Faune Blanc, by Pablo Picasso and The Advance of Socialism: A Crowd Tramples a Bourgeois, by Anton Hansen

Chinese mystic: Hark! I smell pigs! Yes, pigs, indeed. Pigs and silk and leather and blood, oh that most overwhelming smell makes my own bile boil!

He looks out into the crowd of raving peasants. One whose voice carried over the rest could be heard to say, "Let us burn their Armani-Chang ties, and feast on their butter for dinner! Ay, throw them through 5 rings and hear their skulls ping pong down the falling waters of Beijing!"

Chinese mystic: Calm your souls. I have composed a tune on my bamboo tube, our new national anthem. Let it be heard that freedom rings–that means clap your hands!

The crowd drifts into a serene swaying motion, as if it were one mass of grain or, perhaps, a bag of sand, thrown off of a hot-air balloon, and it unconsciously begins to chant.

"I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier

I told the man, when he came around,

that it doesn’t matter any more.

My soul is not for sale, and it need not be

for now I have liberation and buttery mastication

I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier.

As the old saying goes,

a bird in the hand…"

Suddenly the famed Chinese mystic is grasped with terror, seemingly paralyzed as he lets the bamboo fall to the earthen ground.

"Is that a child being clasped to the breast of one of you noble herdsmen?! What is your name, dear cadre?" he cried out. "Why you shall be on every poster in the Old Kingdom! The new face of the people!"

A random passerby pointed out that he was not Chinese, but Indian, the son of a prince from Kashmir.

"SILENCE, you porcine beast masquerading as an ivory knight. Hark! The game of chess is over. Who is with me?! The pawns revolt has begun! Cast him to the ground!"

-Originally published at: http://todaysnewsart.wordpress.com