an emperor for our time

I'm always looking for pictures that could serve as modern tarot cards, especially trumps. Here's "The General" by Saul Steinberg (1970), which I see as a 21st-century trump IV -- the emperor.

The general, like the emperor, is the ultimate secular authority. He speaks in a thick, nearly impenetrable bureaucratic jargon, a formula for fabricating engines of destruction. He is considerably less human than the emperor, almost robotic. It's a sign of the times.

It would be a fun project to look for tarot trump images in the great artworks of our own and earlier times, like this one.

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