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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Finally on a roll at the Yipster Times. Before you start laughing, 13.9% was a ball-buster for a mortgage in 1981, at least as I recall — even for the “fixer-upper” portrayed below. This was about the time that the legendary Largest Arms Buildup Since The First Cold War was being cranked up, about the time the air-traffic controllers’ union was busted, and real wages first began its long, slow slide into the toilet.

Our “leaders” were hitching us back up to the war machine, our wages were hitting the dumper, but at least the goddamn’ Rooskies couldn’t get us.

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During my last two years of college, one of the things my roommate (the other cartoonist for the campus weekly) and I enjoyed most on Sunday mornings was bong hits and coffee for breakfast while watching the local TV evangelists for cheap laffs — TV evangelists were funny back then — while waiting for the local Sunday morning Tarzan Film Festival for even more cheaper laffs (a lot of local channels were running Tarzan movies on late Sunday mornings back then; what was the deal with that?).

The biggest hit around our dorm was a guy with a pompadour a mile high and a pastel blue suit (that looked like he’d stolen it from the local news anchorman) who broadcast out of Pulaski, VA — my bud and I went to Radford College, in the city (for down there) of Radford, VA, just across the river and down the road a piece — who used to “heal” people on the air, usually wheelchair-bound, deaf, mute, and gullible (interesting, he never did have any blind people on that program). He’d gibber a bunch of phrases strung together as if on heroin, top it off with a little “in Jesus’ name, out, thou (insert affliction), OUT!”, and he’d smack some deaf/mute kid in the forehead and push him back onto the deacons. They’d stand the poor sucker back up, and the preacher would snap his fingers around the kid’s ears and say “say ‘thank you, Jesus’”, and the kid would offer up some barely-intelligible groaning and the preacher would exclaim, “ohh, isn’t it wonderful?”; the audience would burst into applause and “amens” and my roommate and I would laugh so hard we shot bongwater out of our noses…

…all in the cause of satirical and artistic inspiration, of course.

So, after a few months of this, I finally start wondering… why is it always the forehead? No matter what the affliction — not just deafness, but paralysis, arthritic limbs, asthma — Pompadour Boy would always smack his marks… uh, faithful …on the friggin’ forehead! Here, in another early Yipster Times piece, I imagine the day that Reverend Pastel is challenged to heal hemorrhoids on his program. A cheap gag, I know, but I learned early on that good execution can often save a really lame gag. It sure did here; I mean, it did get into the Yipster Times.

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