Kneeling or Standing: A fake diversion

Kneeling or standing seems to be another one of these “national conversations” America is having.  Here’s another junk journal I made last weekend, using a 2010 military-themed calendar. It was a free calendar, handed out at the military commissary I use on Fort Stewart.  The clothespins are just to hold the pages open. The songbook came in a fundraising letter from the Disabled American Veterans and on the back it has 2014 on it.  The post card is one of several American bicentennial ones, I bought in 1976:

I put my “I love America” junk journal together, using only stuff I had already.  I still have a lot of work to do with embellishing the inside and finding charms or beads or something to add to the strings hanging out the bottom, which are the strings from sewing the page signatures into the book:

I made the cover out of a cereal box and covered it with patriotic fabric I’ve had for many years.  I decided to put several coats of Mod Podge matte sealer on top, because it makes the cover easy to wipe clean (good for messy me) and it also made it feel sturdier.

This old calendar had lots of nice photos, worth saving, so I added them, some patriotic scrapbook paper, old map pages, and some assorted other paper.  It felt better to be working on this journal last weekend, almost like therapy in the age of Trump: The Potemkin American President, which is a bizarre reality show and sequel to Trump: The Potemkin 2016 Campaign.   His MAGA 2.0 is totally fake.  He plays a constant, vile “us vs. them” strategy. It’s the same old Clinton strategy, where they were always the victim of some nefarious, “vast, right-wing conspiracy”.

This kneeling controversy follows his constant borrowing on the American people’s respect for the generals surrounding him, stealing their honor whenever he can.  He uses those generals to bolster his image as “Trump loves the military” and he uses the military as stage props and flags, flags and more flags, to wrap himself in.

Last weekend’s controversy was a classic Trump diversion. He once again changed the subject, latched onto the topic, showing respect for the flag and national anthem, that he knew his base and millions of Americans would rally behind, all to create a controversy, where the Left would screech.  He has played the innocent, standard-bearer victim for MAGA, again. The real issue was not about kneeling or standing. It was an abuse of power by the President of the United States, trying to exert influence on NFL owners to prod them to fire players over players’ political expressions. Most people buy into either Trump’s spin or the liberal media’s spin and do not think for themselves. With Americans trained to take sides on every hot bed issue, few will stop and say, “that’s not really what the issue is.”

As someone who cringed, when President Clinton waxed about feeling people’s pain, watching Clinton’s old golfing buddy, pretend to be a Republican, sickens me, but it also makes me wonder why so many Republicans rolled over and got on the Trump train, even though Trump’s vacillating policies, pronouncements and even his character were things that many of these Republicans railed against.

These days, I wonder who are these Trump loyalists, people who spent decades preaching conservative values?

Who are these people, who still cheer President Trump’s divisive, phony chants at rallies?  Even more worrisome is who are these mouthpieces, who are willing to repeat any Trump talking point, no matter how untruthful, disingenuous, or fake it is?

The Left and the mainstream (liberal) media are running a phony information war too and besides their endless #Resist campaign to delegitimize Trump, there are many bizarre, dishonest headlines and stories from ostensibly hard news reporters.

Their news reporting often makes me cringe, but their opinion pieces often make me feel like revisionist history is being written from the pages of American journalism’s top newspapers. The New York Times ran an opinion piece a couple of days ago, continuing their Duranty heritage of willingly spreading communist propaganda.  When you examine the #Resist, with their Women’s March, then their Immigration and Workers’ Rights March in May, with far-left organizers, communist propaganda seems to be in vogue again. Lately, the target audience for communist indoctrination is women:

“The Communists did many terrible things,” my grandmother always says at the end of her reminiscences. “But they made women’s lives much better.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/women-china-communist-revolution.html

In August, the New York Times ran an opinion piece titled, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism

While President Trump captures media attention daily with his information war, there’s plenty to be disturbed about with the liberal media too.   I’m doing less blogging and more crafting and needlework,  because the raging information war in America worries me a “great” deal.

Junk journal made with a 2009 local bank calendar.  I turned this into my Hurricane Irma evacuation journal and have it almost completely filled up with collages, receipts, lists, and journaling.

Junk journal made with 2004 Country Bouquet calendar.

I used a dollar store 2018 calendar with lovely vintage collage pictures as pages to add to my Monet journal, which had too much empty space along the spine.  I made two more signatures of assorted pages and sewed them into that journal.  I didn’t have enough of the brown cord that I used to sew in the other 3 signatures, so I used a green beading cord.   I didn’t want to throw away the scrap pieces, that I cut off of those vintage collage pages, so I’ve been cutting and tearing them up, making my own collages on index cards, using  paint, rubber stamping and images from an old wildlife book. I coated them with Mod Podge to seal them.

I made the bird ones, cutting out pieces of paper and using a little bit of ink around the edges, but they looked pretty blah and lifeless.  So, then I tried the butterfly using acrylic paint, inking and gel pen highlights, after, of course, watching more YouTube videos on mixed media collage art.  I cut the words, Timeless Beauty, out of an old magazine.  I opted for tearing out my pieces of paper, like the real collage artists do and I experimented with the paint.   On the bobcat card, I  added paint and some rubber-stamping on the background.  The purrsonality script is from an old sticker sheet.  As a person with zero artistic talent, I am thankful for Pinterest and YouTube videos.

The never-ending information warfare is reforming this die-hard news junkie into a crafting/sewing fanatic.