When you’re a K Street big shot, you like your local politicians to stay bought and keep their campaign promises, and that’s why around the turn of the century, Anthony Williams would’ve been your man. Among his top priorities as Mayor was closing down DC General Hospital, the city’s only public hospital and, in spite of constant alarmist rumors in the Washington Times, not a hell hole.
Among the other jewels of the Williams Legacy was his keeping of campaign promises to close homeless family shelters, to close and sell a fistful of public schools for redevelopment as condominiums or health clubs, and to run poor and working-class people out of DC and replace them with people who can afford to shop downtown and who are most likely to vote for Anthony Williams (or someone like him… like, say, Adrian Fenty).
The Farce is strong in this one, O, Master!
Sure as hell was, there, Mr. George W. Skywalker. What other briefing materials could the Chimp have had when deciding that at a time when the Cold War was long over, one of our main military threats was reduced to a Mafia-ridden laughingstock and the other was our Most Favored Nation trading partner? Sure, why not restart the “Star Wars” program which, by Reagan’s own admission, was a waste of time?
This also wound up illustrating the cover of Alternative Press Review in the summer of 2001.
Sam Smith, author of the Progressive Review, also wrote and edited its “City Desk” column about news and issues local to Washington, DC until his retirement to Maine in early 2009. One of my favorite City Desk columns appeared around 2000, where he details Anthony Williams’ numerous achievements during his first term as mayor of DC — the closing of city shelters for homeless families, the closing of schools for redevelopment as condos, the deterioration of city services, the closing of DC General Hospital — in a column entitled “Anthony Williams’ Greatest Hits”. As the run-up to the ‘02 mayoral election campaign was just getting started, I thought this series would be an excellent and easy-to-remember reminder to potential voters about what, exactly, Anthony Williams had given this city in the past three and a half years.
One happy accident here was, during the initial sketching, finding out how easily my rat could be made to look like Williams with some extra whiskers, a little shock of hair here and there, and a bowtie. I wish now that I’d saved that issue of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine with the cover story on Williams — while he was running for re-election, I think — and the photo the Post used was one of him when he was about three years old, wearing an outfit almost identical to the suits we saw him in while he was Control Board honcho and, later, mayor: that dull-assed gray thing with a plain white or light-blue shirt and that friggin’ bowtie. So, apart from being a soulless Ivy League technocrat and servant of oligarchs, Anthony Williams really did look like his momma dressed him.
Improvisational Firefighting, medium-res jpg image 645k
Write-In Incumbent, medium-res jpg image 710k
Not Enough Health Inspectors, medium-res jpg image 645k
DC General Hospital Closed, medium-res jpg image 645k
Schools Closed, Land Sold, medium-res jpg image 710k
Family Shelters Closed, medium-res jpg image 645k
UDC Public Radio Sellout, medium-res jpg image 581k
University of DC Gutted, medium-res jpg image 710k
Understaffed Fire Trucks, medium-res jpg image 774k
At the time I was doing posters for the Counterinaugural, the Florida freak show was still playing out in the courts and in the streets. Besides, our message didn’t really depend on the results; the message for the Counterinaugural protests was that people need to organize and take action on their own behalf and look among themselves for “leadership” instead of depending on “elected” politicians and the results of an “election” rotten to the core with hypocrisy and corruption, and so mobbed up with corporate cash that its results couldn’t possibly be legitimate no matter who “won”.
Ironically but happily, the scene depicted here came quite close to being what actually happened at one of the feeder-march rallies headed up by a group including the Rev. Al Sharpton. I’d gotten used to having huge historic events right here in the same city, so when several thousand folks gathered just half a block from my house, within sight of my front stoop, at Staunton Square on Capitol Hill, that was some treat. The climax of the whole rally, just before marching past the Supreme Court and on downtown, was a “mass swearing-in” of all the folks present, a mass affirmation that the People are supposed to be the real “leaders”.
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