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”.
Throughout the campaign, the Repuglicans slang mud, made up outrageous claims based on words pulled from random context (Al Gore saying “I invented the Internet”), and made the most absurd threats they could think of to suppress minority turnout. The Donkeycrats, meanwhile, were busy bullying, belittling and threatening Nader/Green supporters and the rest of the Left for not supporting their craven, gutless asses, and threatening them with guilt for bringing down the bloody boot heel of GOP tyranny on all of us for voting Green (“a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush”).
Finally, as we all know, it came down to the good and saintly Donkeycrats against the mean old nasty Repuglicans in a close one in Florida — as some wags like to say, “close enough to steal”. The mean old nasty Repuglicans were doing things like busing in gangs of college brownshirts — these Brownshirts wore crisp white shirts and nice ties and khaki pants, though — to harass election-office workers and disrupt the recount; the good and saintly Donkeycrats, meanwhile, not wanting to reveal their years of complicity in profiling and other racist Drug War policies that created thousands of young black felons — and, subsequently, thousands of young black non-voters — were reduced to mealy-mouthed lawyerly tap-dancing about hanging chads, pregnant chads, the intent of the voter, and all sorts of other banal “meaning of is” bullshit.
In the middle of all the pissing contests in the media and in the streets in front of the Supreme Court building, there was still the Counter-Inaugural mobilizations to be planned and organized and, of course, the poster to be designed and made street-ready by the middle of December. Considering the behavior of the two major parties throughout the campaign, and especially during the Florida recount circus, the whole theater playing out in front of me started to look less like a political dispute between two election campaigns and more like a gang war, like in a Quentin Tarantino film, like Reservoir Dogs or something. The suspicion, jealousy and paranoia had gotten to be too much, and the two hoods who pulled off the caper were turning on each other.
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