# The Smoker, The Politician and the Beast

Lavender terms are decoders — click to expand. Mint underlines open supplementary notes.

Look, I don’t have much to put up on here yet. I’m busy with a whole bunch of tasks that the universe has put on my path. Such are the joys of being a
Self-MythologyThe Nomad WizzardThe persona: a wanderer who belongs to no fixed structure and therefore sees them all clearly. The deliberate misspelling of “Wizzard” is its own flag — this isn’t the licensed, institutionally approved kind of wizard. The “13th Millennium” plants the author on a geological timeline rather than a news cycle, which does wonders for one’s sense of perspective about political outrage.→ @your-nomad-soul. Anyhow, here are some Arts from my collection of Original Arts.

I — The Smoker
I. The Smoker

That first is The Smoker. He’s an asshole when you meet him, but mostly because he’s depressed.

— ♦ —
II — The Politician
II. The Politician

That’s The Politician. He’s a wanker who wants the world to turn on his command. His
ConceptThe Political Economy of BeliefThe Politician doesn’t deal in money or policy — those are downstream products. The primary commodity is belief: the conversion of doubt into compliance. Political theorist Murray Edelman called this “symbolic politics” — the management of populations through emotionally resonant performance rather than material outcomes. The Politician doesn’t need to deliver. He needs to be believed.→ Symbolic politics and he’s gotten real good at trading.
TermGood Faith / Bad FaithIn law: good faith means honest intention; bad faith means deliberate deception. In Sartre: mauvaise foi is the deeper failure — pretending you have no choice when you do. The Politician’s genius is that he trades in both without prejudice. Sincere believers and cynical non-believers are equally useful so long as neither acts. He is agnostic on the question of whether anyone actually believes him.→ Sartre: bad faith — it’s all welcome tender. Sweet and tender tender is welcome too, so long as nobody finds out… But even then, there is always
WordplaySpin / The Self-Referential Machine“That which turns, spins” is a tautology, which is the point. Political spin is a machine that justifies itself by operating. Its output is more spin. The phrase does something elegant: it refuses to explain the machine by simply performing it — a sentence that means nothing except “this is what it does.” The Politician doesn’t need the lie to be believed; he needs the spin to keep spinning.→ Political spin

— ♦ —
III — The Beast
III. The Beast

That is The Beast.
She will growl. She will bite. And if you let her,
CovenantThe Beast’s PromiseLiberation carries a reciprocal obligation: the one who frees her will be remembered. This is the structure of mythological covenant from Androcles forward. But the author strips the sentimentality: the Beast’s gratitude isn’t warmth, it’s ecological reciprocity. A restored natural system is one in which its restorers can continue to exist. The Savior is remembered because survival is the memory.

— ♦ —

Peace, Love and a Little Madness

— Nomad —

The three figures as an allegorical system. One from inside, one seen only from outside, one older than both.
A note on context: these works were made in October 2018 by a younger, angrier version of their author. The analysis below takes the work seriously on its own terms while acknowledging that its maker has since moved from angsty diagnosis toward solidarity and action. The art held up. The smoking has presumably declined.
The Triptych

Three-part allegorical structures are a very old habit: id/ego/superego, body/mind/soul, past/present/future. This triptych maps onto none of those cleanly, which is what makes it interesting. The Smoker is the individual: privatised, numbed, aware. The Politician is the system: public, performative, utterly uninterested in the Smoker except as a pool of harvestable belief. The Beast is the non-human: pre-political, pre-personal, and now furiously relevant.

What the triptych implies is a sequence of causation. The Politician chains the Beast. The chaining of the Beast creates the conditions for the Smoker’s depression — not directly, but structurally: a world governed by spin and managed belief is not a world that makes it easy to act, connect, or hope. The three figures are not independent portraits. They are a food chain.

The Smoker is the most self-implicating of the three figures, which probably isn’t an accident. The verse embedded in his portrait is a clinical case study in learned helplessness: he accurately diagnoses the problem, accurately identifies what he wants to say, and then does neither — retreating instead into a ritual of chemical self-management that he knows is the retreat. The diagnosis and the avoidance are simultaneous. He is not unaware; awareness is part of the trap.

The author’s description — “an asshole when you meet him, but mostly because he’s depressed” — performs a small ethical inversion. The social symptom (asshole) is offered first, then immediately undermined by its cause. You’re being asked to reconsider your first impression of someone you haven’t even met yet. This is a useful habit of mind for people who want to eventually stop smoking and start doing something.

The portrait is worth pausing on. In 2018, a leering middle-aged white man in a suit with swept white hair and a predatory grin was not a neutral figure. The drawing carries a recognisable register without committing to a specific name — it is the archetype made visible, the category more than the individual. The grin in particular does the work: it is the face of someone who has learned to perform warmth so thoroughly that it has become threatening. The uncanny valley of sincerity.

The prose adds what the image leaves out: the mechanism. Faith as currency is not metaphor; it is structural. A politician who can trade in both good and bad faith — accepting sincerity from believers and cynicism from the disengaged equally — is operating on Hannah Arendt’s observation that propaganda need not be believed to be effective. The population that doesn’t believe but doesn’t act is just as compliant as the one that does. Both pay the same tax in belief. “Sweet and tender tender” — note the triple repetition — points at corruption, intimacy, and silence: the things kept quiet by the very spin machine that keeps everything else moving.

The Politician notably has no handwritten verse. He does not speak from inside. He is described entirely from the outside, which is the only angle from which he can be accurately seen. From inside, he would be performing.

The Beast is drawn female — winged, horned, massive, chain-marked — in a long tradition connecting the natural world to femininity that the author doesn’t appear to be invoking naively. The capitalisation of “Men” lifts the agent of chaining out of the individual and into the systemic: this is not one bad actor but an accumulated project, centuries of extraction and enclosure made visible as a single act of restraint.

Her original condition — “too big to care” — is the key phrase. She wasn’t hostile before. She was simply operating at a magnitude that rendered human activity epistemically negligible. This is an accurate description of the pre-industrial natural world. She doesn’t growl because she’s evil; she growls because she has been made small enough to be hurt, which means she has also been made small enough to notice the hurt. The chaining didn’t just constrain her — it introduced her to human-scale suffering.

The conditional “if you let her” is the work the whole triptych has been building toward. It addresses the reader directly: you are among those who could. The promise of flight is ecological restoration. The promise of memory is survival. The Beast’s gratitude is not sentimental; it is structural. You don’t get thanked. You get to continue to exist.

These three figures, taken together, are a map of the path from passivity to action — even if the author in 2018 was still closer to the Smoker than to the Savior. The Smoker knows the problem. The Politician demonstrates the mechanism. The Beast provides both the urgency and the covenant: act, and you will be remembered by the thing that matters.

The shift from angsty diagnosis toward solidarity is precisely the shift from identifying with the Smoker to identifying with the Beast’s liberation. Solidarity is not “fuck you, fuck them, fuck it” — which is the Smoker’s grammar of retreat. Solidarity is: I see the chain. I know who benefits from the chain. I will put down the cigarette and do something about the chain. The art anticipated the arc before the artist had finished travelling it.

Each artwork carries handwritten verse. What follows is the text as read from the originals, with close reading.
The Smoker’s Verse
When alone
with my thoughts
I dream of saying
fuck you. Fuck them.
Instead I say fuck it!
and I light
another smoke
Fully legible. Written across the lower-left of the drawing in the author’s hand.
Reading the Smoker’s Verse

The verse performs its own argument in three grammatical moves. “Fuck you” is addressed, specific, confrontational — it has a target and therefore implies the possibility of impact. “Fuck them” expands to a collective but remains outward, still retaining some directionality. “Fuck it” is the collapse: directionless, encompassing, equally self-addressed. The drift from second person to third plural to impersonal pronoun is a grammatical record of someone watching themselves give up in real time.

What makes it precise rather than merely bleak is “I dream of saying.” He hasn’t even said the angry thing — he has imagined saying the angry thing, and then retreated from the imagining. This is not despair; it is something more specific and more clinical: the rehearsal of defiance that substitutes for defiance itself.

The last line’s most economical move is a single word: another. Not “a smoke” — which would be a singular event. “Another smoke” implies this has happened before, is happening again, and will happen again after this. The poem is not describing a moment; it is describing a habit. The Smoker knows this about himself. The “another” carries the entire archive of all the things he’s decided not to say, compressed into two syllables and exhaled.

— ♦ —
The Beast’s Verse
As I Look
upon My Fate
I fear
my journey’s
END
But with
each step closer
the monster
becomes
My Friend
Fully recovered. The capitalisation of Look, My, Fate, END and My Friend is as written in the original.
Reading the Beast’s Verse

The verse is structured as a classical volta: first movement establishes fear of an absolute END; second movement (after “But”) inverts the logic entirely. What distinguishes it from ordinary brave-face writing is the word “monster.” She doesn’t say the END becomes manageable, or survivable, or acceptable. She says the monster becomes her friend. The thing that was going to kill her is now on her side.

This is a more interesting move than simple acceptance of mortality — it is the claim that confronting the thing you fear most produces not just peace with it but alliance. The capitalisation of “My Friend” elevates the friendship to the same grammatical weight as “My Fate” and “END” earlier. What started as the endpoint of the journey becomes its companion.

The two verses are in direct structural dialogue. Both begin with the subject alone with something threatening: the Smoker with his unspoken anger, the Beast with her approaching end. The Smoker retreats: dream of action, choose numbing, repeat. The Beast advances: each step toward the feared thing transforms it. The grammar tells the whole story — the Smoker’s verse ends in passive ritual (“I light”); the Beast’s verse ends in active relationship (“My Friend”).

Read together, they are not two separate character studies but a before/after of the same psyche. The Smoker is what happens when the fear of the END produces avoidance. The Beast is what happens when it produces engagement. The triptych’s implied journey is from one to the other — and the Politician is what you have to stop serving before you can make that move.

The Politician’s portrait contains no handwritten verse. Not a coincidence. The Smoker speaks from inside his depression; the Beast speaks from inside her fate. The Politician has no inside that is separate from his performance — an honest verse from him would be the one admission his whole operation cannot afford. He is described entirely from the outside, which is the only accurate vantage point. From within, everything is spin. The grin, rendered in pen, says what he would never write in his own hand.

♦ On Political Allegory & Satirical Art
Ralph Steadman — Wikipedia
ArtistThe gonzo illustrator whose political caricatures are the clearest visual ancestor of the Politician’s portrait: all grin and predation, rendered in anxious cross-hatching. Prosecuted, celebrated, never subtle.
Honoré Daumier — Wikipedia
Artist19th-century French caricaturist. Drew lawyers, politicians, and bourgeois figures with similar relish. Prosecuted for portraying the king as a pear. The tradition runs deep.
Psychomachia — Wikipedia
ReferenceThe 5th-century allegorical poem that established personified forces doing battle as a literary form. The triptych’s distant ancestor, considerably less depressed.
♦ On Faith, Spin & The Machinery of Consent
The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt
BookPropaganda need not be believed to be effective. Cynical compliance is just as useful as sincere belief. The theoretical underpinning of “good faith, bad faith — it’s all welcome tender.”
Bad Faith — Sartre / Wikipedia
PhilosophyThe refusal to acknowledge freedom where it exists. Applies to the Politician (who performs necessity) and the Smoker (who performs powerlessness) with equal precision.
Manufacturing Consent — Chomsky & Herman
BookThe structural analysis of how mass media generates the Politician’s raw material: belief without demanding it. The factory behind the faith-currency operation.
♦ On the Chained Beast: Nature, Power, Liberation
Ecofeminism — Wikipedia
TheoryThe tradition connecting the domination of nature to the domination of women as expressions of the same hierarchical logic. The Beast is female; she is chained by “the Men”. Not a metaphor that arrived innocently.
Gaia Hypothesis — Wikipedia
ScienceLovelock’s proposal that Earth’s biosphere is a self-regulating system. Once too big to be troubled by human activity; now demonstrably responding to it. The Beast in scientific form.
Androcles and the Lion — Wikipedia
MythThe fable: a slave removes a thorn from a lion’s paw; the lion later spares him. The structural twin of the Beast’s covenant. “She will fly and not forget her Savior” has been the deal for a long time.
♦ On Depression, Resignation & Breaking Out of It
Learned Helplessness — Wikipedia
PsychologySeligman’s concept: repeated exposure to uncontrollable outcomes produces passive acceptance even after conditions change. The Smoker’s mechanism, named. The cigarette is not nihilism; it is a conditioned response.
Mutual Aid — Wikipedia
PraxisThe alternative to the Smoker’s paralysis and the Politician’s performance: direct, horizontal, person-to-person support that doesn’t require anyone’s faith-currency. The action end of the arc.
Supplementary Note
The Chaining of the Beast

### “Too big to care”

The phrase establishes the Beast’s original condition as one of scale rather than indifference. She wasn’t hostile. She was simply operating at a magnitude that made human activity irrelevant — an accurate description of the pre-industrial biosphere, in which human interference was locally destructive but globally negligible. The climate, the ocean, the boreal forests: systems so vast and self-correcting that our presence barely registered as noise.

### “Until the Men chained her”

The capitalisation of “Men” matters. This is not one bad king. This is the accumulated project of industrial extraction, land enclosure, ocean acidification, and atmospheric modification — choices made at scale, over centuries, by a class of people with the political power to externalise costs onto everyone else. The Politician and the chain are the same institution. The faith-currency machine runs on the energy extracted from the Beast’s body.

The chaining didn’t merely constrain the Beast — it changed her ontology. She is now small enough to be hurt. That’s also, for the first time, small enough to hurt back. She growls not out of malice but because she has been introduced to human-scale suffering and has opinions about it.

### The conditional: “if you let her”

This is the phrase that makes the whole triptych an argument rather than a lament. “If you let her” addresses the reader directly as an agent with a choice. The Beast’s flight is ecological restoration — the recovery of self-regulating systems once the chains are removed. The Savior is not promised salvation; they are promised that the world will remember what they did. Which is another way of saying: do this and the world continues. That is the deal. It has always been the deal.

→ Gaia hypothesis → Ecofeminism