Solitical

Background I came up with the title Solitical quite simply. Often when I was in the beginning stages of realizing the show as a whole, people would ask me what it was going to be about. As if the show were unquestionably preordained to be a visual novel of some kind, I of course had a well-recited answer.

“It is going to be a show about the social and political fallacies of our country.” I would usually leave it at that. The point is I eventually said social and political so many times in the same sentence that I just came to call the show Solitical. You must understand that my dear mother who I would never speak negatively about tends, no, constantly asks so many questions about any and everything (and usually in repetition) that word condensing and cutting out altogether is quite fundamental to my mental well being.

Beyond my personal tribulations, I do have serious reservations about the direction in which our society has been heading. Solitical is a collection of pieces exemplifying several of the major social and political problems of our contemporary American nation. It examines the gross domestic psyche of average Americans: their interconnected values, actions, negligences, and consequences therein. I first heard the term gross domestic psyche when watching Bill Moyer interview an easy speaking gentleman, Andrew Bacevich. Colonel Bacevich ingeniously examined our American society with a term he calls the gross domestic psyche. Like a gross domestic product, a nations psyche can be measured by its actions, policies, fears, and desires as a whole. He explained that: Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by people in Washington D.C. and imposed on us. Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want… we want this unending line of credit. (A. Bacevich) I was completely flabbergasted as I heard this! He was exactly right and shed a magnitude of parallels into my existing points of view. Though Bacevich tends to focus more on foreign policy and consumerism, I realized that this concept of self-neglifying indulgences applies to more spectrums of our society: all of them.

Listening to this, I screamed aloud to my inattentive cats, “This is exactly what my show is about!”

And it was. The more pieces I would work into the more I began to realize their central congruent factor: selfishness. The American psyche has become laden with a dominating concern for self. My art attempts to blatantly tackle many individual fallacies, once commonly referred to as sins, which are presently commonplace in our society: obesity, greed, abortion, sloth, drug abuse, and so on. Interestingly, though, as I would be working on any given one of these pieces I would inevitably see selfishness resurfacing alongside the intended fallacy. It wasn’t even half-way through completion of the show that I realized that this would be the interconnecting factor to all of the pieces regardless of any compositional or visual elements.

Selfishness has become America’s connecting factor, an inbred downfall summarizing our cultural heritage of a great and lustrous capitalist society.

I am not being cynical about capitalism. I feel that our current understanding and respect or regard for interpersonal relations as a communal planetary life form are well necessitated by the laws of capitalist economics. That is, it is probably the best way for the most individuals to experience some sort of liberty. For example, in China, which claims to be a communist country, wherein by the nature of the meaning of communism, an equal paying job would be required of each individual based on his or her suitable talents. Regardless, though, the Chinese economy has almost naturally evolved into a commonly capitalist workforce. Capitalism seems to be the nature of the economic world at present, because it is the best possible solution for a world of beings concerned primarily with self-sustentation.

While there are many of those who fear everyday we grow closer to a return to a system that resembles old feudality or dictatorship wherein a select few would harshly control all, leaving us, the little people forced into a system of servitude or death. I do not necessarily fear this at present. The laws of capitalism allow that select few to harbor their control while allowing the rest of us a notion of individual freedom. Essentially, it is that hope