Right there it was, smack dab on the front of the Washington Post, this Major, this UN military mission flack, spewing what had to be one of the most twisted, most spectacularly weird and otherworldly excuses ever made for something like spraying unarmed protesters in the streets with machine-gun fire from helicopters and President Bubba, from all reports at the time, being totally OK with that.
One of my friends in one of the crews we had out with this piece tells an interesting story: that night, while saturating Dupont Circle and vicinity with this one, my friend’s crew is beseiged by five or six young College Democrat types whining, “It’s not Bill’s fault!”… sort of a precursor to Chris “Leave Britney Alone!” Crocker at least nine years pre-YouTube. Yeah, that’s right; my pal and his crew were harassed by Liberals for putting up anti-war posters.
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.
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
This piece was pretty much the last political cartoon I did for nearly six years — for what was probably the last Counterinaugural event put on by the old NYC YIP posse that I know of. Not having the Internet in those days, getting your message out and networking with folks of like mind were damn’ near impossible in the face of growing media oppression (in the form of increasing Drug War propagandizing) and growing hostility by society at large towards anyone or anything “different”.
Left activism and political cartooning, in this kind of environment, were getting to be a seemingly hopeless grind of years with no hope of results, and often backward progress. The Yipster Times/Overthrow outfit put out its last issue at or about 1986 or so, and outlets were becoming scarce already before that. Rather than give myself a nervous breakdown howling into the wind, I went back to doing what I enjoyed in art school: happy partying hippie comix, hippies happily outwitting cops comix, hippies trying to nab spare Dead tickets comix, at the Dead Relix fanzine, also out of New York. It didn’t pay much more than weed money, but I already had a day job, and had an outlet to do entirely fun cartoons with no redeeming political commentary whatsofreakinever, at least for a few years.
medium-res jpg image, 323k; high-res tif image, 4.9mb
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