The Warning, 2025
May 2025
About a week ago I was driving home and the Stefan Goodchild Feat. Doudou N'Diaye Rose remix of “The Warning” by Nine Inch Nails was playing- I love driving to Nine Inch Nails, but I’ve especially been listening to Year Zero, an album that came out in 2007 predicting what America would be in 15 years. I’ve been really delving deep into that album, because it’s very much come true, and it’s helped me process a lot of feelings about where we’re at as the American Empire. I live in Texas, and while I’m in the DFW metroplex- a noticeably blue place- I’m alone in my beliefs with pretty much all my family and it can honestly make me feel a little crazy. Listening to Year Zero made me feel less alone, and more validated. This particular song was definitely alluding to alien contact when it was written, but I felt it speaks as a modern day American, too (peep the Starlink explosions on slide 2). I try hard to believe everyone is trying their best at any given time, but sometimes people are just… evil. Actually evil. Cartoon villain evil. And we reward their cut-throat narcissism with positions of power. Unlimited, unchecked power. We’re so far gone I don’t know how we’ll come out of it. How do you even begin to sift out who hasn’t been bought?
My therapist has to hear every week about how one of my biggest stressors is the people in power and how truly evil the world feels, and I remembered art is just another form of screaming… so I got drawing. Just scribbling, getting “messy” with digital charcoal in procreate. Screaming about how I’m tired of seeing fascism, dictatorship, liars, murderers, rapists, nazis, and dead babies on my feed every day, and how they keep getting away with it. I angrily google references of Elon, and Trump (hate that I have to have that in my search history) and churn these drawings out in almost a record speed. I didn’t focus on perfection, just getting the message down. I was fueled by raw rage. A week later, I blinked and shook my head and this was done. I just hope it speaks to other people and makes them feel seen and less alone. You’re not crazy. It IS bad. We probably won’t even know how bad for another ten, fifteen years, but they definitely see it in other countries. So many of our loved ones live in this hellish American snowglobe, happily playing their part in the capitalist grind, while the rest of the world looks on in horror. It’s hard to say if Americans just don’t know or if they don’t want to know, but either way is alarming.
Just remember when the world is falling apart, we turn to art for comfort, both consuming it and creating it. Keep making things about this. Keep screaming, however that looks.
