We’re Still Hiring
About this time, the implosion of the Dot-Com Bubble was really starting to ripple through the economy, causing an uptick in unemployment and a “recession-ette” — nothing like the massive Fail we’re experiencing now, of course, but still quite a jolt at the time.
In the midst of all this was the run-up to Iraq War v2.0 — batshit-crazy Neocons throwing absurd lies and fabrications at the wall in hopes something will stick, craven Democrats fighting each other to be first in line to support Bush’s lunacy, and an increase in aggressive military recruiting tactics — i.e. stalking high-school kids coming out of class or at the shopping mall, threatening kids with imprisonment in Guantanamo when they attempted to back out of enlistment.
In this piece, I’m sort of wondering aloud about whether or not the Neocon Mob were actually banking on the increase in unemployment to supply them with the volunteer cannon fodder they needed to properly stomp on Iraq and steal its resources and destroy its culture. Need a job, kid? No prob, dude; the Army is still hiring!
This was my first — and so far, only — “made for TV” poster, a “throwaway” idea that’d been rattling around in my head for a while, which I drew for the benefit of a crew from Swedish Public Television (STV) who’d come to town to interview me in my studio and to show my posse and I out for an evening’s wheatpasting in the wake of my big bust-out in the Washington Post.
This particular piece was done during the run-up to Iraq War v2.0, in which President Chimp was pushing the doctrine of “pre-emptive war”, which was basically the foreign-policy version of those scenes in old Three Stooges comedies where Moe bashes Larry upside the head from clear out of nowhere; Larry asks “hey, what’d you do that for?”, and Moe says “that’s for what you were thinking!”
I’ve chosen not to post the video of the actual STV segment here, as due to my nervousness about public speaking, my studio interview segment shows me saying “like” and “you know” in every other sentence, totally going against everything I was taught by my tenth-grade English teacher and my college Oral Interpretation teacher with regard to proper public diction and the avoidance of “vocal tics” (which is what “like” and “you know” are) in public speaking. STV actually portrayed me and my work in a very positive light as part of “the other America” in the Bush Era, but I was still terribly embarassed at what a bashful public speaker I am… like, you know…right?
Continue reading "“Pre-Emption” Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry" »
Cover Art, The Progressive, October 2002
After the Washington Post feature and the Swedish Public TV interview, this pretty much capped off what I liked to call my “Elvis Year” — at least until ’06, when I got to go on a couple of right-wing talk-radio interviews, where I had the pleasure of making the hosts crap their pants while asking me why I hated America as a result of my participation in the Holocaust Cartoon Competition.
Thankyuh, thankyuhvurymuch.
Continue reading "Cover Art, The Progressive, October 2002" »
“Poster Boy of Protest”, in the Washington Post
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" »
Recent Comments