Balloon Frog, Peace Someday
Why would this classic liberal artist feel revulsion at Portland News8 blowing valentines to costumed agitators? Well…
First, I’ll confess to laughing.
Puffy cartoons & furries prance, perchance to clumsy dance, wriggling & swarming before a phalanx of AI.GI.JOE.GOV …disarming as intended.
This charm offensive subverts an older meme, the cold-tones of darker green outcasts banished to backwater social pools of self-owned Conservatives, Rejects & Alternate-Right as Pepe Frog, hijacked and re-made… P-Pe-Peace Frog …and the crowd goes wild!
Please, take care.
Move slowly & nobody gets hurt.
You may be suffering narrative whiplash… that neck twist from tracking political sonic booms — already fading as you scratch your head, surprise filling eyes with wonder.
First Blood, drawn in bright alien green
We watch vying groups each claiming public frog favor.
Portland Pepe is meme example of Counter Gangs, in-line with BLM & Antifa as street-minions to power in XXIst century Epiwars. Epistemology comes from cosmology, religion, the philosophy informing a life. How we define what we know & can do as our limits, or goals. The measure of your world is what you are counting, your own jar of marbles. The battle of ideas is a war for your mind. Learning & exploring resets limits, and how that changes what victory can mean.
Pepe Frog has been a solid symbol for reactionary conservatives over a decade. Growing spontaneously to become a stand-in for an alienated outsider group viewed as Other; alien, reptile, devolved.
Now, that same outsider group is ascendant, winning political power in dramatic ways conventional neoliberals sting from dramatic recent losses to status beyond ballot boxes. Game theory gives advantages to aggressive choice & action.
“…they’re turning The Gay’s into Frogs!”
— Al3x Jon3s Clon3s
Narrative Management
We have the grand French tale of Revolution for Liberty, Brotherhood, Equality that froze western political archetypes into color & turf gangs. We are told our very Ship of State runs Portside as one color, Starboard for another team - and this dynamic is somehow intrinsic, ‘emergent’, reflecting some basic of human nature. However, Always-Blue to True-Red, was never full-spectrum political thinking.
Stealing Valor is Counting Coup
Labels and social values around Left<->Right political allegiances works for small groups dividing & controlling larger populations. Confusion is a goal. Contradiction is a win. Opposites lend power to those slippery wormtongues.
Our schools and media only teach & show a very limited range of views. Excluding some values & methods while exaggerating minor, vestigial, issues purposely divides people & incentivizes conflict, it subverts social relations to reward conflict with attention, position, resources. Choose your flavor of Democracy from the provided popup menu, please.
One side wants Mommy-energy setting firm rules, like strict Racial Thinks & Green Energy, another prefers vigor of Daddy-assertions, say Only Two Sexes. Conservatives want sorters of disorder and givers of protocol. Liberals expect forever feeding and always-approval coziness. Both sides stuck, dead-end cantilevered-out at one end of political spectrum. Nudged, or shoved, gather to fight for political breathing room. Scarcity & constant threat-dynamics keep almost-allies knocking each other off perch as enemies, when public Agrees more than Not. Congress or Parliament, Oval Office or Throne, rarely answers to public polling, or sentiments. We have not demanded great thought or leadership; instead fear-weary we finally settled for the comfortable discomfort of Authoritarian. Americans, at last Passive.
Fear, wait. To be told.
When, to be helpless.
New flavors of fear.
Lives On Hold, waiting for the All Clear siren,
or Joseph Campbell’s latest Super Hero arrives… maybe wearing a frog suit?
Permission Granted!
“When deception works,
it is the most elegant and
least expensive manipulation”
-Vernor Vinge, Fire Upon The Deep
I shame the Peace Frog
Agit-Prop Field Commanders like Maria Stephan, an effective PhD of Applied Chaos, drags her deep state banshee-screeching nails, to scraping, clawing, and gouging trails-of-tears across Global War on Terror chalkboards. Redraws human misery in broken bodies like shards of chalk & bent minds for colors of despair in Iraq, Yemen, & Libya.
