Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State in that order, and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice President, he will do so. He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice President and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.
–Secretary of State, fmr. Gen. Alexander Haig, speaking to reporters after the assassination attempt on President Reagan

Ahh, who can forget Alexander Haig — White House Chief of Staff under Nixon, Secretary of State under Reagan, Allied Supreme Being in Europe, a guy who looks like he could play himself in a Robert Ludlum story? And, who can forget that memorable occasion — while we’re on the subject of the media and government getting weird together — when in answer to some question or another, Secretary Haig blurts out an assertion that he was “in control here” following the assassination attempt on Reagan downtown?

Leave it to my pal Gregor, who ran the Yippies’ print shop in DC — and his dryly-barbed sense of humor to give my muse a kick in the ass, with his comments that Haig was behaving like the coup leader and El Presidente of some Central American banana republic, giving his first address to the People, and his sarcastic throwing of stiff-armed fist salutes into the air and shouting, “Haig, Haig, Haig For Life!”

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One thing about this period was that it was that time when things started getting weird in Media And Government Land, ranging from frivolity like Reagan inadvertantly mouthing off around live mics, mentioning his plan to “…begin bombing in five minutes…”, to far more evil intentional mouth-offs, such as then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s declaration that a nuclear war would be “winnable”.

I remember being absolutely gob-smacking amazed at that. How the hell does he decide whether or not we’ve “won”? I’d ask myself, would it be if our side had enough people left to put on a halfway decent victory parade, as opposed to the pathetic, raggedy-assed second-generation mutant rumble shown above?

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These days, our gentle punditocracy would call the mom and dad shown below “values voters”, but back then we just called them “right-wing religious-freak nutjobs” — not quite as elegant, but more truthfully desciptive. Another better-known Yipster Times/Overthrow piece, a back-cover subscription ad poster from the summer of ’81 which asked its readers the question, “Weighted Down By The ’80s?” That’s right, not a year into the new decade, and every aspect of life — workers’ rights, reproductive rights, civil liberties, education, popular culture — was hammer-down on the highway to hell.

You know when an outfit calls itself “Focus On The Family”, all of our families are in huge-ass trouble.

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During my last two years of college, one of the things my roommate (the other cartoonist for the campus weekly) and I enjoyed most on Sunday mornings was bong hits and coffee for breakfast while watching the local TV evangelists for cheap laffs — TV evangelists were funny back then — while waiting for the local Sunday morning Tarzan Film Festival for even more cheaper laffs (a lot of local channels were running Tarzan movies on late Sunday mornings back then; what was the deal with that?).

The biggest hit around our dorm was a guy with a pompadour a mile high and a pastel blue suit (that looked like he’d stolen it from the local news anchorman) who broadcast out of Pulaski, VA — my bud and I went to Radford College, in the city (for down there) of Radford, VA, just across the river and down the road a piece — who used to “heal” people on the air, usually wheelchair-bound, deaf, mute, and gullible (interesting, he never did have any blind people on that program). He’d gibber a bunch of phrases strung together as if on heroin, top it off with a little “in Jesus’ name, out, thou (insert affliction), OUT!”, and he’d smack some deaf/mute kid in the forehead and push him back onto the deacons. They’d stand the poor sucker back up, and the preacher would snap his fingers around the kid’s ears and say “say ‘thank you, Jesus'”, and the kid would offer up some barely-intelligible groaning and the preacher would exclaim, “ohh, isn’t it wonderful?”; the audience would burst into applause and “amens” and my roommate and I would laugh so hard we shot bongwater out of our noses…

…all in the cause of satirical and artistic inspiration, of course.

So, after a few months of this, I finally start wondering… why is it always the forehead? No matter what the affliction — not just deafness, but paralysis, arthritic limbs, asthma — Pompadour Boy would always smack his marks… uh, faithful …on the friggin’ forehead! Here, in another early Yipster Times piece, I imagine the day that Reverend Pastel is challenged to heal hemorrhoids on his program. A cheap gag, I know, but I learned early on that good execution can often save a really lame gag. It sure did here; I mean, it did get into the Yipster Times.

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