About this time, at the peak of O.J. Frenzy, I was noticing a pattern in the media: that of what I liked to call the “Enemy Of The Month”. Didn’t it seem like that to you… seemed like every other day, there was some huge hysterical alarm in the media about some inflammatory hot-button bullshit issue like rap lyrics, or heavy metal lyrics, or cyberporn, or immigrants, or the Iraqis, or “hate speech”, or… O.J.!

Brilliant — in a ham-fisted fashion — when you think about it: what better way to keep peoples’ minds off of any actual real economic and social issues than keeping their panties in a bunch about a constant parade of shallow, sensationalistic “issues” like flag burning, TV violence, cyberporn, rap lyrics and — most heinous of all at the time — teen smoking. For some mysteriously weird reason that summer, a longtime American tradition was being raged over as if it were an asteroid about to hit the Earth. Needless to say, much of this starred President Elvis all over the TV lecturing us about teenaged smoking, using his Baby Boom membership as a tired-assed “I know, I remember the Sixties” bully pulpit. Hearing the broadcast browbeatings made me ask any Liberal within earshot, “Did you people honestly think this guy was going to give us any meaningful policy reforms on medical marijuana or drug policy in general? I mean, f’cripesake, listen to the guy!”

The real, personal insult on top of injury came that summer, a couple of weeks after Jerry Garcia had died, when President I Didn’t Inhale, in his daily radio blather, chose once again to beat us over the head with the teenaged smoking “issue”, vomiting smarm and condescension over my radio at staggering rates, alarmingly making note of Garcia’s death in the speech, finishing with words to the effect of “remember what happened to Jerry! Just Say No, Kids!”

Right then, in that very instant — that very fleeting little instant, sitting next to the boombox on the beach, mouth poised over a fresh slab of pizza, gulls snatching fries off the blanket, airplanes towing advertising overhead — I felt that I could’ve dropped what I was doing, gotten some clothes on, driven back to DC, and risked certain life imprisonment for assaulting El Presidente, just for the satisfaction of crashing the speech and smacking President I Didn’t Inhale square across the chops, on the air, for using rhetoric so crassly exploitive that it set a perverse “Gold Standard” for crass exploitation, even for the Clinton Mob.

1 of 2, medium-res jpg image, 872k
2 of 2, medium-res jpg image, 844k

Continue reading "Enemy-of-the-Month Club" »

I always hated listening to Democrats and Liberals bitching about government abuses in the name of “fighting terrorism” under George W. Chimp, as they always seem to forget that their own boy, Bubba Clinton, wanted to do just about the same things after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. Who were the first people he wanted to go after? Go on, take a guess. Not surprised? Neither was I, hearing that President Bill’s number-one target under his prototype Patriot Act was the Left. The crackpot “militias” in Montana, Michigan and Idaho — guys who had actual guns and openly professed a willingness to use violence against their opponents, guys like OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh — apparently were no huge threat, until Clinton needed the threat of rightist violence to scare people into accepting his authoritarian “anti-terror” measures… and then, oh, yeah, the rightist militia cranks were the goddamn’ Enemy Of The Month. Never mind that Mr. Crime Fighter, Mr. Put Several Hundred Thousand More Cops Onto The Streets, Mr. Three-Strikes, never appeared to lift a finger on the womens’ clinic shootings and bombings. Nahh, Mr. Crime Bill’s first instinct here is to go for the crowd pleaser, and jail the Left — as per usual.

So, some years later, when I saw the Government’s response to 9/11 — basically, the Oklahoma City response dialed up to 11 — I wasn’t all that surprised (unlike all the pants-pissing Liberals around me), having seen it all before from a Democratic administration, that of the Clinton Mob… but just try and point that out to your average mindless partisan Liberal, and watch their goddamn’ heads explode from cognitive dissonance overload.

Medium-res jpg image, 576k

Continue reading "Spot the Terrorist" »

This piece was pretty much the last political cartoon I did for nearly six years — for what was probably the last Counterinaugural event put on by the old NYC YIP posse that I know of. Not having the Internet in those days, getting your message out and networking with folks of like mind were damn’ near impossible in the face of growing media oppression (in the form of increasing Drug War propagandizing) and growing hostility by society at large towards anyone or anything “different”.

Left activism and political cartooning, in this kind of environment, were getting to be a seemingly hopeless grind of years with no hope of results, and often backward progress. The Yipster Times/Overthrow outfit put out its last issue at or about 1986 or so, and outlets were becoming scarce already before that. Rather than give myself a nervous breakdown howling into the wind, I went back to doing what I enjoyed in art school: happy partying hippie comix, hippies happily outwitting cops comix, hippies trying to nab spare Dead tickets comix, at the Dead Relix fanzine, also out of New York. It didn’t pay much more than weed money, but I already had a day job, and had an outlet to do entirely fun cartoons with no redeeming political commentary whatsofreakinever, at least for a few years.

medium-res jpg image, 323k; high-res tif image, 4.9mb

Continue reading "1985 Counterinaugural Poster" »

For a while, it seemed like every damn’ time you turned around, either Time or Newsweek or the Washington Post or Parade Magazine or NBC was doing smarmy photo spreads and interviews with Reagan on his ranch — at least Reagan was smart enough to stick to sitting on a horse looking all manly and Presidential, unlike a certain Texas brush-clearing President we all know — and damn’ near causing normal peoples’ heads to explode from the sheer volume of aw-shucks down-home patriotism, feigned cowboy attitude, and religiosity.

As a public service, I presented through the Yipster Times/Overthrow this undercover report on the real Reagan Ranch, not the folksy simulacrum presented for Time, Newsweek, Parade and People.

pdf file, 4 pages, 323k

Continue reading "A Visit to the Reagan Ranch" »