THE FOUR HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE

The American Dream and
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse*:
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfled, & Wolfowitz

This painting, on primed Masonite, measuring 24 x 20 and image size 20 x 18, was finished in 2005. I thought of this painting when I was in Maine in 2004 and worked on it in Mexico in 2005. It includes photographs of President George W. Bush; Vice President Dick Cheney; then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; and Insider and Iraq war spokesperson Paul Wolfowitz. The four leading individuals who perpetrated the Iraq War are the high-powered principals in this war (Rumsfeld & Wolfowitz no longer in the Bush Administration); and the voices that have to answer to its engagement and final results.

One cannot change the history and this Administration cannot rewrite it to suit its needs.

I am willing to concede that the dictator-killer, no good leader of Iraq, Sadam Hussein, is best dead. But the war, with its killing of tens of thousands of Iraq civilians and thousands of America’s finest men and women, although fought bravely was lost by mismanagement and arrogance. I can’t pin the blame for the present [2007] disastrous results on any one of these Four Horsemen without considering the involvement of one or the other in the process of war strategy and creation and management. Therefore, as an artist, I take the liberty of lumping them together in this artistic collage and mixed media painting as well as appropriating as a noun Apocalypse in the title: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse**.

The painting is not political—not my one-sided view of events. The painting is an expression of my bewilderment on how we got to where we are. Commenced in 1993 [beginning of the Iraq War] on a false intelligence of the “imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction” and allowed to happen by the failure of the world community to halt the war fervor in the West Wing of the White House; the four horsemen trampled “truth” in favor of “half-truths” and more than likely “lies” —the Nation marched to war—un-united. Once on the path to a war, this CNN TV special event war, now in its fifth year has come to cost the United States its history of respect throughout the world—not to mention the many American lives lost and the economic costs future Americans will have to pay for the debt it has amassed.

There is not much that can be undone or corrected, even the inevitable ending to this tragic wasteful war remains not in sight. We seem to have only posturing by Congressional Democrats and Republicans and find our Nation with an Administration inept—not able to resolve its failures.

This Bush war cannot be said to be the cause for the decline in values that once were building blocks for the American middle-class; however it is a factor of great importance in the resulting demise of the middle-class.

So:

The American Dream is dead.

And while, President Bush alone did not kill it, he is at its gravesite, shoveling dirt on
its coffin.

So, for all his lofty words and pronouncements of support for the American Dream, it remains rhetoric..

His West Wing cadre of supporters is merely doing the Texas Two Step, ignoring the demise of the American middle class, whose members struggle mightily to maintain their self-worth, while the upper class secures more than its due share of the American Dream.

And now, the American people lapse into economic insecurity facing even more, higher, unneeded risk in their lives.

Many will come to wonder how the American Dream was lost and how the U.S. Constitution that begins, “We the People” is now so stained by crass materialism and so dishonored by those entrusted to its loving care.

So, shovel away. ***

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* The four horsemen of the apocalypse are described in Revelation chapter 6, verses 1-8. The four horsemen are symbolic descriptions of different events which will take place in the end times.
** “An apocalypse is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.” J. J. Collins, "Apocalyptic Literature," Dictionary of New Testament Backgrounds, eds. Craig A. Evans and Stanley Porter (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000): 41.

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