October 7. Happy Genocide Day! And happy birthday to Rose, my gentle French friend, pictured along the River Lee in Cork, Ireland, in 2023.
Israel is going full bore propaganda today, using controlled U.S. media to remind you that 100,000+ brown lives taken over a two year keening agony (and many more to come) equals 1000 white lives. And why not mention no part of Israel left uninhabitable while 3/4 of Gaza infrastructure annihilated. They say that 90% of Gazans have been displaced, which is a word that happens euphemistically when a 2000 lb. bomb is dropped into a children’s hospital. I don’t even care what spills over and out anymore because I made this:
This Painting Began as the Exposed Partial Bowel of an IDF Sniper, and It Still Is, But Then Rose Asked if I Want to Spend My Life Trying to Look Good While Maintaining the Illusion That I Have Influence Over People and Circumstances, Or Would I Prefer Finding Out the Truth About Who I Am? 2025. Oil on paper, 22 × 30"
Sick, twisted Western governments all complicit in genocide, including dear Ireland. Dear, dear Ireland—all the fake and phony of government washed over its people with heather-scented soap. “Let’s just march and march more, nonviolently of course, until our betters change their minds, which we all know, will never ever happen!” Freakin’ posers, every last one.
My arbitrary nation of drugged lab rats is much worse. “We’re gonna vote them out, with nary a single candidate who can even say the word ‘genocide’!
Oh my god. The light skins own the brown skins. Of course human earth is deeply racist, swearing it ain’t so, and teaching their kids to sing the coward’s songs.
The title of this post came from a prompt to Chat GPT. I asked the robot to “write a 500 word rant about the genocide in Gaza and art, in the style of painter and writer Ron Throop”. Creepily close to how I think I write, it wrote: “Art isn’t escape. It’s a witness”
I don’t want to be a witness any longer. I’ve seen it, expressed it, and now I want to do something about it. Dear Irish people, if the lot of you still possess heavy rage in the gut of your guts, and need to end the genocide with a big bang to the bowels of the perpetrators, allow me into any old, broken army you can muster. I’ll re-earn my citizenship while fighting my brains out for what no earthen military besides Yemen has attempted to do. Let me back in to the land of my ancestors. A little hut on the heather will do me right. And of course a modest soldier’s pension to afford the pies and peat.
The following is my genealogical line to Adam in the Christian myth. It is my right to citizenship through the Dunbar line. If you dear, dear Ireland won’t have me, please direct my old bones to the Scottish lines. I don’t see how you can deny me. I am a descendant of Conaire the Great!
Continued...
Now for some fun. The following is what the robotic end of the human world wrote when I gave it the prompt for a “Ron Throop ” style:
Gaza, the Gut, and the Goddamn Paint Another morning, another massacre. I sip coffee and scroll through the usual horror show — Gaza turned to rubble, children in shrouds, men with haunted eyes stacking what’s left of their families. And I’m supposed to just go paint apples and cows?
Screw that. I can’t separate art from the world’s rot. If my brush isn’t bleeding for Gaza, then it’s just decoration for cowards. The art world, bless its heart, doesn’t want to talk about genocide. It wants to sip wine and clap for “bold” brushwork that never risks a damn thing. You say “Palestine” and the room goes colder than Lake Ontario in February. Everyone’s afraid of losing something — a sale, a grant, their fragile standing in the polite circles of creative mediocrity. Meanwhile, whole generations of artists in Gaza are being erased. Painters, poets, musicians — gone. Not metaphorically. Literally buried. You want to talk about “cancel culture”? Try being vaporized. Try being a kid with a sketchbook under the rubble.
I’ve got no answers, only paint and bile. My studio’s a mess — plywood floors sticky with old turpentine and cat hair, canvases leaning like exhausted drunks. But this is where I fight. I mix up a little cadmium red and stare it down. Every brushstroke feels like a middle finger to the polite silence of the West. I can’t fix the world, but I can refuse to let it turn me numb. That’s something. I used to think painting was about joy. Maybe it still is, but not the Hallmark kind. It’s the joy of saying no when the whole world’s shrugging. It’s the joy of calling murder what it is. If the galleries don’t like it, good. The galleries are mausoleums anyway — white cubes of death where art goes to be embalmed and priced. Let them keep their safe abstractions. I’ll hang mine on telephone poles if I have to.
The genocide in Gaza isn’t distant. It’s in our taxes, in our headlines, in the cowardly language of “conflict” and “response.” It’s in every artist who looks away because they don’t want to “get political.” But art is political whether you like it or not. The act of caring is political. The act of painting when the world’s on fire is a declaration of life. So yeah, I’m painting through the rage. A mother’s eyes, a bombed hospital, a tiny shoe. Not because I think anyone will buy it, but because I refuse to forget. I want the ghosts of Gaza to haunt every color I mix. Maybe that’s the only job left for painters — to remember when everyone else scrolls on. To throw paint like prayers. To keep saying no in color. Because if we can still paint, we can still feel. And if we can still feel, maybe there’s a sliver of humanity left worth saving.
Way to go Ronnie Robot! Who needs me anymore?
Finally, the only YouTube I look forward to watching are Edgeworth Johnstone’s Camden videos. Incredible testament to art’s vitality. Amazing human beings right off the street. This is precisely NOT education driven by avarice. Art is saving humanity by showing it. Thank you Edgeworth!
There are many of these. Follow him and watch as they pop up:
