Am I the only one here who was totally gob-smacked at the spectacle of politicians, freelance guardians of public morals and the Federal Communications Commission Board all simultaneously crapping their drawers at the reports of Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl Halftime Show baring one nipple in an instant so quick, so fleeting, that the only way you could really see it was to watch the super-slo-mo replay? Am I the only one here who’s more than a little bit annoyed at seeing all these people howling over a nipple being exposed for one one-hundred-thousandth of a second while our manuafacturing jobs are being sucked away by China, our IT service jobs being siphoned off by India, our Bill Of Rights being shredded, and the US is up to its armpits in an illegal imperialist war of aggression in Iraq? Am I the only one here who’s more than slightly disgusted at all the hypocritical shrieking about obscenity and sexuality at the Super Bowl Halftime Show while our airwaves and cable are flooded with Desperate Housewives, Real Housewives, Sex And The City, and beer commercials full of frolicking hotties — not to mention the supreme irony of scantily-clad NFL cheerleaders prancing on the sidelines during the actual Super Bowl game itself? Is there not one woman in this country who’s tired of being driven insane trying to live up to the US entertainment and advertising industries’ official standard of feminine beauty, i.e., emaciated stick insects with visible ribcages and silicone-injected ta-tas big enough to choke a horse?

Well, consider this cartoon a call to action to every woman who’s tired of being told by advertising that her body is inadequate, and told by the Federal Communications Commission that her body is just plain dirty, to write her favorite brief, simple, elegant, dissident message across her chest and take it to the streets.

At every protest, at every media event, get your average, non-beer-commercial-like body into the streets and flash your message at every opportunity. Going to the IMF/WB/Pro-Choice actions in DC this spring? Cruise the streets, look for remote live TV news crews, manuver your way into the near background, and bam, let ’em have it, your message about censorship and media hypocrisy, emblazoned across your entirely non-Swedish Bikini Team-like bare chest — or, if you’re the shy type, mix up the ol’ paste bucket and hit the streets with this provocative poster while leaving your shirt on the entire time.

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Continue reading "Show Us Your Tits!" »

As the more transparently sleazy, odious, and second-rate features of President Junior’s “No Child Left Behind” program became known, the sarcastic nicknames began to fly — among them my own favorites, “No Child Left Unrecruited” and “No Child Shall Escape”. Indeed, no child shall escape the State’s program of psychiatric drugging, captive-audience mass-marketing, military recruitment and political indoctrination. Education? Who said it?

By this time, as well, military recruiters’ encroachment into high-school campuses had markedly increased, along with more aggressive tactics ranging up to and including harassment, threats, and telephone harassment of students’ families at home. Student resistance escalated in kind, including the blockading of military recruiting office in downtown DC; in at least a couple of cases, young men in the process of enlistment got the message and backed out on the spot.

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Continue reading "No Child Left Behind, no.2" »

A friend of mine noted that it’d been quite some years since I did one of my good old-fashioned blood-spattered antiwar cartoons, so I came roaring back with “Super Service”, and the even more brutal piece here. As I recall, it was about this time that Lisa Beamer, wife of a 9/11 victim, went on a whirlwind promotional victimhood-pimping tour including a stop on the NBC Today Show plugging her book, and — what really sent me over the top, inspiring this cartoon — her attempt to register a trade/service mark on the phrase “Let’s Roll”. Sweet friggin’ Jayzus, I thought, does this goddamn’ woman have any shame at all?

While pretty much everyone I knew in the antiwar activist community was totally down with the message, many found the imagery disturbing (much to my delight). Washington DC media activist Zoe Mitchell wrote:

…the argument he chose to present his argument with disturbs me. It’s violent. It’s bloody. It makes me sick. Unfortunately, it’s dead-on accurate. US soldiers driving SUVs have shot and killed Iraqi civilians. Contrary to the US Media’s imagery, Persian Gulf War 2.0 is violent and bloody. It should make us ALL sick.

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Continue reading "Let’s Roll!" »

This was my first — and so far, only — “made for TV” poster, a “throwaway” idea that’d been rattling around in my head for a while, which I drew for the benefit of a crew from Swedish Public Television (STV) who’d come to town to interview me in my studio and to show my posse and I out for an evening’s wheatpasting in the wake of my big bust-out in the Washington Post.

This particular piece was done during the run-up to Iraq War v2.0, in which President Chimp was pushing the doctrine of “pre-emptive war”, which was basically the foreign-policy version of those scenes in old Three Stooges comedies where Moe bashes Larry upside the head from clear out of nowhere; Larry asks “hey, what’d you do that for?”, and Moe says “that’s for what you were thinking!”

I’ve chosen not to post the video of the actual STV segment here, as due to my nervousness about public speaking, my studio interview segment shows me saying “like” and “you know” in every other sentence, totally going against everything I was taught by my tenth-grade English teacher and my college Oral Interpretation teacher with regard to proper public diction and the avoidance of “vocal tics” (which is what “like” and “you know” are) in public speaking. STV actually portrayed me and my work in a very positive light as part of “the other America” in the Bush Era, but I was still terribly embarassed at what a bashful public speaker I am… like, you know…right?

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Continue reading "“Pre-Emption” Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry" »