One thing about this period was that it was that time when things started getting weird in Media And Government Land, ranging from frivolity like Reagan inadvertantly mouthing off around live mics, mentioning his plan to “…begin bombing in five minutes…”, to far more evil intentional mouth-offs, such as then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s declaration that a nuclear war would be “winnable”.

I remember being absolutely gob-smacking amazed at that. How the hell does he decide whether or not we’ve “won”? I’d ask myself, would it be if our side had enough people left to put on a halfway decent victory parade, as opposed to the pathetic, raggedy-assed second-generation mutant rumble shown above?

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Come ’round the bend, you know it’s the end –
the fireman screams, and the engine just gleams!
–grateful dead

Smoke-In’s over, summer was survivable, time to quit bitching and get back to some ball-busting.

The MX “Peacekeeper” mobile launcher system was, basically, an entire railroad designed to move MX launchers from one bunker to the next, presumably with the idea that if you ran an atom bomb railroad, you could keep your atom bombs from being hit so easily — because, as everybody in the atom bomb business will tell you: it only takes one to hit it.

Just how the beer ad analogy came in, I don’t quite remember… something about “Night Train” wine, or the Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull, or something…

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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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