I don’t know about anyone else, but at the time, it seemed like a single year under the Reagan Mob was forever, and getting worse. What a relief to finally quit doing cartoons about how grim things were getting and do a good old Smoke-In poster, this time with a Hollywood theme (of course) in honor of our esteemed host of Death Valley Days (or “Daze”, which things were in at the time). This is one of the last serious Smoke-Ins they were able to pull as the Just Say No™ rhetoric was just starting to take hold, and a generation of high-school and college kids decided they all wanted to be Gordon Gecko and Timothy Geithner when they grew up.
This piece wound up as a color full-age ad for the 1981 White House Smoke-In appearing in High Times magazine. Sadly, that’s the only piece I ever got into High Times, likely because their art director, a guy named Jeff Tiedrich, was also the art editor of the Yipster Times around 1977-79, and was shit-canning my stuff there as well — before he moved on, and the task of picking out the art fell to a guy who was quite a fan of mine back in the day: Yipster Times co-founder/co-editor and Yippies co-founder Dana Beal.
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The week that the Reagan Mob won the MX Missile appropriation vote, Time Magazine had Reagan on the cover, at his desk in the Oval Office, smiling that nasty, crooked, lipless smile (how is it that our last three Repuglican Presidents: Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, all had nasty, crooked, lipless smiles?) holding the tally slip recording the roll-call vote on the MX system. I first caught sight of that cover one night in the check-out rack while waiting to pay for some beers down at the drug store and thinking jeezus, why don’t they just run a foto of him with his dick in his hand?
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These days, our gentle punditocracy would call the mom and dad shown below “values voters”, but back then we just called them “right-wing religious-freak nutjobs” — not quite as elegant, but more truthfully desciptive. Another better-known Yipster Times/Overthrow piece, a back-cover subscription ad poster from the summer of ’81 which asked its readers the question, “Weighted Down By The ’80s?” That’s right, not a year into the new decade, and every aspect of life — workers’ rights, reproductive rights, civil liberties, education, popular culture — was hammer-down on the highway to hell.
You know when an outfit calls itself “Focus On The Family”, all of our families are in huge-ass trouble.
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“Survival kit contents check! In them you will find: one 45-caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleepin’ pills, tranquilizer pills, one miniature combination Rooshian phrase-book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewin’ gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair’a nylon stockin’s… shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff…!”
–Slim Pickens, as Major Kong in Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove.
Actually, to be honest, I actually wasn’t consciously trying to directly mock Kubrick in this piece — I hadn’t seen Strangelove in some years, not since early in college — but was whacking on the whole media-manuafactured image of Reagan as some good old cowboy type; at the time, it seemed like every other issue of Time or Newsweek or the magazine supplements in the Sunday papers had some glorifying portrait shot of Reagan in his old buckskin jacket and his big ol’ hat sitting on a horse at his ranch, looking all raw-boned and macho, ready to fight Ivan with just his ol’ six-guns
This was picked up in the late spring of ’81 for the cover of the Yipster Times — or, the Overthrow, as it was renamed in early ’80, to commemorate the fall of the Shah Of Iran. This, in my opinion, wasn’t such a hot move as even though the Shah was walking scum who got what he deserved, his replacement by an opportunist gang of theocrats wasn’t exactly what everybody was hoping for. Besides, I thought, Overthrow just didn’t have the same kind of upbeat, laid-back “ring” as the name Yipster Times. I thought Overthrow sounded like the name of a ‘zine put out by the Maoist International types, or the Spartacists, or one of those other teeth-grinding vanguardist outfits.
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