Ah, Y2K… a simpler, happier time. Nothing important having to do with computers or networks crashed, failed, collapsed, imploded or fell over. We still didn’t have our flying cars yet, but we were still wired to the teeth on the solidarity high from A16. Of course, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to bitch about not having our flying cars yet, as it was fast approaching time to decide how we were going to organize around the Presidential “Election” circus, and the attendant party conventions. This being DC, we spent a lot of time spotlighting Statehood organizing and the “debates”.

Every Presidential “election” year, the Commission On Presidential Debates, a totally bipartisan outfit, convenes to decide, in an entirely bipartisan fashion, how to prevent anybody other than Republicans and Democrats from appearing in the nationally televised “debates”. This, of course, was also the first year in many that the Democrats were facing any kind of serious challenge from the Left — and by “the Left”, I don’t mean “candy-assed phony ‘Pwogwessives’ who vote Democratic, mail checks to NPR and read Mother Jones while they’re taking a dump”; by that, I mean the goddamned Left, from the outside, in the form of Ralph Nader and the Green Party USA, who actually were close to polling numbers high enough to qualify for Federal matching funds and automatic ballot access in the next “election” year. Needless to say, most of the Democratic Party’s most vigorous campaigning wasn’t against the GOP, but against the Left — basically, against its own base — for daring to decide they had a choice, and that they didn’t need the Democrats’ permission to take action, and to call the Democratic leadership to account for their abandonment of core values, its failure to defend working people and, basically, being such a worthless, no-account, dive-artist outfit while still attempting to put up a shabby, weak, Liberal/Progressive facade. It was the year the Democratic Party finally revealed what it was really all about by doing everything it could to keep off the ballot and out of the “debates” a party whose platform would’ve been raised proudly by the Democratic Party themselves in, say, the early ’70s.

This poster advertised a series of protests held in downtown DC, at the headquarters of the Commission on Presidential Debates, calling out the Democrats for their hypocrisy and cowardice, and calling out the CPD for rigging the rules in favor of rich, well-connected establishment politicians, and for allowing corporate influence in the form of Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship of the telecasts. This was also the year where you couldn’t turn on your TV set without at least once seeing that goddamn’ “Whazzuuuuuuup!” commercial at least ten times. Still, it was silly enough to hold my attention for more than ten seconds, and my friends and I were already using it as a form of ironic, absurdist greeting, so when I let my mind wander a bit and started riffing on the whole Presidential Debate/Whazzuuuuuup idea, it didn’t take long to start asking myself what influence Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship will take. Would they be allowed to hang their logo onstage, like those old quiz shows from the ’50s? Would A-B be allowed final say on the questions…and have us reduced to an hour a night for three nights of Gush and Bore standing there going “Whazzuuuuuuuup?” This, while not the most likely, proved to be the more entertaining vision.

11×17 medium-res grayscale .jpeg image, 660kb

Continue reading "Let the People Into the Debates" »

Well, here we were maybe a year and a half since the big “victory” parade we gave ourselves, and Daddy Bush’s approval numbers were circling the drain two months before the “election”. Not being able to figure out how a bar-code reader worked, right there on TV in front of everybody and their cat, certainly hadn’t helped matters any. So, there was only one thing for Daddy Bush to do, and that’s — you guessed it, gin up another war scare with a pretext so flimsy that I can’t even remember what it was. Get everybody’s patriotic hard-ons working again, and they’ll forget about the economy, and the looming North American Free Trade Agreement… and the fact that their President was such a sheltered preppie that he never even had the chance to see how a bar-code scanner at the frickin’ supermarket works.

A few mornings after our crews had hit the streets with this one, a scattering of them across Capitol Hill started showing up with a note stuck over them addressed to the local GOP contingents — that is, the Hill’s resident population of beer-guzzling interns working for GOP representatives and Senators — from the local Democratic contingent of young beer-guzzlers, apologizing in the most profusely craven and abject manner for the tasteless cartoon being displayed on Capitol Hill, mere weeks before a major Presidential “election”, implying that Daddy Bush was instigating a war scare to rustle up some votes. Oh, p’shaw. A war scare to win an election? Oh, tut-tut, it is to laugh.

Anyway, said young Democratic partisan beer-guzzling youth ended by swearing all up and down that it was the work of a lone nut — admittedly, half true — and not that of the Democratic Party, which goes without saying as even back then, the Democratic Party was one of the most dickless, craven outfits ever to foul the modern American political stage and could never, ever in its wildest dreams, ever summon up the cajones to publicly suggest that a sitting GOP President — a scheming, lying, conniving, former CIA Director, f’cripesake — would actually whip up a phony war threat in order to win an election.

As we were to find out about a year later, President Bill could give us all a clinic in how that kind of behavior is done right.

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It was nearly Thanksgiving, 1990, and the Iraq War I crank-up was going full swing, with all the attendant flag-waving media zaniness. The days of drawing hippie-comix versions of Mack Sennett chase comedies were just about over, and it was time to get off my six-years-moping ass and dive back into the fight. I’d spent the last part of that summer and a good chunk of the fall out in the San Diego area, crashing with some artist friends from the old VERBUM digital arts magazine while trying to find work. I’d met some really hot artists and made some good friends, but had found absolutely zero work. When you’re in a naval/defense/aerospace “company town” and the Berlin Wall falls, and the USSR collapses, you sort of find your main industry in the tank — and when your main industry hits the tank, the rest of the local economy tends to follow you…but, anyway…

…I was maybe a couple of days out of San Diego heading back east, crossing west Texas near Midland and Odessa, where you could see the drilling from the highway and where the stink was so bad that rolled-up windows and AC didn’t work on it. I’d been getting up at 3 or 3:30am in order to get a head start while the weather was cooler while crossing the Southwest, so I’d already been on the highway for a couple of hours when I pulled into a Shell station just before sunrise to top off before heading out on my attempt to cross Texas in less than two days.

This particular Shell station was right off the Interstate, one of those stations right off the exit, with the giant electric logo sign a mile wide on a pole a mile high so people on the highway can see them above the trees — and the giant mile-high electric sign on this particular Shell station also had a massive giant shiny plastic yellow ribbon, tied in a perfect bow, around the pole under the Shell logo at the top of the sign. That’s right, their gas supported more troops than anybody else’s gas. Rolling up to the pump island and parking directly beneath this thing was like stopping to buy gas in the Twilight Zone. The sheets of yellow plastic and the light from the giant Shell sign in the predawn murk bathed the place in this weird yellow glow that sucked the color out of everything and made it look as if it were a black-and-white TV show.

The scene outside when I got out to self-serv my gas was nothing if not post-apocalyptic — or at least pre-post-apocalyptic. Fat, nasty-looking ex-biker types of every kind, driving ’77 El Caminos and old International Scouts and 4×4 pickups which had actually been taken off the road recently and which had actual guns in the racks (not like those goddamn’ poseurs back in Virginia who drove spotless Ford F-150s with just the racks in the back). After a seemingly endless wait to pay for the gas, I had to slip my cash to yet another nasty-looking old biker type in the “cashier’s cube” wearing a brown t-shirt and desert camo BDUs and one of those baseball caps with the name of an aircraft carrier embroidered on it.

…after which I — in a smooth manner calculated not to draw attention to myself — slipped back behind the wheel of the ’88 Rabbit wagon with the Grateful Dead stickers on the back, started it up and — once again, in an entirely casual manner — calmly and nonchalantly floored it the hell out of there.

Maybe a half hour or so down the highway, away from the Outer Limits Rerun From Hell, with the sun breaking the horizon ahead and color perception returned to normal, my mind began to fixate on thoughts of coffee — black with sugar, a box of Krispy Kreme chocolate cake doughnuts, breakfast burritos… and the two cartoons you see here. These two were sketched, scanned and made print-ready within days after returning to DCland from San Diego

OK, No Blood For Oil. Doesn’t seem like a big deal now, everybody and their cat knows that’s one of the main reasons we’re there, and the meme is getting beat. Still, in December of ’90, or early January of ’91, to blurt this out was like George Bernard Shaw’s great truth beginning as blasphemy.

There was a sort of “perfect storm” of artistic, social and technological events that sucked me back into political cartooning after all that time. I’d been inspired by the large-scale “flypasting” recently made popular again by cartoonist Robbie Conal out in Los Angeles. Some weird thing called The Internet was just becoming available through the BBS systems that maladjusted geeks like myself hung out on, which suddenly made it possible to send a picture to someone in Australia over a computer network. Most importantly, though — even though it didn’t seem that way at the time — I found myself in late ’89 hooking back up with a local network of activists which seemed to emerge almost totally intact from the DC dissident culture scene of the late ’70s, and still active on most of the same issues the old DC Yippie collective was working on. Kind of weird it was, really; I heard there was some pro-legalization rally at the Sylvan Theater, and when I get there, it turns out half the old 10th & K Street crew was running the show and working the stage. As an added bonus, most of them shared a large group house up in upper Northwest DC, in the South side of the Divided Peoples’ Republic Of Takoma Park. I lived the better part of a year in the old place on Butternut Street — the “Nuthouse”, it was called, of course — right up until I left for California in August of ’90, just as the Iraq War I hysteria was getting its legs. Returning home found the Nuthouse in full swing, getting ready to put on local antiwar events, helping organize for national events coming up, getting ready to host people from out of town coming to the big marches in January… and really into the idea of getting out and doing some of that there wheatpasting that everybody’s talking about… and, there I was, the guy who used to do the comix in the old DC Yippie rag, still doing comix…

“Topping Off”, medium-res jpg image, 356k

“The Latest Shipload”, medium-res jpg image, 340k

Continue reading "Original “Blood for Oil” Series" »