The Department of Homeland Security is now trying to brighten our mornings by posting their vision of America: small towns full of white people, with a church across the street from a little one room schoolhouse, and children gathering around the flagpole to pledge their allegiance.
“Protect the homeland,” it says. But only if a cheesy painting by Thomas Kincade(!) is your idea of a homeland. Turn back time to your imagined glory days of pale schmalz and pastoral pablum.
Unfortunately, the estate of Thomas Kincade (he’s dead, you know — drug abuse and alcoholism did him in) is unhappy that his art was used without authorization. Or without payment, I thought uncharitably, given Kincade’s notorious greed…but no, this is actually a very good statement.
“At The Kinkade Family Foundation, we strongly condemn the sentiment expressed in the post and the deplorable actions that DHS continues to carry out,” the foundation wrote in the statement.
“Like many of you, we were deeply troubled to see this image used to promote division and xenophobia associated with the ideals of DHS, as this is antithetical to our mission,” the statement continued. “We stand firmly with our communities who have been threatened and targeted by DHS, especially our immigrant, BIPOC, undocumented, LGBTQ+, and disabled relatives and neighbors.”
I’m mildly surprised that the heirs of that drunken, selfish sot seem to have turned out to be decent people.
The DHS responded to this rebuke, naturally.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Post that the agency is highlighting artwork that
celebrates America’s heritage and history.
If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails and forged this republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook,she said in the statement to the Post.This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage.
What history book would that be? Some sloppy propaganda composed by PragerU?
“I’m mildly surprised that the heirs of that drunken, selfish sot seem to have turned out to be decent people.”
Reversion to the mean.
You missed the other picture they posted, showing Indians and buffalo fleeing into history as plucky American settlers and the figure of, apparently, Manifest Destiny advance.
Even the frigging cars are from the 1950s.
If they need a book about American history, I heartily recommend Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saunt.
Something tells me they won’t post Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” which depicts a certain event in New Orleans in 1960. Look at this link quick, because with the current trash in office it might not be here by the end of the day.
https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/resources-for-educators/classroom-resources/media-and-interactives/media/visual-arts/norman-rockwell–the-problem-we-all-live-with/
I was going to say that the flowers in the foreground are at mid summer peak, no school in summer. But then I noticed that a couple of trees are turning color. Rockwell should have consulted a horticulturist.
American History is okay I guess. The last 500 years has been rather depressing, but the rest of it’s good.
In life, Kincaid was a Christofascist scold and con man. I don’t see why he’d oppose DHS from using his “art.”
@5 “Rockwell should have consulted a horticulturist.”
The artist is Thomas Kincaid.
Please do not EVER confuse the two!
Norman Rockwell is probably the most misunderstood artist whose actual sentiment is most diametrically opposed to what people assume it is. (To be fair I don’t know anything about Kincaid and have not really scrutinized his works below his immediate apparent kitsch. Maybe there’s more to him than meets the eye, as there is to Rockwell, but I doubt it.)
This seems like a better fit for DHS using a Kinkade painting.
https://images.app.goo.gl/WBwEGnsHS2drTo4m8
I am (un)fortunate enough to live in what is laughingly called a constitutional monarchy. Another name for this is a bunyip aristocracy. A bunyip is a nasty beast from Australian Aboriginal mythology that lurked around pools and streams ready to pounce on and devour unsuspecting travellers. That is a pretty good description of our would be aristocrats. Being a monarchy we have no bill of rights and or constitution is an act of the Brutish Parliement rather than our own. When I was a young lad we too had to swear an oath of allegiance at the start of school each morning. The wording was “I honour my God (no atheists allowed), I serve my Queen (no Republicans either, particularly those nasty Irish ones) and I salute the flag. More than a few of us were mildly pissed off at this imposition and once we’d passed the Queen bit, we changed the words to “I shoot the flag”. Considering that the flag still has that ugly bloody Brutish ensign in the top left corner that is an entirely appropriate action.
@9 Artor: You wrung an early-morning chuckle out of me with that link. Thank you!
The use (abuse) of the Kincaid painting by DHS fits nicely with the oversimplified definitions I keep in my head:
Conservatives believe the “Golden Age” was somewhere in our past, when things were as they should be, and good people should strive to bring them back.
Progressives believe the “Golden Age” is somewhere in our future, when things will be as they should be, and good people should strive to reach them.
A gross oversimplification, as I said. In both cases, the devil is in the details. The backward-looking conservatives conveniently forget that the Golden Age was not golden for many, many people—but that’s okay because they’re brown, anyway. The forward-looking progressives forget they need to define their vision carefully: the Golden Age could be usurped by the same racists and kleptocrats that want the Kincaid vision for our society today.
The Boss and I were discussing when was America “great” in the seedy, twisted, demented minds of the Heritage Foundation Christian nationalist.
We settled on 1958. Summer, just prior to Sputnik. Two children and a dog, breadwinner, housewife, Plymouth station wagon. Pre-Beatles when the main threats to society were Elvis the Pelvis and beatnicks. Maynard G. Krebs, “Work!”
After that the iceberg rolled over and chaos ensued. Civil rights, hippies, women who didn’t know their place (substitute “women” for your preferred minority), liberty, equality and fraternity.
Oh really?
When is DHS going to post pictures celebrating Black slaves working in the cotton fields?
Or the centuries long genocides of the original inhabitants, the American Indians?
Imported Chinese laborors building the transcontinental railroads?
The US Civil War which the current leaders of DHS lost?
Their version of American heritage and history never existed.
How should Carl Spitzweg be considered? His paintings are very middle class but their humour seems, to me, healthy. Whether they are kitsch or not is personal taste. The fact that Hitler liked them is surely not Spitzweg ‘s fault.
Here is a more relevant classic Thomas Kincaide painting, slightly modified.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/cthulhu-and-thomas-kinkade–101260691595355545/
We are getting close to waking Cthulhu up.
They would be at home with the Trump regime.
#13 Raven:
Already done, as mentioned in my post #2. Assuming, that is, that you intended to continue the theme of “celebrating” from the previous sentence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/07/29/trump-dhs-immigrants-social-paintings/
@woozy #8
My bad. I had just clicked on timgueguen’s link (#4) and Rockwell was on my mind.
Sorry about the error.
I’m really starting to fucking hate Nazis.
Didn’t Behind the Bastards do an ep or two on Kincaide? Because Kincaide was a bastard…?
@3 John Watts wrote: If they need a book about American history, I heartily recommend Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saunt.
I reply: Yes, that is good. I would strongly recommend:
Daniel A. Sjursen’s A True History of the United States get it at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612519/a-true-history-of-the-united-states-by-daniel-a-sjursen/ DO NOT by from amazon
and
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
The Compartment of Homeland Insecurity (along with every other tRUMP admin. group) is run by fascist, cosplay military imbeciles.
And, Kinkaid was a cheesy flim-flam production artist turning out endless, garish, ridiculous, parodies of ‘americana’.
Welcome to more clear indications of the death spiral of this country
Oh look, it’s two orgs having a fight and I hate them both.
I can only hope that KFF sues the U.S. government and loses badly, with new case law that weakens the power of copyright law and dramatically expands the protections and scope of fair use.
My grandmother was an artist and despised Thomas Kincaid. I think the thing that made her angriest was the tagline “Painter of Light.” Isn’t that what all painters do? I mean, green is only green because it absorbs that specific wavelength.
Back in the 30’s there was an Austrian kitsch painter who lived in Austria. His name was Adolf something….
Schmaltz is an apt descriptor for anything painted by Thomas Kinkaid. It’s also a noun meaning rendered chicken fat. Various internet sources claim it’s Jewish, but that’s nonsense. Schmaltzbrot is very much a Germanic word and foodstuff. (Blech, nein)
I am not surprised that the official mouthpiece of the execrable dog- killer currently in power at DHS thinks this kitschy trash is art, or somehow celebrates American history. I suggest she study some actual fine art, in particular : La Mort de Marat or Marat Assassiné) a 1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David. Being the mouthpiece for fascists is historically dangerous.
One room schoolhouses were not located in cities , and had mostly gone out of use by the fifties. The one my Mother attended in extremely rural North Dakota has been relocated to a tourist attraction known as Buckstop Junction. It was vacant for decades after being closed in 1958.
The students generally walked or went via horseback, and there was never a flag on a giant pole. I have photos of the students in my Grandfathers era, and they are poorly dressed in hand-me-down overalls, frequently barefoot, and overall quite grubby.
asclepius @ #22 — If I understand correctly, green paint is green because it reflects light in a range of wave lengths that our eyes and brains interpret as green while the object absorbs other wavelengths particularly red and blue. But I think it’s the other way around if it’s green glass.
Another good book on American history is The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist. He explores how integral slavery was to the rise of American capitalism after importing new slaves because illegal, not just for the production of cotton but for making money selling slaves. Virginia and North Carolina went from agricultural based economies to slave-trading based economies.
Those Kinkaid paintings always look like burning meth labs to me.
tethys @24 – see Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmaltz)
schmaltz = yiddish
schmalz = german
The noun Schmaltz is derived from the German verb schmelzen ‘to melt’, from the West Germanic root *smeltan, modern English to smelt. It entered English through Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews who used schmaltz to refer to kosher poultry fat; the Yiddish word שמאַלץ shmalts refers to rendered chicken fat.[6][7] The English term schmaltz is derived from Yiddish and is cognate with the German term Schmalz, which can refer to any rendered fat of animal origin including lard (more precisely Schweineschmalz) and clarified butter (Butterschmalz); though according to German law, Schmalz must exclusively refer to a lard-based product in a commercial context. English use tends to follow Yiddish, which limits the meaning of schmaltz to rendered poultry fat.[8][9][10]
The textbook? Mein Kampf.
@direlobo
Yiddish itself derives from Old High German. Of course schwineschmaltz is not kosher so chicken is the Jewish version.
The pronounciation of both spellings is exactly the same, the difference is merely modern orthography. Germany also spells the numbers two, ten, and twelve with an initial Z, in addition to willingly eating bread smeared with schmaltz. It’s literally sold in jars at the supermarket. The bread is fabulous, but the schmaltz is just a no for me.
Schmaltzbrot is a thing in Germany. Bread smeared with schmaltz
“If the media needs a history lesson . . .”
You can always spot an ignoramus. They always assume they are the smartest person in the room.
Actually, the artist’s surname is spelled Kinkade, NOT Kincade. (I wonder if the DHS & other Trumpists also plan to abuse paintings by Norman Rockwell?)
Agreed that Norman Rockwell gets a bad rap. He painted plenty of scenes extolling traditional values of middle American, and it’s fair to call him out on that, but he also celebrated the working class, painted the original Rosie the Riveter (not the more famous propaganda poster, which was not called that until after WW2), and as mentioned above made one of the most effective anti-racism images in US history.
@7
Because like all talentless grifters, he would be furious that someone was stealing “his” art and his money. Although “his” art is a stretch–his business model was to paint those schlocky pictures, then pay other people to paint identical paintings of his original, which he would then sign and sell for ridiculous sums of money as a “genuine Kinkade”.
@11 The Golden Age, as conservatives imagine it? Try this:
https://mariadahvanaheadley.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/the-golden-age-of-science-fiction-swimming-club-more-thoughts-on-sff-sexism-racism-and-general-badness/
@ 22, 25 Additive color (light) can either be a wavelength in a specific range/color in the visible light range or it can be made from multiple wavelengths. For example, red and green wavelengths make yellow (at least as perceived by human eyes. If you are pollinator insects or birds, you get some extra colors in the UV range). RGB makes white light. Subtractive color absorbs certain wavelengths and reflects others, so blue and yellow pigments make green. CMYK combined make black, which absorbs all wavelengths.
robro@25,
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist is certainly worth reading, but has been severely (and I think probably correctly) criticised for the claim that the increase in the “productivity” of enslaved people picking cotton was entirely due to those people finding ways to increase their rate of picking in order to avoid floggings. The enslavers, contrary to Baptist, did innovate in terms of the varieties of cotton they used and I think other aspects of production. But Baptist is certainly enlightening on how far the financial tentacles of slavery in the American South spread, and hence the deep complicity of business and finance in the North, and in Europe.
For a broad view of American history I recommend Alan Taylor’s three books: American Colonies, American Revolutions, and American Republics, which place the prehistory and early history of the USA in its continental (North American) context, without which, much of it makes little sense.
It has been sadi so much light spills out from the windows of the cottages he paints that they appear to be on fire.