the maga fever.
Let’s sanitize our communities from fascist goon squads and the fear and danger they bring with them. Know your rights and use the rules to your advantage. Call the real cops (no matter what you think of them). Like they always tell us – if you see something, say something.
Unless the goons are the ones trying to talk to you. Then keep your mouth shut. If they want to talk to you, they can show their faces, their IDs, and their warrant, and then they can make an appointment with your lawyer.
And be smart about videos and photos. Only show the people and faces you want to. Nobody needs to be able to track everyone who was protesting peacefully before the brownshirts showed up.
Generally conduct yourself with safety in mind. Cultivate situational awareness. That means take the damn buds out of your ears and put the damn phone in your pocket once in a while. Know your route and exit options everywhere you plan to go. Do not post your safe maps on your social media, for fucks sake, omg. And follow the safety measures recommended by civil rights activists all over the internet. We all see the info every day.
Basic community safety measures like this will go a long way towards deflating the threats the fascists are using to bully us into submission.
Let’s cleanse our political discourse of lies, propaganda, and bullshit. Let’s learn how to tell good from bad when it comes to information and news sources. Rely on primary sources as much as possible and swear off relying on social media gossip mills.
Apply “see something, say something” to political information, too. When we see the propaganda, bullshit, and lies, call it out, every time. Let nothing slide unchallenged, no matter who says it. We need to hold our own and ourselves to account as well.
Let’s cleanse our public offices of corruption by shining the bright light of public attention on them constantly. For real, public officials need to remember who they work for, and it’s not the ones paying their bribes.
Make 2025-26 be a maelstrom of town halls, crammed constituent office hours, overwhelmed phone lines and emails. Fill media with demands for investigations. Bring the receipts from the states and districts. Hell, organize recall elections. It doesn’t matter if they’re almost impossible to pull off. They get attention. Let’s help our electeds experience the same worries and stresses we voters are, thanks to their political choices. You know, to help them understand where we’re coming from.
Oh, I’m sorry, GOP politicians, are you feeling exhausted? Do you dread going to work and looking at the news every day? Are you worried about losing your job? Welcome to the party, you “bunch of little bitches.” This is the bed you made, so you get to lie in it with the rest of us.
If they don’t like it, they can fix it easily. All they have to do is switch their obedience from Trump to their constituents. Or they can quit and go home. Simple.
And if they refuse to cooperate? Well, that’s what the petty recalcitrance of pure spite is for, because until they do what We the People want, let them never enjoy another swordfish and whiskey dinner in peace.
I think those are three good starting points for the civic new year in a fascism epidemic. We can put the rest of our energy into building our personal strength and resilience.
Let’s start building community-based options for the services the fascists are taking away from government. I’m talking about food and health care access, education for our kids, housing, legal services, community security, communications, financial services, etc.
Yes, we’re all dealing with the horror of watching fascism rise again in the world, but don’t underestimate the stress of how difficult they make ordinary daily errands. How many of us feel scared going out for lunch, for fear our meal will be interrupted by an armed abduction? How many of us lose sleep over our bills, our parents’ nursing homes, our kids’ safety at school, what to do about our neighbors’ pets if they suddenly disappear?
Nobody can live under such constant ambient pressure. Understand, this is a deliberate tactic of oppressors. They exhaust resistance by literal exhaustion.
So we’re not going to do that, okay? They want to take control of all the details of our lives, but we’re going to keep that control, however we manage it. We don’t need to get precious about details, right? We’re going to take care of ourselves and our needs as we see fit. End of.
And we’re going to remember this precept: The most fundamental and effective form of resistance is to keep doing what the oppressors don’t want us to do.
They don’t want us to figure out for ourselves how to get food, housing, medicine, etc. They don’t want us to choose how and where we work and spend. They don’t want us to resolve our disputes peacefully amongst ourselves. They don’t want us to relax and be happy, or feel free to play with our families in parks, or eat at cafes. They don’t want us to make our own music and art.
They want us to need them for everything.
Resistance is not needing them for one single damn thing.
Therefore, I propose three Citizen Resolutions for US Civic New Year 2025:
Practice radical acceptance. Acknowledge the work that needs to be done and make a start. Effort is worth more than blame.
Be rude. Screw respecting public officials. Those lazy, crooked assholes need to get to work or get out. Let them know that.
Do not obey. Fascists don’t want America to exist. So be Americans, the whole nine yards, every day. Be the Americans who kicked these bastards’ asses not just in WW2 but in our first Civil War, and our Revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement, and all the other movements towards a better world since 1775. Screw them, they don’t get to tell us what to do.
Happy Independence Day. There are no American kings.
Notes: This essay belongs to the Liberty Gravy category of the Jen Fries Arts: Arting Life newsletter.
The illustrations are selected works from my portfolio, ones carrying specific political messages. All my work is political. You can ask me how, or figure it out yourself.
Omenology: The body of this essay contains 2,388 words. The numerals of the word count total adds up to 21, representing spiritual fulfillment and transformation, and reducing down to 3, representing creative expression. These two numbers align with the tarot cards The World and The Empress. The Empress signifies joy, abundance, and celebration. The World signifies self realization and expansiveness. Together, they unite micro and macro awareness, local and global action, self and society. The 2 and 8s signify balance and success, as well. So, having reached that number, I stopped editing. (“Omenology” is a word I made up today.)
But if the trees fall, where will the birds sleep?
What will hold the flood? Embrace the Earth?
Draw the soul from my bones so that someday
someday
I might yet get a chance to pay my debts?
Be kind to the trees, Wind
For if they do not stand, I can’t walk
Written during a series of gusting storm fronts that swept through my city over several days. March came in like the proverbial lion this year. I wrote this while the wind howled, my house swayed, the dogwood branches clawed across my windows in the dark, and I just had one request.
Which was granted, after all.
The illustration is a small painting in ink and watercolor.
It begins at 12:00AM and runs through 11:59PM. For this whole day, we are suspending all non-essential commerce. No shopping. No buying. Especially, no corporate brands or chains. If you must spend money, go to small, local shops, preferably in person, to avoid giving business to Google et al., and pay in cash, to avoid giving business to credit card companies and big banks.
You might think a single day of across-the-board economic shutdown won’t have any effect. But I happen to be a fan of consumer activism, so let me explain why I encourage you to get on board with Blackout Day.
First, this day is just the beginning. We might call it a “shot across their bow,” i.e. a warning to remind the people trying to dismantle our Constitution and way of life what leverage We the People of the United States really hold.
One inescapable fact of the USA is that it runs on money. For good or ill, the US is a mercantile nation. Money is the body and soul of our politics and our power structure.
And there is no money if there is no We the People. The US economy runs entirely on the labor and purchasing of millions of Americans. That’s us doing the jobs and us buying the stuff. Anything that interferes with us showing up for work or us buying stuff from stores slows the economy immediately. If it keeps up a while, our “envy of the world” economy quickly starts to shrink.
And boy-howdy, do the billionaires start yelping when that happens.
Remember the 2008 crash, when the global economy very nearly collapsed and countless Americans lost their homes and were drowning in debt. Remember how the economic pundits and the billionaire CEOs were all over media complaining about the slow recovery after that crisis of their making. Remember how they blamed the American people for unpatriotically – yes, some of them actually invoked patriotism – saving our money instead of spending it like they wanted us to.
Remember the pandemic, when there were no jobs, no open shops, even the supply chains were shut down, but we individual worker-consumers were still getting scolded for not getting out there to lend it, spend it, send it rolling along. I will swear to my last breath that I heard multiple capitalists on US media literally declaring that keeping the economy going was more important than keeping ourselves alive, and we were betraying the nation by staying home just to stay healthy.
Were any of those pundits, capitalists, or CEOs on the brink of starvation from the faltering economy in those crises? No, they were not. So why did they care so much?
If I were an economist, it would be complicated to explain, but I’m not, so it’s simple.
The heads of US industry, the leaders of our dominant businesses, our CEOs and Directors, our would-be American oligarchs are, at the end of the day, little more than glorified peddlers. Take a hard look at them, all those Big Corp brands. They’re all basically hawking junk on street corners, just like a hundred-plus years ago when they were selling liver pills and miracle tonics off wagons and conning yokels into selling their land for wildcat oil drilling.
All these years, all these generations, these latter-day robber barons built their fortunes by conning – or extorting – the rest of us into giving them all our labor and all our money.
When we stop giving them those things, their house-of-cards empires start to shake. It never fails.
A dip in commerce means a dip in profit margins – a hiccough in line-go-up. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a one-day event. The blip will appear on the radar, and the voting shareholders won’t like it, since the only reason for any of these grifters to exist at all is to maximize profits for voting shareholders. Blips don’t maximize.
So on February 28, we will do our best to put a blip on the radar.
If they’re smart, they will listen to our demands. They will back off their attempt to turn the US into a fascist client state to Vladimir Putin. They will restore order, funding, and staffing to the US federal government. They will obey the orders of the federal courts. They will pass a proper federal budget. They will restore our support for our traditional allies and trading partners in accordance with our treaties. They will quit fucking around with things they don’t understand.
If they’re not smart, then there will be more blips. Bigger blips. More blackouts will follow, along with longer boycotts and labor actions.
If they take away our rights from us, we will take away our money from them. If they take away our liberty, we will take away our work. If they take away our Constitution and our system of law and representation, we will take away the life blood of the economy and their industries.
And we shall see who wins the argument. Myself, I’m betting on We the People, because we have the numbers, and without us, they have nothing.
Now, as a movement, economic resistance is relatively slow and requires discipline, organization, and cooperation. It demands that we change long-accustomed habits, that we support each other in our communities, and that we all do some creative problem-solving.
But today is just one day. The first day. So let’s try it out, and see how it goes.
At the very least, not spending money for a day isn’t going to hurt you any.
And remember, this is just for non-essential spending. There are people who would prefer a total shut-down of all transactions, but those people forget February 28 is the last day of the month. It’s Rent Day for millions of us. We must be reasonable. Do pay your rent, by whatever method you normally use. Pay your bills if they’re due. If you have to fill a prescription or keep a medical appointment, etc., take care of it. That is essential spending, not non-essential.
But stay the hell off Amazon. Stay away from the big box retailers. Don’t log into your streaming services. Don’t send money over the internet or pay for anything by credit card. Don’t order in from a chain restaurant via a corporate gig-work delivery service. Just don’t.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I run a small business out of my studio. I would very dearly love for you to buy my work.
But not today. Not online today. Today is for a different kind of work, without which I might not be able to keep doing my life’s work.
You know what I’ll be doing today, instead of trying to sell you my art? I’ll be doing some creative problem-solving. For example, I think I’ll research alternatives to Paypal and Venmo (the same company) so I can offer you a more ethical way to do business with me. Might take some time, but it’s a great day to start, don’t you think?
And I’ll do some artwork, so there’ll be fresh stuff for you to buy as well.
Today is the first day of the economic part of the pro-democracy resistance in the US.
Today is also the last day of the last month of winter. Tomorrow, March 1, we begin barreling into spring. Is there a better moment to wake up? To dump the old in favor of the new? To clean our house?
I went for a walk before I wrote this and saw the first green shoots rising from the ice-soaked ground in a neighborhood park.
That’s an allegory for you, right there.
This is how the weather changes. This is how the tides turn.
Since he’s already made his horse a senator, I suppose he has no one more qualified on hand. In any event, he has declared himself Emperor of American Culture, promising to whip us all into he-manly shape with no more of that icky drag stuff that reminds him of, I suppose, that time he went on a date with Rudy Giuliani.
Unsurprisingly, the response from the arts world has been a resounding chorus of “Oh, fuck no!” for about 10,000 serious reasons.
As I’m part of the arts world, I’m joining the chorus. I hope to talk you all down a bit about it but also pep you up a bit.
Like everything that asshole does, this move starts out scary but comes apart under scrutiny and yields to a plan of action. Let’s parse it out.
The Scary Part:
You are correct. This is a precursor to a program of censorship, perhaps a retread of Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare campaign of terror in the 1950s, with the modern witch-hunters’ obvious, but only first, targets being trans people and the wider LGBTQ+ community.
I’d be willing to bet, in fact, that McCarthyism 2.0 is the literal plan because El Cheeto’s first evil mentor was Roy Cohn.
For those lucky enough not to remember, Roy Cohn was a lawyer notorious for, among other unpleasant things, assisting McCarthy as chief counsel in his crusade to accuse and destroy supposed communists in the media and government, until both men were taken down by their own over-reach plus exposés by Edward R. Murrow.
Cohn then went into private practice in New York. There, he was so infamously crooked that he was eventually disbarred, but not before collecting a list of rich, famous clients, including one Donald J. Trump.
Those two were a match made in hell, by many accounts, and cut quite the swath together through the Studio 54 party scene. It ended in 1986 when Cohn died, sick, alone, and despised. His best bud, Little Donnie Dipshit, refused to visit him and denied their relationship at the very end. (Sound familiar, Rudy?)
Nevertheless, El Cheeto has yearned for his old friend over the years, lamenting every time some attorney tells him something he wants to do is illegal, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
(He’s dead, Donnie, and you wouldn’t even go when he called for you on his deathbed, you backstabbing bastard.)
So with one of the architects of McCarthyism as a formative guru, we can be sure Trump is dreaming of a 21st century HUAC, endless show-trial hearings led by Gym Jordan and the Three Weird Sisters of the House Maga Caucus, Boebert, Greene, and Mace, ruinous SLAPP lawsuits, bans, cancelling, and gleeful mobs.
The goal will be to erase any art and literature that doesn’t glorify the maga ideal. We can expect floods of AI-generated versions of “Birth of a Nation,” full of racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes and heavy doses of christian-nationalist propaganda, in which the heroes are the kinds of bulked-up, gun-slinging dudes Trump enjoys looking at, in slo-mo.
We’ll also have the spectacle of media companies, music labels, publishing houses, and key celebrities, piddling themselves to be the new regime’s favorite Leni Riefenstals.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will run like rats in fear of what the mobs will do to us if we take one wrong step.
I’m pretty sure that’s the plan.
Only it won’t work.
The Coming Apart Part:
This escalation of the culture war will fail for two reasons.
I. The first reason is there’s no there there.
The magaists are like most Americans in that they don’t understand there is no arts system in the USA. We have no credentialing bodies, no established academies, closely linked to government or social elites, that dictate American Arts & Letters. We have people who claim to be that, but they’re bullshitters.
Many people believe the federal government does support the arts, because politicians talk about supporting the arts, but that’s bullshit, too. Our government support consists basically of the National Endowment for the Arts and a few sincere but fragmented programs with painfully tiny budgets that are constantly being cut. If people knew how meager federal arts funding is, even diehard art-haters would think, “Damn, that’s cold.”
This lack of support has a few causes, but it’s mostly due to the US having never given two shits about the arts. Sorry, but facts.
Except for that brief fling with the WPA, the creative sector has never been important enough to warrant a bureaucracy of our own. We have no departments or agencies. Hell, we couldn’t even get into education despite the traditional pairing of the arts and sciences – and STEAM being an objectively better acronym than STEM.
Which means that there is nothing for Mango Mussolini to weaponize.
He can cut institutional funding, and that will hurt PBS, museums, and state programs, but they’ve been surviving political sabotage for decades. And 99+% of individual creatives never see a dime of that money anyway.
He can threaten and bribe media to act as censors for him, but they’re already at war with artists, replacing us with AI and churning out slop-buckets of conformist garbage.
At the federal level, there’s no infrastructure, no organization, not even any money – no way for him to blanket-crush us the way he blanket-cut-off everyone else’s funding and blanket-pardoned his pet insurrectionists.
This was true in McCarthy’s day, too, but back then limited technology allowed media companies to own the means of cultural production. You had to go through Big Media to make movies and television, publish books, record and distribute music, etc. McCarthy could attack speech indirectly, evading the First Amendment, by attacking the companies the arts depended on with bogus national security claims. And they were only too happy to serve up sacrificial victims, such as the Hollywood Ten.
Even so, censorship mainly hit corporate media, while in the greater art world, that period saw a flood of innovative, avant-garde, politically charged, and socially challenging creativity. How? I’ll get back to that.
And let’s remember, the 2020s are not the 1950s. Thanks to modern technology, artists today are more independent than we’ve been in centuries. And as the US’s red-headed stepchildren, we are used to self-funding our projects with no corporate middlemen (because we’re not that profitable). If you want to know what real-life “bootstrapping” looks like, consult an indie creative. It’s not as glamorous as the oligarchs make out.
When Trump comes for the arts, lacking any kind of structure or leverage, he’ll find it’s like emptying the ocean with his hands. He’ll have to terrorize each one of us individually, and nobody even knows how many of us, professional and amateur, there are. I don’t see him doing that for very long, do you?
II. Especially since the second reason his culture war will fail is that there’s no there there on his side, either.
The culture war has always been fake – mere inflammatory slogans, and the more ephemeral and illusory the scapegoats, the better they serve to enrage and divide people.
When you turn the concept into a thing, however, then you have problems.
So Clementine Caligula takes over the Kennedy Center. Whatever. It’s just a theater. It’s not attached to anything. No dominoes will fall, nor ripples spread because of it. This hostile takeover will thud into nothing, just like the thousands more hostile takeovers he’ll have to do if he wants to make a moral crusade of it.
And none of it will actually impact the arts.
The Kennedy Center is just a theater like any other. It is legendary only because of the audience that goes there. Its association with the Presidency makes it a favorite venue for wealthy art patrons – the glitterati whom Trump envies and hates to his rotten core.
By an amusing coincidence, many of them are also among the country’s biggest political donors. Oops.
But that glamorous world he resents is completely separate from the sweaty, ink- and paint-stained, 80+ hours/week world where art is actually made. Artists and Kennedy Center patrons exist in different realities, only crossing paths briefly at a few events per year.
Magaists don’t realize this because they never see either artists or art. All they see are the glitterati, and their own culture war slogans, through the filter of their angry fantasies.
By grabbing the Kennedy Center, Trump made the fantasy real and revealed its emptiness. Like he always does.
Meanwhile, we artists keep on working. Like we always do.
The Plan of Action Part:
But the McCarthyist threat has been made, and the malicious, destructive intent behind it is more real than Trump himself. It must be understood to be counteracted.
The Red Scare, the blacklist, today’s culture war, even the First Amendment fights over Black history, women’s history, and trans representation – none of that is really about the arts. The books, artworks, shows and films being defunded and banned don’t actually matter to fascists. We are not the fascists’ true targets. We are just a means to an end.
They really mean it when they go after the news media, because journalists confront them head-on, exposing their secrets. They understand that kind of threat to their power. That’s a hard danger to them.
They don’t see artists that way. To them, we’re just a bunch of farty flibberty-gibbits who can’t take a punch. But lots of people like us, so they go after us to get to those other people – the public, We the People.
They destroy the arts because art is personal and emotional, and they want to hurt and scare the people and tell them they can’t have anything private, anything just their own. The fascists have to be the center of their attention.
It’s like the abuser who punishes a child by putting down their pet.
They see artists as weak, disposable, something someone else loves, and no more threat to them than so many puppies.
They think that way because they are stupid. They can only understand the hard danger of direct confrontation. They don’t understand the soft danger of the arts.
Journalism is about information. The arts are about hearts and minds. Journalism tells you what happened. The arts tell you how to feel about it. Journalism speaks in plain words and clear images. The arts speak a subtle, even subliminal, language of symbolism and emotion. Art can deliver its messages without anyone being aware what it’s doing, let alone able to pinpoint its methods.
This brings us back to the outpouring of challenging art in the 1950s despite McCarthy’s pogroms.
I guarantee that any maga-fascist who happens to read this essay will laugh at me right about now. This is such self-soothing copium bullshit, right? Art is crap.
That’s what the McCarthyists thought. We are nothing to them. They can’t detect our signals or break our codes. They don’t get our banter. They don’t see anything in us that is target-worthy in our own right. Unless they want to drown a puppy to make children cry, they pay us no attention.
And that’s how the 1950s was full of American art, literature, drama, and music that protested injustice, called out corruption, challenged social and moral norms, critiqued the church, the government, the draft, specific news events, etc., and included the voices of people of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, and more.
Artists even went after McCarthyism itself. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, came out in 1953, the height of the Scare just before its collapse.
So what does this mean? What should we do right now?
Make Art.
That’s what we should do.
I realize it sounds glib to play up all this drama and end with telling people to carry on as they’ve been doing, but hear me out.
I believe the most direct, foundational form of protest is to keep doing the things the oppressors don’t want us to do. This is related to Timothy Snyder’s advice, “do not obey in advance,” i.e. don’t cede our agency, our liberty, our principles to appease the autocrat.
I amend that advice to simply this: Don’t Obey. Full stop. Forget “in advance.” Don’t obey ever.
Fascists want artists to shut up because, if we shut up, others will, too. They think that, if they silence artists, they will have taken something personal, something intimate and meaningful to the people – our cultural identity – and the people will become demoralized and will submit.
But they can’t silence us by force. Instead, they try to scare or depress us into silencing ourselves to appease them, and then they’ll take the credit for having done it to us, and everyone will fear them, and they’ll win. That’s what the blacklists, book bans, censorship, and mobs are for – to get us to stop making art.
So how should we respond to that?
By making art, that’s how.
But Jen, I sense you shouting, how???? I want to fight fascism, but I’m tired and confused and stressed and poor. How am I supposed to do this?
I hear you. Your concerns are legitimate, but this is doable. Plenty of experts on this stuff (and how fucked up is it that there are experts on this stuff?) offer tips on sustainable resistance. Here are a few that are working for me, so far. Your mileage may vary, but give them a try:
1. Breathe.
Deep, cleansing breaths, calm and grounded. Attacks on the arts are psychological warfare, intended to scare and upset people, but it only works if we let it into our heads. When you feel the tension rising inside, take a break. Get off the internet. Go outdoors. Go to your work or practice space, and do your creative exercises. Natural light and art are literally, neurologically, the best tonic for calming the nerves and mind. Apply liberally as needed.
2. Protect yourself.
Beef up your cyber security. Get your own website, backed up offline, so your work is not dependent on any corporate platform. If you’re a creative employee, start an independent side hustle, and have a lawyer look over your employment/contract terms re ownership and exclusivity. Save your money. Choose whom you allow into your personal circle, even as you reach out to the world. No more universal love and light, kumbaya, all are welcome bullshit. Take anyone’s money, but vet your friends.
3. Connect.
It will fall to all of us to look out for each other and to support and protect the vulnerable. Collaborate with your fellow artists. Network within your communities. Pour energy into local arts cooperatives and mutual aid groups (after vetting them, of course). Network across interest groups, too, for practical support with living costs, political action, legal services, schooling, even sharing healthy food and consumer goods.
Footnote: Avoid excessive ideological purity. When vetting the people you bring in and the groups you collaborate with, keep your ethical standards high, but judge people more on their values and actions than their labels. We will need carefully chosen friends in police departments, for example.
4. Keep it sustainable.
This is an “in it for the duration” situation, so don’t try to do it all on your own, and don’t put unreasonable pressure on yourself. Assess your skills, interests, passions, resources, obligations, personality. Ask yourself realistically what kinds of actions, artistic, economic, political, etc., fit with what you can do going forward. Make a manageable list, and do those things, knowing there are millions of other people making similar assessments and lists. Carry your weight, and trust others to carry theirs.
And if some don’t, kick ‘em and carry on with those who do. Part of sustainability has to be not wasting energy on the uncooperative.
5. Be Kryptonite.
Existence is Resistance. Being an artist is resistance. Choosing who you will or won’t work for is resistance. Choosing where you will or won’t spend your money is resistance. Growing a garden, sewing your clothes, sharing with neighbors, teaching children, cleaning rivers – all that stuff is the resistance, because it undoes or undermines what the fascists are trying to impose on us. So live your life on your own terms, not just in reaction against what they do. Don’t force yourself into fighting fascism as a separate, additional thing you must do. Being a free human being is the fight against fascism. So when you’re figuring out how to be in the fight, consider all the things you do every day and try to do them in a way, with an energy, that makes them toxic to fascism. Thus, just by your existence, you are poisoning the well of that evil ideology. Then everything else you add to your to-do list is gravy. Liberty gravy.
No sugarcoating. The world is in trouble. There is a disease in our body politic, and it will take more than just ousting the current crop of villains to cure it.
We in the arts, being the cultural influencers, have a vital role to play. We may be disorganized and freaked-out, but this is our moment to do what we do. Win hearts and minds. Soothe shattered nerves. Awaken atrophied senses. Guide the narratives, and shine light in the darkness.
So breathe, hydrate, touch grass. And keep making art.
-Jen
Illustrated with details from my collage. XIX. The Sun, symbolically relevant on many levels.
Today begins the year of the Wood Snake according to the Chinese lunar calendar. In the Chinese zodiac, it seems snakes are associated with wisdom and calm, grounded dispositions, something I think we could all benefit from this year. Last night, I wrote this:
Snow is falling on my street Slow and light Bright against the night
The wind calmed down at last. I draw the blind across the glass and go to bed.
They say the wind will blow again tomorrow So tonight I sleep in blankets deep and the silence of the snow falling on my street.
I started writing this at 10 to midnight on January 20, 2025. By the time I finish and certainly by the time you read this, we will be well into a new day.
But as of starting, Monday was bad.
As my subscribers know too well, I do not hesitate to express my political opinions in this art and writing blog. Marketing people always say you shouldn’t do that. You want your audience to get to know you, but only the sellable you, the SEO-friendly you, the positive, unchallenging, amusing version of you that won’t turn away potential sales. Not the you that might not be universally palatable to all demographics at all times. Nobody wants to see that crap.
But you know what – fuck that noise.
That’s job advice – the cubicle-jockey concept of professionalism. Trust me, I have jockeyed enough cubicles in my life to know that the conventional wisdom against being abrasive or opinionated, against publicly taking a stand on issues, against bringing your personal views into the work space, is all about maintaining the work flow of your boss’s business.
And it’s good advice as far as it goes. It’s the right way to behave when you’re working for someone else. It’s especially good advice for anyone who is getting paid to represent someone else’s image or brand.
But it doesn’t apply here because I’m not an employee. I don’t have a boss to answer to. I am the boss in this space.
Jen Fries Arts is the portal into my studio. When you come here, you’re an honored and welcome guest in my house, but I don’t work for you, so I don’t have to separate myself from my work.
As a business-owner, which is what an independent creative is, my professionalism is about delivering goods on time and within agreed terms and dealing in good faith. It’s not about sucking up. It’s not about putting on a mask and lying to you about who you are following on this site.
That’s why, when bad things happen in the USA, where I live, I post statements about them. Long-time readers will be aware that I am firmly anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, -sexist, -transphobe, etc., firmly pro-democracy and civil rights, an ally to marginalized people, and, especially, pro-Earth.
I make statements because I’m a future-oriented Aquarius sun INTJ with a fiery Sagittarius moon and pragmatic Virgo ascendant, so when shit happens, I must confront it and declare my path over, under, around, or through it.
Well, on January 20th, shit happened. It was probably the worst non-personal day of my life so far. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
To be blunt, as of 1/20/2025, a new Confederacy is in charge of the USA, and this country is at war with itself.
I know a lot of experts will balk and start parsing legal definitions and splitting historical hairs – and I certainly can’t argue with them – but personally, I’m ready to call it. Civil conflict.
It’s been brewing as a cold war in politics and the media for many years, but it turned hot on Jan 6th, 2021, when Donald Trump instigated a violent mob to attack the US Capitol with the aim of overturning the 2020 election. I don’t care what the magaists say, we all saw it.
We beat back that attempt on that day, but, stupidly, we did not press our advantage. We did not root out the corruption in our institutions. We did not defend our Constitution. We failed in our civic duty.
And sure enough, our enemies came back for another round. This time, emboldened by lack of consequences, there’s no pretense, no mask, no cubicle-politeness. They are out to destroy people they hate. Simple as. You can find the details all over the news media. I won’t go into it here, but the rightwing’s extremism is cartoonish in its malice and cavalier abandonment of law.
He said he’d be a dictator on Day One, and here we are. Now the question is, what will he be on Day Two?
Or rather, will there be a Day Two at all? Or will January 21, 2025, be another Day One – the first day of a new American independence movement?
I’m no billionaire oligarch, media mogul, or A-list celebrity who goes to bend the knee and kiss the ass for favors and privilege.
I’m just a working stiff like millions of others, barely scraping by. I don’t have to beg Mango Mussolini not to push me off some high perch. I may speak as I please and create as I speak. So here goes.
When I talk about civil conflict, I’m not talking about armies seizing cities and carving out territories. That’s not going to happen.
However, I’m also not talking about a bloodless coup or some kind of paper secession program worked out in courtrooms. People have died by political violence in the US in recent years, both before and since 1/6. I do believe there will be more of that.
We are entering a dark time, and we will all be caught up in it, one way or another. It will not be possible to pretend it’s not happening, as we have for so many generations till now. Everyone is going to have to choose how to relate to these times and its belligerent factions.
But what could I possibly do, broke-ass, minor creative and isolated individual that I am, with neither money nor connections? What can any of us do, realistically?
Well, realistically, we can think about this very question. We can think seriously about how we define ourselves as human beings. That itself is an action, a response, to our present moment.
We will all be defined by world events, whether we participate or not. Everything we do from now on will come with moral assumptions and judgments attached. No, it’s not fair, and it should’t be this way, but it is because that’s how deep the civil conflict has saturated the fabric of society. Literally everything we do tells the world who we are.
And that’s where I come in – I and all creatives, big and small, maybe especially small.
Because we artists, storytellers, poets and singers, designers and artisans, actors, dancers, etc., are the real influencers.
Sorry to all the modern influencers on the internet, for whom that cynical title was invented. I’m glad they earn decent money, but artists have been the cultural influencers for thousands of years, and we’re still here.
We’re here, and we are not going to be replaced by AI or rendered irrelevant by artificially shortened attention spans because what we do is core human stuff. We adjust with the times, but fundamentally, there is little difference between what artists do today and what the cave painters were doing 40,000 years ago. When a thing’s got legs like that, it’s not a fad. Art is fundamental.
Creatives channel the vibes of society. We interpret world conditions. We explain, contextualize, and set the narratives. We comfort, reassure, encourage, excite, and sometimes scold, challenge, and hold to account. We create the culture references everyone turns into memes. We bring people together in mutual recognition.
We are the bards who raise kings with praises and tear them down again with satires. We open minds, get people curious, thinking, and talking. We are dangerous to power, and that’s why the powerful censor us, slander and denigrate us, cut us out of school curricula, ban our books.
Granted, too many of us have slacked off. We’ve let ourselves fall into self-indulgence and the complacency of thinking we’ll never amount to anything if we don’t reach some unnecessary level of wealth in some impossible time frame so why even bother. We’ve allowed ourselves and our profession to be made ridiculous playing out banana and duct tape kayfabes with the ultra-rich.
That’s got to stop, right now.
This is the Information Age. Control of thought is the key to power, and very bad people have seized that deep power via disinformation, distraction, propaganda, and censorship. They have woven webs of confusion and fear around every mind they can reach. The damage is profound.
And there is no one – no tech developer, political leader, college professor, or tragically today, journalist – better equipped to break through those webs than artists. I truly believe this.
Because what they do is fake. What we do is real. They tell lies. We cast magic. They spin webs. We build worlds. When the artists wake up, we will wake up the world.
So wake the hell up, artists. It’s work time.
You may be thinking, “What the frik are you talking about, Jen? You just make collages and nature pictures and sometimes weird shit with bones and junk, and nobody knows who you are. How can you wake up the world?”
Recall, I said this may come down to small artists like me.
Why? Because we are your friendly neighborhood artists. The regular, working people whose art is hanging in regular, working people’s houses all over the country. We’re the bands playing in local bars, the writers giving talks to community book clubs. We teach classes down at the Y and paint kids’ faces at municipal fairs. We set the style and look of a community with park sculptures and downtown murals.
People know us, and we know them. We have the ability to get inside their heads, to bypass the programming of social media, 24/7 news, and ideological podcasts, and stir up memories, emotions, connections.
We can plant the seeds of better possibilities and better choices. We can set ripples in motion that have the potential to grow into tsunamis.
I’m talking about the work of artists supporting a grassroots awakening against the malefactors of the new fascism. I’m talking about a counter-culture that can help dissolve the webs we are trapped in.
How we do it will vary artist to artist. We’re all different. Some of us offer healing and therapy. Some, reassurance or respite. Others are rabble-rousers, whistleblowers.
Myself, I’m into raising consciousness. I seek to awaken awareness of a larger world and deeper experiences. You’d be surprised – it’s pretty effective. Anyway, that’s the kind of artist I am.
And this long-winded essay aims to raise the consciousness of my fellow artists.
It is time now for all of us to think about what kind of artists we are.
I would like all of my colleagues, all creatives, pro and amateur, in every medium and genre, to take some time and think about what we are putting out into the world, what we want to be putting out there, what we should be putting out there.
How can we, with our small, human abilities, contribute to building a better world?
Many of us will start dissembling. “I just play piano.” “I just do pet portraits.” “I just make drawings.”
Stop that! There is no “just” in art. All art is more that it appears, because there’s a human behind it.
Quit belittling yourself. Own your work, your thoughts, your dreams. Create, share, teach. Speak freely, and let the only words you never say again be those self-poisoning apologies for your existence.
The world needs us because tyrants fear us. They fear our doodles, ditties, and dog drawings, because they can’t control how our work lands with the people. Neither can we, but we don’t want to. Art liberates.
So that’s my assignment to myself, and my call to all of you: Create. Express. Do the things, no matter how nuts. Communicate. Cooperate.
And above all, speak truth to the people around us, because truth is the first victim of autocracy.
It’s now January 22. Writing this took me all of Day One of the New Movement. Thus it begins.
Illustrated with details from various of my works over various of my years.
Winter is a season of challenge and rest. It’s a time of stark beauty, quiet light, and endless space. In winter, we see right down to the fundamentals of things, and we make the most of what we’ve learned the rest of the year. Winter is the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. Here are some paintings and collages, celebrating this season of contrasts. Happy Holidays!
Jen Fries Arts 