Y’know what really got me about all this was how everybody in the public and the media seemed to forget all about the great honking wad of cash that the Bush Regime gave to the Taliban, early in the Chimp’s Presidency, ostensibly for the purpose of “fighting drugs” in Afghanistan. This was, of course, right about the time the Taliban were catching worldwide hell for doing things like destroying old Buddhist temple ruins and such.

Afghanistan, needless to say, was full of militant Muslim militia/guerrilla types who were trained by the CIA to resist the Soviet invasion back in the day, including an especially notable ex-CIA asset named Osama Bin Laden. It must not have occurred to the US “spooks” that folks like the Taliban or the Mujahideen see any outside invasion as a threat, not just the Soviets. Talk about more blowback than you can handle.

We first hit the streets with this one in early November, while the shit was just starting to fly hot and heavy here and in Afghanistan, and had an amazingly easy time considering the climate. Around Adams-Morgan, we’d just finished hitting a Washington Post box and were about half a block down the street when I happened to glance back to see a couple of women checking it out, and overheard one saying to the other, “yeah, we all know Bin Laden.”.

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Continue reading "Six Degrees of Separation" »

Tragic though the event may have been, I got tired quickly of all the TV talkers howling about the thousands who died at the Pentagon and World Trade Center without once considering the USA was responsible for at least a hundred times as many over the course of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, ten years of Vietnam, the 1991 bombing of Baghdad, and the decade of sanctions against Iraq following Iraq War I.

Also — stop me if I’m wrong — but didn’t Bin Laden’s targeting of the World Trade Center classify as targeting on a “military asset” under the Pentagon’s own current rules? Was he really doing anything different from the US in Iraq Wars I and II, or the US/NATO action against Belgrade?

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Continue reading "America’s Towers O’Terror" »

This is one of the pieces I was happiest about, in terms of people getting the literary/dramatic reference in the context of the initial mass Tourette’s outburst of almost WWI-like zaniness from the US Government and society at large in the weeks after 9/11. I honestly didn’t think enough people in my audience would’ve seen The Madness Of George III to get it, but it turns out lots of folks had. I was rather embarrassed to have forgotten that the kind of people who collect my work aren’t going to be the kind of people who like films with hot babes, high-speed chases, robots turning into airplanes, and stuff blowing up.

It was another weirdly poignant piece: done originally for the October issue of The Progressive (without the headlines and captions) it dealt with the emerging imperialistic tendencies of the then-early Bush Regime and drawn a good month or so before 9/11.

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Continue reading "Madness of George II" »

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room,
where I got me a date with a pretty little girl from Greece;
she told me she would be there with me
when I paint my masterpiece!
–Dylan.

I try to think more about the guy we met at Dupont Circle who was overjoyed to have finally discovered where these posters came from, or the students from the George Washington Action Coalition out for a late-night bicycle ride on P Street who stopped off and jazzed us up with a quick blast of solidarity (“Yo, wheatpasters!”) to take my mind off the “neighbor” on Connecticut Avenue who stalked us — tearing down posters — for two blocks, and the DC cop who became frustrated with his own piss-poor knowledge of the law and inability to cite us for anything and proceeded to stalk us and tear down posters all the way down P Street from Dupont Circle almost to Georgetown, committing no less than half a dozen separate basic Constitutional violations in the process against our crew.

So, the next time you bump into some pacifist liberal who wants to “negotiate” with the police, direct them to this video.

Continue reading "Out With the Crew for an Evening’s Postering, Fall 2001" »