So, anyway, just to recap: we pay more taxes here in DC than many actual states, and have lost far more citizens in places like Vietnam and Iraq. For many a decade now, this city, its citizens and its alleged government have been the Feds’ test bed for its policies in places like El Salvador, Palestine, and Baghdad, and the IMF/WorldBank’s policies in places like Indonesia and Africa.

No control over our budget, no ability to collect taxes on outfits like the World Bank, or on all the suburban yahoos who roll across the river to Washington Nationals home games and kiss off and spit on any folks from DC who show up to publicly speak out on this predicament.

And, oh, yeah; it’s just been leaked that the current budget estimate for shoving an entire neighborhood across the river and building a brand-new monstrous stadium for the ex-Montreal Expos to continue to play suck-ass ball in is now in the billion — with a “B” — dollar “ballpark”.

Medium-res jpg image, 645k

Continue reading "The Colonist: Knocking the Cover Off It for DC Statehood" »

For a number of years in high school and college, one of my big dreams was to take over Herblock’s job at the Washington Post — or, perhaps, to hit the front page in the Post’s Style/Arts section. Needless to say, as my work took a more radical turn, I realized that my chances of making the Arts page — let alone becoming the successor to Herblock — were slim at the very best, and I got a little more realistic and focused my attention to creating cover cartoons for the Yipster Times or trying to break into High Times or Rolling Stone.

So, imagine my surprise when I found myself the subject of a front-page “personality profile”-type story appearing on the front page of the Post Style section a good twenty-odd years after my giving up on the idea of ever breaking into the Post at all. The Post had done a couple of previous Style profiles on local antiglob/antiwar movement figures, and apparently, now, it was my turn; it turns out that a certain Post reporter who’d been covering the local movements since Seattle had been a fan of my work for quite awhile, ever since it began appearing with regularity, wheatpasted on DC’s streets beginning with the original “Blood For Oil” series during Iraq War I.

It was with a mixture of surprise and ironic glee, then, that I found myself and my work “writ large” on the front page of the lifestyle section of a major US city daily, getting top billing over — of all people — Catherine Deneuve (ooh la-la) and Robert Duvall. I was even more surprised to see myself getting an even-handed, quite positive treatment, as I was worried at how I’d be portrayed in print after seeing how the op-ed columnists were savaging the anti-globalization movements ever since Seattle/WTO and A16.

Story by David Montgomery; photographs by Andrea Bruce Woodall.
Adobe pdf file, 4.3mb

Continue reading "“Poster Boy of Protest”, in the Washington Post" »

Time for another parody of an iconic American image, this time the famous photograph of the Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima island during WWII. Once again, it’s not like it’s been done before, but like all the great Renaissance painters doing their own versions of the Annunciation and Crucifixion, I decided it was time for me to do my own version of Iwo Jima.

This piece advertised the planned “Peoples’ Strike” focused on the residents of Washington, DC who, the organizers of the “strike” assumed, had reached the point where things had gotten bad enough to spark a mass general strike to coincide with the IMF/World Bank meetings. Sadly, somehow, despite the loss of the city’s only public hospital, the closure of homeless shelters and the sale of schools and the property under them to condo developers, many residents of DC chose not to join the “strike” as apparently things still hadn’t gotten bad enough — either that or, as I suspect, they were awaiting permission from the local Democratic Party to organize and rise up on their own behalf.

Medium-res jpg image, 710k

Continue reading "Strike for Statehood!" »

Part of the ’02 IMF/World Bank festivities was a planned widespread, networked civil disobedience around the city of Washington, DC, which organizers hoped would include major highways and subway lines in and out of the city. In order to dramatize the organizers’ intent, this poster depicted the entire city of DC squeezed and choked at the various intersections of highways and rapid-transit lines — or, resembling some kind of weird alien bodily organ, depending on how much Star Trek you’ve watched.

Medium-res jpg image, 839k

Continue reading "Fall 2002 IMF/WB “Map”" »