Posted on September 27, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
There’s a debate raging in the republican ranks. They are dropping the elephant as their branding mascot in favor of either a sheep or a lemming. If I had a vote I’d go with lemming.
The animal symbol most associated with cowardice is, of course, the chicken but the committee eliminated the chicken as a possibility since they did not want to create a possible rooster confusion. Roosters are symbols of great fighters and protectors and that would be misleading in the republican re-brand.
Think about it. In the past week we’ve seen the most egregious breach of the first amendment in modern history. We’ve witnessed the president publicly call for the prosecution of his enemies while simultaneously telling the assembled leaders of the UN that they are destroying their countries. There are crickets from the grand ole party. Not a word. Not a spine. And, through it all, the party of “family values” actively protects the identities of a legion of pedophiles lurking in the Epstein files. A complete abdication of responsibility; an abandonment of reason and morality.
Sheep? Lemmings? Both have merit. Maybe a chimera! A symbolic creature made from the parts of lemmings, sheep and chicken! A chilemshep. A lemchickpeep.
Supine: failing to act or protest as a result of moral weakness. Who knew that “supine” and “republican” were interchangeable words!
In Japan the clematis is a symbol of moral beauty. Consider it.
There are very few adequate synonyms for the word ‘beauty’ yet we know without doubt what it means. It’s a word of the senses. It is felt in the heart. It is a cup overflowing with awe and appreciation.
On the other hand, the word ‘moral’ has many, many synonyms. Virtue. Doing the right thing. Honest. Decent. Truthful. Upright. Right-minded. Just plain good. And from these adjectives – descriptions of a quality of being – we experience the undefinable: beauty.
Moral beauty. The clematis climbs. It aspires to reach new heights. Things that climb are often associated with gaining broader perspective and, therefore, wisdom attained from the experience of climbing, of overcoming obstacles, of persevering. From the heights – and the journey to get there – we see the landscape and our inner landscape more clearly. We are more capable of discerning between what is important and what is not, what has value and what does not, what is honest and what is not.
The clematis blossoms. Our blossom is called moral beauty.
It is why many of us shudder watching the ugly amorality goosestepping across this nation. It is a descent into darkness. Indecent. Dishonest. Wrong-minded. Synonyms of ‘ugly’ include perilous, dangerous, hostile, menacing, ominous. Are these not perfect descriptors of ICE?
The clematis climbs.
The nation falls.
Rather than beauty our nation reveres an alligator infested swamp. It champions a liar. Narrow minds threaten and erase greater perspectives. This nation, once a beacon of hope is now afraid of the light. Rather than overcome real obstacles, our leaders manufacture them to fuel outrage and circumvent and/or undermine the Constitution. Ignorance bellows over wisdom. History is whitewashed. The truth is hidden away in the files.
I return to the question, “What do we do?” The clematis climbs. It overcomes. It perseveres. We need not fall into the muddy pit.
It occurs to me that we have in our tradition a Golden Rule. It begins with the word “do”. It provides guidance for what we might do as a first step: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
It is a wisdom that comes from standing upon the heights after a difficult climb. That is why it is so simple. Do Empathy. Do Reciprocity. Do Consideration. Do Generosity. Do Kindness. Isn’t that what we want done unto us?
We know what to do, don’t we? We know where to start, don’t we?
“The American people just got a taste of authoritarianism wrapped in judicial robes. In a stunning 6-3 ruling this week, the Supreme Court greenlit the mass deportation of immigrants, not to their home countries but to third nations where they have no legal status…Whether it’s a camp outside Kraków or a deportation center in Guatemala, the strategy is the same: create a zone of moral invisibility. A legal no-man’s-land where acts that would outrage decent people become routine, because they happen far away, beyond the reach of media, law, and conscience.” ~Thom Hartmann, Moral Cleansing, American Style, June 25, 2025
A zone of moral invisibility. Hear no evil, see no evil. Poof! Not only do the people disappear but so does our responsibility. So do our rights since due processwas a right that applied to all people, not just citizens. Note for emphasis: I just wrote the word “was” in reference to a fundamental right that no longer “is”. The Supreme Court, supposed guardians of our Constitution – protectors of our fundamental rights – just discarded the 14th Amendment:
…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
And along with discarding due process, habeas corpus goes with it. Wrongful imprisonment with no recourse is now – according to six members of our Supreme-Kangaroo*-Court – permitted in The United States of America.
We are officially no longer a government of laws; we are by this ruling a government of whim.
“You may think this only affects immigrants. But consider: the legal precedent now exists for the government to forcibly remove someone from U.S. soil and drop them in another country without due process. Today it’s asylum seekers. Tomorrow, who knows?” ~ Thom Hartmann
What’s gonna happen? I don’t know. No one does – but if history provides a clue it paints a mighty bleak picture.
*Kangaroo Court (noun) – an unofficial court held by a group of people in order to try someone regarded, especially without good evidence, as guilty of a crime or misdemeanor.
“In the art world, lines are a fundamental element used to create a wide variety of effects. They can define shapes, create movement, guide the viewer’s eye…” ~A-I Overview to my inquiry about lines in art
I confess that I am having a hard time. I’m in the middle of a mini-moral crisis.
I’ve written this blog since 2010. I set out to write about positive things, affirmations and stories of the best of us. At the time I began writing I was traveling around the nation, working with incredible people everywhere I went, so I had a bucketful of stories to share, celebrating the best of the human spirit. Kerri and I began writing our Melange 382 weeks ago. We had so much art and music in our folios and files and we wanted to bring them into the light of day. Sharing the best of us – another way of celebrating the human spirit.
After all of these years I enjoy a small but enormously appreciated (by me) audience.
Lately, I am aware, that my daily writing and my focus is not about celebrating the best of us but has almost exclusively become about ringing an alarm against the worst of us. I am sometimes snarky. I am mostly horrified at how dulled we as a nation have become to the outrageous. I am alarmed at our normalization of the monstrous, the disappearance of Congress, the collapse of the system of checks and balances.
Each day I have a chat with myself about staying focused on the positive but I am lately finding that to be naive to the point of dangerous; it is akin to sticking my head in the sand or plugging my ears so I hear no evil.
Each day, more and more people are being swept off our streets. Each day, they are denied due process. This morning I’ve been reading – and verifying – accounts about the unnecessary death of a Haitian woman in one of our many overcrowded detention centers. The conditions are appalling. She is not the first. She will not be the last. Her crime: trying to escape abject poverty and enter the land of the free and the home of the brave.
90% of the people – human beings – are being held without due process in privately run detention centers that are by many accounts no better than concentration camps. Think about it: “privately run” means that they are detention-for-profit; the more people swept up and crammed into these camps the more money they make. Inhumanity with a profit incentive.
Which brings me to my moral crisis. I am both a visual and theatre artist. I know how to create movement that guides a viewer’s eye. I know how to make an audience see in a story what I want them to see. I also know how to prevent them from seeing what I don’t want them to see. It’s akin to the magician’s trick. Create a distraction so the mechanics of the trick go unnoticed. Our national media are masters of distraction. They make rather than report news.
We-the-people are being distracted. We are being pitted against each other so we do not look at the magic trick that is making our rights – and the rights of others – disappear. We are not supposed to see what is happening in the detention centers – we are not supposed to know how our taxes are being used, what we are paying for, what we are creating: a police state.
Follow the lines. It is not so hard to see what we are not supposed to see. It’s ugly. A president ignoring the law, exploiting brutal immigration sweeps to incite violence, manufacture an “insurrection” in order to turn the military against citizens. The suspension of elections will surely follow. The sweeps will include voices of opposition.
It is morally irresponsible to look the other way. It’s morally reprehensible to say, “There’s nothing we can do about it,” or “I didn’t vote for this,” or “I had no idea what was happening,” or “This doesn’t impact me.” It is fundamentally immoral to pretend that this is something that we “Can’t talk about.” It is depraved to roll along as if the current course of this nation is anything other than ethically bankrupt. People are dying, being held without due process in deplorable circumstances. And we-the-people are paying for it. We don’t like where the lines lead so we change the channel. We look the other way or swallow whole-cloth the media spin.
What is my responsibility to write? To paint? To draw? How can I celebrate the human spirit, the best of us, when the leaders of the nation are every day grinning at, applauding and investing in brutality, taking delight in human misery? And our tax dollars are making it possible.
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” ~ Helen Keller
A mile to the west it is 75 degrees and sunny. Here, by the lake, it is foggy and 10 degrees cooler. The inland heat meets the cool lake water and produces a layer of thick fog. Standing on our front porch we cannot see the end of the street.
It is quiet in our pocket of fog. Today I welcome the protective solitude it inspires. It provides a magical respite from the happenings of the world. Fog brings permission to unplug, some breathing space from the news of the day. Sitting on the back deck I imagine that we are on the shores of Avalon, disappearing into the mist, becoming invisible to the rest of the troubled, enraged world.
In the Arthurian legend, Avalon is a magical, mystical place. It is symbolic as a place of virtue.
Virtue requires vision. Choose any adjective that describes virtue – goodness, morality, integrity, dignity, honor… – all serve a clear ideal. A vision. A vision based on the capacity to discern between right and wrong, truth and lie, service and exploitation. A vision that follows a steadfast moral compass.
By this or any standard, our current leadership has sight but no vision. The milksop Republicans in Congress play cowboy while sacrificing themselves on an alter of greed. How else do we make sense of their dedicated impotence in the face of the worst constitutional crisis in our nation’s history? It’s a crisis that they could stop in a day if they honored their oath to the Constitution. If they did their jobs. The Republican president sells the national soul to the highest bidder, personal profit the glutton-master he and his peers serve. A fall from grace, our isle of vice is not disappearing into a fog of uncertainty, rather it reveals itself in the harsh light of moral indifference, it adorns itself in a festival blanket of foxy-lies producing angry maga-followers awash in a cultish brain fog. Sight without vision.
There is nothing mystical going on here. The unprincipled disavowal of ethics, the blatant bribery and unbridled greed, the hard right turn away from truth and democratic ideals – all happening in plain sight – renders us worse than blind.
Is it any wonder I welcome the fog and imagine myself disappearing into the quiet of the mystical island, a sanctuary symbolic of virtue?
Years ago we created a single panel cartoon called At The Door. The image never changed: DogDog and BabyCat sitting at the front door, staring out into the world. Dogga, ever the idealist conversing with a hyper-cynical BabyCat. No syndicate wanted our cartoon so we let it slip quietly into the portfolio of “tried but no takers”.
Smack-Dab is a cartoon that we never intended to syndicate. It was – and is – for fun. The dirty little secret of Smack-Dab is that I’ve never drawn any of it. Kerri has always cobbled it together from earlier Chicken Marsala panels, mixing and matching images that she plucked from one of the hundreds of Chicken strips. That was, until her computer died. Her Photoshop capacity died with it and, being a child of the Depression, she refuses to replace it as long as her dinosaur iPad Mini is still chugging along.
So, Smack-Dab has unintentionally become a variation of At The Door, only instead of our over-enthusiastic dog and our deeply-distrusting cat, we’re the characters staring out into the community, a community that we more-and-more do not recognize. We see a nation that sells its soul for an airplane. A Republican Congress that stands silently by as bribery, grift, and corruption corrode the foundation of our nation. They could stop it in a moment, this Project 2025 public execution of our democracy, but they are complicit. They are now the poster-party of “penny-wise-pound-foolish;” sacrificing the greater Constitution to protect their personal interest. And that is the sickness that poisons the blood of The United States of America: personal gain smothers community service. It is the cancer that is threatening to kill our nation-body.
And we watch out the door. We find ourselves, smack-dab in the middle of middle age, smack-dab in the historical moment when our leadership failed, when morality collapsed and cowardice prevailed: a golden airplane for a bribe and a military parade to mask the shallow men and women who exchange the land of the free and the home of the brave for a few coins, a Saudi golf course, and a chance to keep their seats warm. And we-the-people, all of us, live inside of their sickness.
Posted on February 14, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
It’s rapidly becoming folklore week at The Direction of Intention. I blame The Brothers Grimm for inciting a deeper dive into their collection of ancient tales. I somehow missed – or forgot – that the moral of the folk tales is to honor your commitments. Take responsibility for your actions. The stories are driven by transactions-gone-awry. The daughter makes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin: she will give him her first child if he will save her and spin straw into gold.
In another tale, The Pied Piper is hired by the people of Hamelin to save the town from an infestation of rats. He plays his magical flute leading the rats to the river where they drown. Since the town is no longer overrun with rats the leaders decide there is no reason to honor their commitment. They refuse to pay the piper. The Piper once again plays his magic flute and leads the town’s children away. The children are never to be seen again.
Honest dealing. Gratitude. Consequences of actions and choices. Morality tales are told – and have been told across cultures and generations – to instill in the young and affirm in the old the necessity of a moral center. When the moral center collapses, the consequences are far worse than imagined.
We’ve placed a coneflower sculpture in the garden. We can see it while doing dishes, looking out of our kitchen window. I’ve always loved our little coneflower but in the past month I’ve grown to appreciate it as a reminder, a daily nudge to stand closer to love than I do to fear. Coneflowers are symbols of resilience and strength.
The collapse of decency. The disregard for morality. So many toxic and ill-intended transactions swirling around us. It is only a matter of time before the Piper demands payment. Folklore meets the news of the day.
The coneflower reminds me that this too shall pass. Resilience. Out of the now-inevitable loss-of-our-children will someday arise a renewed commitment to responsibility to the common good. A moral center, after all, is nothing other than attentiveness and concern for the needs of others, and a dedication to ourselves to walk in this world with integrity decency, fairness, and an internal compass – reinforced by the stories and symbols we’ve inherited – that serve as constant companions showing us the way.
Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora
Posted on January 10, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
“…the larger story of this moment is the plunder of public land for private gain.” ~ Historian Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, January 7, 2025
When future historians ask the question, “What the heck happened to the United States of America?” they will need only look to Heather Cox Richardson’s encapsulating phrase: the plunder of the public for private gain. Were I one of the future historians I would title my book, The Nation That Ate Itself.
Our Achilles Heel? We worship business above all things so believe everything should run like a business. Government-by-transaction is no way to run a country. The natural conclusion of a nation that confuses public-service with business is the blatant exploitation of its people. It inevitably divides and feeds on itself. I would conclude my imaginary-future-history book with this: “It was inevitable and calculated. Their demise was no surprise”.
We watched the storm roll across the lake. The clouds were ominous and roiling yet the colors were gorgeous. It’s the reason we stopped. The visual collision of beauty and menace. While Kerri snapped photographs I was awash in metaphor (of course). The coming storm.
Our fall is not so different than the fall of Rome. When wealth is consolidated at the tippy-top and controlled by a gluttonous few, a once powerful nation tips over. It’s simple physics. Feasting on the people, the nation rubs its fat belly and decides to protect the privilege of the few over the health of the many. History repeats itself and, as we’ve written of Rome, our demise like theirs, is not and will not be a surprise. Root rot.
Kerri believes that, as people age, they do not change but become more of who they really are. Life boils them down to their essence. The same might be said of our nation. The plunder of the public for private gain is endemic in our system.
There is no mercy in the god of transaction. There is no morality in a worship made hard by the fundamentals of bottom lines. The church of Dog-Eat-Dog has little use for truth.
When asked the question, “Why did so many of the plundered public vote for their own demise?” the future historians will smile and answer simply, “They were manipulated by their social-media-masters into seeing their neighbors as dogs-to-be-eaten.”
Communal root rot. The mighty tree falls. No surprise.
Posted on November 4, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
I was grateful for the meme. It gave me simple language, a shorthand, for something I was wrestling to articulate: We are not having a difference of opinion. We are having a difference of morality.
I wonder that it took a meme to open my eyes. This in not about information bubbles or dueling points-of-view or fact-checked-information.
We are on the eve of an election. This election is unlike any other in our lives. The choice before us eclipses policy differences. On the ballot is democracy or not-democracy. A constitutional republic or an autocracy.
The maga-candidate sows division, darkness and grievance. He is a pathological liar. He is obsessed with retribution. He vows to use the military to silence “the enemy within”. He promises to arrest his opponents. Last week he suggested a firing squad for Liz Cheney. In a multicultural nation, a nation of immigrants, he promises mass deportations.
This is not empty rhetoric. As we’ve learned from his overthrow of Roe, he will do what he says. He has a Heritage Foundation plan called Project 2025 to dismantle our democracy. He disavowed it when public knowledge of his embrace of this extreme fascist blueprint hurt his chances for election. It is his milksop pattern: by pretending he has no knowledge he abdicates responsibility for his words and actions. It is a damning statement of his lack of character. It is a characteristic of an authoritarian narcissist.
What is also a damning statement of character is to vote for such a man. To turn a blind eye to all that he has said, all that he has done, all the lies that he has told, is a statement of our character.
Presidential historian Jon Meacham recently reminded us that within the spirit of the Constitution lives the character of our leaders – and also the character of the led. Our national character. “Out of many, one” is more than a quaint Latin phrase printed on our currency.
A character check: compare the maga-candidate’s daily mantra, “I have no knowledge” with the sign Harry S. Truman proudly displayed on the resolute desk: The buck stops here.
A vote for the maga-candidate is literally a vote to suspend the Constitution (his words). It is a vote to suspend our national character. It is a vote absent of a moral center.
We choose our leaders as a reflection of ourselves. It is why this election is unlike any other in our lives. The image the maga-candidate reflects back to us is at best repugnant. It is empty of character. It is the opposite of our nation’s identity.
If you see yourself in this man, a misogynist, xenophobe, racist, filled with rage and retribution…we are having something much more profound, much more serious than a difference of opinion.
We have a difference of morality.
Decency matters. Conduct matters. Language matters. Character matters. Principles matter. Intentions matter. Discerning the difference between right and wrong, between good and bad behavior, matters.
It’s the spirit living in our Constitution. It’s the character our leaders ought to reflect back to us because it’s the character we should demand from our leaders.
And so we vote.
Democracy or not-democracy.
Will we live and act from a moral center, striving to fulfill the promise of a more perfect union, or will we throw it away and spiral into a fascist void?
Posted on October 24, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
I could have sat all day on the porch and stared at the sculpted landscape, the fingers of Lake Powell reaching into the canyon. My artist’s soul rejuvenates in the southwest. It excites my imagination while quieting my mind. Just as the high desert sun warms me to the core of my being, the geography invigorates the core of my artistry.
It’s been two weeks since I sat on that porch and looked with awe at the horizon and watched the colors transform from hot orange to dusty purple as the sun progressed across the sky. It was akin to looking at the ocean surf, a rolling touch of the eternal. A perspective-giver.
While sitting on the porch I pondered our nation’s inability to fully reconcile with its past. It’s impossible to drive through tribal lands and not consider the full history of our nation. It’s been much on my mind recently since it is a central theme of my latest play, Diorama.
Think about it: just this week the maga-candidate-for-president suggested he would stop funding schools that taught about slavery. Nikki Haley, while running for the Republican nomination for president, said that there’d never been racism in the United States of America.
I sometimes wonder in these divisive times if the USA is like an alcoholic that refuses to admit that it has a problem. Why so much denial? Why so many blatant lies? In fact, it’s not new. Take a gander at the Lost Cause narrative propagated throughout the south (and the nation) following the civil war, a tale of happy slaves and benevolent slave owners. You might recognize it as it has resurged as the official curriculum in the state of Florida (and other states) in 2024. Twelve generations of brutality white washed and to what end?
Of course, it is the white-washed America that the reds aspire to inhabit – and to achieve their fantasy they necessarily need to ignore the full scope of our history. There’s no responsibility in a white washed history. In cowboy brain there are only good guys and bad guys so the good guys need never question their actions or confront their shadows. It’s an infantile narrative, not only unworthy of a maturing nation, but crippling to its growth.
The fourth step in the AA twelve step program suggests that, in order to restore our sanity – in order to grow up – we must be willing to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We must not be afraid to admit when we are wrong or recognize when we have strayed from our ideals.
A fearless moral inventory. An honest look at our complete history, the good, the bad and everything in between. As Aldous Huxley wrote, we are in a race between education and destruction. An educated populace would never tolerate the lies of the would-be-autocrat and would easily see through the crazy revisionist history that he manufactures and spews. Perhaps that is why he vows to dismantle the Department of Education.
The question before us in November is whether or not our democracy will prevail and mature or will the white nationalist monster, in a celebration of ignorance, eat our collective freedoms and send us swirling into the immoral (and infantile) fascist nightmare outlined in Project 2025? A fearless moral inventory or the path of the Lost Cause cowards?
The choice is ours to make. The story is ours to tell.
The Direction of Intention 