digital photography; two 12×19” and one 19×12″

“Darwin had it wrong. The weak and craven, the immoral and stupid can, sometimes, murder the strong, the moral, the just.

In that year, there was no art. Instead, platitudes were piled as high as the bodies. In that year, the vapid flew banners of rage and closed their ears to science, their minds to reason and their hearts to compassion.

In that year the willfully ignorant gorged themselves on empty rhetoric and pledged fealty, at all costs and under all circumstances, to the unctuous purveyors of hatred and lies. In that year, they worshipped and celebrated murder. They killed the sick and slew the elderly. They slaughtered children to make America great again. They killed without conscious and ignorance was their weapon.

They came together, dressed like circus freaks, and congratulated one and other. And all the while, they gleefully vomited prepacked justifications for their genocide. They killed for the flag and they murdered to honor non-existent gods. In that year, truth and originality and decency died. In that year, Darwin had it wrong.

In that year the banal digital straw men killed all novel thought. In that year the plastic and the precious crapped tele-prompted lies from their greasy mouths every hour; they equated the ignorant and the insightful, the hackneyed and the original and outright lies became the truth. Art died like the back-alley fetuses they claimed to love. In the end we were left to worship, to create with the dead and dying, the little that remained. In that year, nothing else remained.”

ARTIST BIO: Michael Kearns is a writer and photographer who lives in Milford, Ohio with his beloved Rebecca and their sons. In that place they also harbor two strange cats, and three bizarre dogs.