We can hold One Nation marches every week. It will not make any difference until we revolt against the formal structures of power.

The liberal preoccupation with positive forms of propaganda ignores the root of our problem. The tea party and hate mongers on Fox such as Glenn Beck, however repugnant, are the manifestation of the crisis, not its cause. The forces assaulting the remnants of American democracy will not be cowed or discredited with rallies, such as the one in Washington on Saturday. We will blunt these rising anti-democratic forces only when we organize outside conventional systems of power.

Mass support for anti-democratic movements and public acceptance of open violations of human rights are not caused, in the end, by the skillful dissemination of misinformation or brainwashing. They are caused by the breakdown of a society and the death of a liberal class that once made reform and representative government possible. The timidity of our liberal class was on public display during the march in Washington. Speakers may have called for jobs, but none would call on citizens to abandon the rotting hull of the Democratic Party and our moribund political system or put Wall Street speculators in prison.

– Chris Hedges at TruthDig, 10.05.10

One Nation FAILing Together, more like.

Oh, how I wanted to punch this rally in the teeth.

After happily committing to blowing off that thinly-disguised Donkeycratic GOTV rally, I ended up letting my comrades in the Town Hell Posse talk me into coming out with them to shoot it with the idea of putting together a nasty, sarcastic music video to the tune of the Dead Kennedys’ Holiday In Cambodia.

Jeezus, what a huge-assed mistake. This was, without a doubt, the dullest rally ever held in DC — and I mean the Dullest. Rally. EVER. A rally made of Lame. Not even the Socialist or Green contingents could save this Lamefest. Even inasmuch as my pals warned me what I was letting myself in for, it was still a soul-crushingly wretched scene in its own way even worse than Beckapalooza was in August. No street theater, no puppets, no militant pizazz, no civil disobediences, no genuine sentiment, just a bunch of goddamn’ liberals waving mass-printed placards.I chose to cover the immigrants’ rally and feeder march because it was at the Capitol, five minutes’ walk from my house, and because the immigrants’ protests have always been better as they all come from countries where they really know how to throw a protest. Huh, some hope. The immigrants’ rally was totally overrun by SEIU jerks still proudly wearing their goddamn’ purple Obama ‘08 jackets — and featuring Al Sharpton, to boot. Augggh, Reverend Fucking Al, The Cosmic Media Attention-Sucking Vortex, spouting his standard-issue faux militant boilerplate after opening with a prayer. As usual, there was more God than I could handle at this shindig. I can handle the rightists yelling about how America needs God and Christianity, but the Liberals totally blow my gaskets with their hypocrisy about religious diversity even as they totally ignore atheists and freethinkers (such as yours truly).

It was all downhill from there. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial just in time to hear some guy yelling about how “we can’t let Obama fail,” or some godawful shit, and I knew then that I was in for a long, hard afternoon. This Kool-Aid tripper was followed by a bunch of students taking turns reciting pieces of King’s “I Have A Dream” speech as if they were in some kind of school Christmas pageant, followed by MSNBC’s Ed “I Know No-THING” Schultz who bellowed his usual partisan line of bullshit at the top of his goddamn’ lungs. You don’t know scary until you see that windbag Schultz yelling at you from a goddamn’ Jumbotron.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to mention the Jumbotrons — lots of ‘em. Yeah, nothing says bottom-up, grassroots peoples’ mobilization like a fistful of Jumbotrons.

After I finished having the skin peeled off my face by Ed Schultz’s blustering, I decided I just couldn’t take any more and headed back to the Washington Monument snack bar for a hot dog and a beer or three. Normally, I just couldn’t see paying three and a half bucks for a goddamn’ Budweiser, but after witnessing that weak-assed spectacle I was more than happy for a few overpriced Buds to help me recover.

It wasn’t until I met up with the rest of the Posse and headed back to my house to review the footage that the true wretchedness of what I’d just endured really set in (I only shot about half an hour of tape that afternoon because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand looking at it again). The more deathly dull footage I saw rolling by, the more I realized that here was five hours of my life I’ll never get back again — and more’s the pity.

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Continue reading "One Nation Working Together" »

They love me! They really, really love me!

After spending the better part of the past two or three months cranking ‘em out every other week — including more goddamn’ oil spill cartoons than I care to think about — I decided to take a break and finish getting ready for my two-week trip to South Africa, which I just returned from this past weekend.

So, the other night, while doing my normal rounds of rightist blog surfing for cheap laffs, what should I stumble over but this entry at Michael Wolfe’s blog at americana83.com, declaring the Teabaggers’ opposition is hypocritical and swearing all up and down that the Tea Party “Movement” isn’t racist, despite the recent Philadelphia rally which was made of FAIL, the recent video-hacking antics of Little Andy Breitbart and the racist email blasting of New York Gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino.

Along with citing my video of the July 4, 2009 Teabagger rally on Capitol Hill, Mr. Wolfe also took considerable liberties with my work in the form of an attempted parody of my late 2008 cartoon “Obama’s Big Bus”:

I briefly considered writing to complain and to post a takedown notice under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, except that 1: parody, as I recall, falls under “fair use”, and 2: I was unable to type properly as I was laughing so hard, although not in the manner that Wolfe might have intended.

So I finally decided, what the hell, man; why not keep it classy and be a good sport? And, besides, as they say, any publicity is good publicity. Thanks, Wolfe.

Continue reading "More Lame Teabagger Hackery" »

I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I still want to be an astronaut when I grow up.

Ask anyone who knows me really well, and they’ll tell you that I’m a huge space geek, and a really huge fan of human expansion off the Earth. Normally, though, spaceflight issues these days aren’t normally big on the mainstream media radar — save the occasional catastrophic Space Shuttle failure — and haven’t been since the last Apollo crew came home. In fact, the last space-related cartoon I did was about nine years ago. Still, once in a great while a cartoon-worthy space policy issue will bubble up into the MSM, such as the current partial privatization/funding brouhaha going on over the late Constellation/Orion program and the future of US manned spaceflight As We Know It™ with regard to President The One’s Vision For Space Exploration. So, while it’s a bit of a geeky issue, I thought this might be a good time to take the opportunity — while I’m still struggling for good immigration cartoon ideas — to knock out this piece that’s been rattling around in my head since I read about the current House version of the NASA appropriation:

So, the crew module that was supposed to be capable of ferrying astronauts to the Moon (the Moon? What’s that?) and to Mars-bound spacecraft has been reduced to an ISS lifeboat, and President The One is talking up that old chestnut, the Public-Private Partnership™, to take up the slack of building and launching cargo and man-rated vehicles to ISS. Needless to say, Elon Musk’s nipples are exploding with delight. Oh, and they’ve also directed NASA to get down to building a heavy-lift booster by the end of the decade. I’d just love to know how the hell they’re going to pull that off when their program is getting be as cash-starved as the xUSSR’s N1 heavy-lift lunar booster program was in the 1960s. Here’s a look at the outcome of one of their many test launches which, to the last, was made of FAIL:

The thing that really irks the hell out of me is that this is just the icing on the cake, after seeing pretty much every other important program — healthcare, housing, education, Social Security — having to go begging because of the stonking huge wads of cash being pissed away on two wars, neither of which is particularly beloved among the public, and the equally stonking amount of cash being blown on building a massive security state. We’ve got no problems throwing away money on Predator drones and bunker busters and upgrading the phone networks to allow easier tapping, but when it suddenly comes time to fund a national healthcare system, or keep Social Security out of trouble, or help humanity expand off the planet, it’s like they’re suddenly all tapped out. But, they’ve always got money to pay for their goddamn’ wars.

But, wait! There’s more! Now, after the Constellation Program’s gone, all that promise out the window, and we’re reduced to buying rides with the Russians and waiting around for half a dozen spaceflight-contract wannabes to get their ducks together, NASA’s added insult to injury by releasing a video game version. Yeah, that’s right, a goddamn’ video game. Mind you, being an artist as well as an old space geek, I certainly loves me some tasty CGI concept art as much as the next guy, but this kind of bugged me somehow, coming as it did so soon after the program meant to replace the Shuttle went from its first test launches to just the latest addition to NASA’s Awesome Concept Art Gallery. I mean, that’s just depressing (besides the fact that they haven’t even developed a Mac version, losers).

What’s really sad, though, is the fact that I still want to be an astronaut when I grow up.

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Continue reading "Happy Apollo 11 Anniversary, Everybody!" »

Yeah, I know, I know. I’m as tired of it as you are. There’s so much other cartoon-worthy stuff going on — ten percent unemployment, home foreclosures skyrocketing, Obama escalating the war in Afghanistan, Israel murdering humanitarian aid workers, Arizona enacting a racial-profiling law — but it seems like pretty much every damn’ cartoon I’ve done in the past two months has been an oil spill cartoon.

At last, however, this is the final idea left in the queue. At last! My final, really, no kidding really, honestly, seriously, absotively posilutely final BP oil spill cartoon — even though it’s really sort of an election cartoon:

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Continue reading "My Final BP Oil Spill Cartoon (I hope)" »