delusions of artistic greatness.

There are some people I've met who say that if artists ran the world it would be a better and more beautiful place, but I beg to differ. We creative folk also have our delusions of grandeur but are mercifully too poor and unconnected to wreak havoc on the globe. What always amazes me is how so many world leaders were not only power-mad but also considered themselves creative aesthetes.

Art has always driven and been co-opted by ideology because of its potential for beauty and power. I think about people I used to play in bands with who wouldn't take any creative input because that would mess with their all supreme vision, and when people have a supreme vision and some degree of firepower, bad things tend to happen.

Hitler was a vegetarian painter who clearly understood the power of aesthetic and the use of visuals and pageantry to manipulate the masses when he wasn't painting bucolic pastoral landscapes.



Stalin also had a thing for the pastoral and wrote lots of nationalistic poetry about flowers.

The pinkish bud has opened,
Rushing to the pale-blue violet
And, stirred by a light breeze,
The lily of the valley has bent over the grass.


Gaddafi wrote short stories along with his Green Book which contains revelations about the difference between men and women being that women menstruate and men don't. He could use a serious editor with his writings, but those who tend to question despots don't tend to live well for long and who wants to mess with suicidal astronauts, ranting about the awfulness of the city, prose like this:

Is death male or female? God only knows...What good does it do to determine weather death is male or female? Death, after all, is death. However, it is our duty to specify its sex, and find out whether it is male or female...



Speaking of humble tractor drivers, Albania's Enver Hoxha, who built 750,000 bunkers in the event of invasion, wrote loads of memoirs, some of which detailed his serious man-crush on Stalin. Before Pooty and Berlusconi, there was Enver and Josef watching musicals on the couch together about tractor drivers. Bros before hoes indeed, unless those hoes are collectively farming in the workers' paradise.



So much for the Doomsday Device. Even Kubrick can't make up stuff like this.