The Emperor’s New Faith

by frje Echeverria

38" x 36" • acrylic, paint cups, bamboo brush, tubes of acrylic, stretched canvas, printed pages, and charcoal on canvas

I am never not amazed by how creative work can be so inclusive of all of one’s experience. Some weeks before I had even thought of what I might do for what has now become the We Protest Show, and for reasons not even directly connected to my own work in painting, I was combing the internet looking for Chinese poems I had not read for a few decades so I could to see how they would seem to me now. You know how wonderful it can be to revisit a place and use one’s older eyes to see it, and one’s more alert mind to know it. I knew of Po Chu I and Li Po; Du Fu was a new discovery. When I began to consider the Show and the theme of peace and war I remembered the poets and that they had written on war. It seemed important that these artists had been born 1200 years ago and share my sentiments about war. You know how sometimes we can feel so much in the minority that we take heart when we find ancient ones who share our sensation of life. So I determined to copy these poems and combine them with my painted version of Bush as shown on the dust jacket of the book: The Faith of George W. Bush, by Stephen Mansfield. So at this moment, as I write this on the Monday after the show deadline and before the show opens, while perusing the book: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, I have just chanced on two other voices, one of someone born much later, 1711, David Hume. And in the same book lines from Simone Weill, born 1909. Here they are: David Hume, from: A Treatise on Human Nature When our own nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent; But always esteem ourselves and allies as equitable, moderate, and merciful. If the general of our enemies be successful, ‘tis with difficulty we allow him the figure and character of a man. He is a sorcerer; He has a communication with daemons; as is reported of Oliver Cromwell, and the Duke of Luxemborg: He is bloody-minded, and takes a pleasure in death and destruction. But if the success be on our side, our commander has all the opposite good qualities, and is a pattern of virtue, as well as of courage and conduct. His treachery we call policy: his cruelty an evil inseparable from war. In short, every one of his faults we either endeavour to extenuate, or dignify it with the name of that virtue, which approaches it. It is evident the same method of thinking runs thro’ common life. Simon Weill, from: The Iliad, or: The Poem of Force Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.