Politics & Power Quote by Eddie Campbell

There’s a particular kind of artist’s shrug in Eddie Campbell’s line: the way “political stuff” is waved off as if it were a genre convention, while “total fantasy” gets treated as a necessary altitude change. Campbell isn’t merely confessing escapism. He’s sketching an aesthetic stance that doubles as a survival tactic: when politics becomes a daily, grinding material, the imagination either metabolizes it into story or refuses it outright and goes airborne.

The name-drop of “Delano” does heavy lifting. If it’s FDR, Campbell is gesturing toward the canonical American myth of politics as theater with real stakes - fireside rhetoric, big systems, big consequences. Against that, “Me” lands with deliberate smallness: the first-person voice that knows it can’t compete with statecraft and doesn’t want to. Campbell’s intent feels less like ignorance and more like a critique of the expectation that every cultural producer must file a policy memo in the form of art. His subtext: politics is already saturated with narrative, propaganda, and performance; there’s a point where making “political art” risks repeating the same scripts.

“Gone off the top” is the key phrase - manic, comic, slightly self-mocking. It frames fantasy not as retreat but as a pressure valve, even an act of dissent. By refusing the compulsory seriousness of political discourse, he defends another register of truth: the symbolic, the absurd, the personal. The punchline is that “total fantasy” can be the more honest response when reality has become aggressively unbelievable.