Patriotic Times is a coloring book of US democratic state failures and the emergence of fascism, covering the twenty-six years from 2000 to 2026. Authored by Adnan Selimović. Sixty-three plates, sequenced chronologically, each drawn from a specific event in the public record.
The format is the joke and the project. A coloring book is a children's object; the events depicted are not for children. The friction the reader experiences in colored crayon vs. carceral apparatus is the project's pedagogy.
Every plate is interactive. Open any one on the plates index and color it in the browser — paint-bucket fills the closed regions of the line art in your chosen color. When you are done, the Print your version button exports your colored page directly. Print the blank line art and color it by hand if you prefer; the act is the project either way.
The line work is original. Reference photography was drawn from contemporaneous press archives; sources are documented in the bound edition's appendix.
Plates exist on this site as interactive line-art (above), as printable sheets, and as a forthcoming bound edition. Individual sheets are available for educational and exhibition use; reproduction for non-commercial purposes is permitted and encouraged.
The landing page presents the same sixty-three plates grouped into four thematic chapters across the period — a narrative arc that the chronological plate sequence does not itself commit to.
Each plate cites a specific event in the public record. Selections were made by the author from a longer list of documented incidents 2000–2026. Events were grouped into four thematic chapters such that the chapter title carries the diagnostic frame and the event sequence demonstrates the frame's extension across the period.
The project sits beside The Closed-Loop Libidinal Economy (the framework that names the conditions under which the book's events were possible) and OHCOSE (the imagined bureaucratic register that administers the lifecycle the book's subjects inhabit).
The closed-loop framework is the theory. OHCOSE is the satire. Patriotic Times is the evidence.
Textual content: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (non-commercial). Plates: all rights reserved by the author; reproduction for educational or exhibition use is permitted with attribution. Commercial reproduction requires written consent.
Selimović, A. Patriotic Times: A Coloring Book. 2025–2026. autostimulus.org/patriotic-times