After the Washington Post feature and the Swedish Public TV interview, this pretty much capped off what I liked to call my “Elvis Year” — at least until ‘06, when I got to go on a couple of right-wing talk-radio interviews, where I had the pleasure of making the hosts crap their pants while asking me why I hated America as a result of my participation in the Holocaust Cartoon Competition.
Thankyuh, thankyuhvurymuch.
Continue reading "Cover Art, The Progressive, October 2002" »
Ah, Y2K… a simpler, happier time. Nothing important having to do with computers or networks crashed, failed, collapsed, imploded or fell over. We still didn’t have our flying cars yet, but we were still wired to the teeth on the solidarity high from A16. Of course, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to bitch about not having our flying cars yet, as it was fast approaching time to decide how we were going to organize around the Presidential “Election” circus, and the attendant party conventions. This being DC, we spent a lot of time spotlighting Statehood organizing and the “debates”.
Every Presidential “election” year, the Commission On Presidential Debates, a totally bipartisan outfit, convenes to decide, in an entirely bipartisan fashion, how to prevent anybody other than Republicans and Democrats from appearing in the nationally televised “debates”. This, of course, was also the first year in many that the Democrats were facing any kind of serious challenge from the Left — and by “the Left”, I don’t mean “candy-assed phony ‘Pwogwessives’ who vote Democratic, mail checks to NPR and read Mother Jones while they’re taking a dump”; by that, I mean the goddamned Left, from the outside, in the form of Ralph Nader and the Green Party USA, who actually were close to polling numbers high enough to qualify for Federal matching funds and automatic ballot access in the next “election” year. Needless to say, most of the Democratic Party’s most vigorous campaigning wasn’t against the GOP, but against the Left — basically, against its own base — for daring to decide they had a choice, and that they didn’t need the Democrats’ permission to take action, and to call the Democratic leadership to account for their abandonment of core values, its failure to defend working people and, basically, being such a worthless, no-account, dive-artist outfit while still attempting to put up a shabby, weak, Liberal/Progressive facade. It was the year the Democratic Party finally revealed what it was really all about by doing everything it could to keep off the ballot and out of the “debates” a party whose platform would’ve been raised proudly by the Democratic Party themselves in, say, the early ’70s.
This poster advertised a series of protests held in downtown DC, at the headquarters of the Commission on Presidential Debates, calling out the Democrats for their hypocrisy and cowardice, and calling out the CPD for rigging the rules in favor of rich, well-connected establishment politicians, and for allowing corporate influence in the form of Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship of the telecasts. This was also the year where you couldn’t turn on your TV set without at least once seeing that goddamn’ “Whazzuuuuuuup!” commercial at least ten times. Still, it was silly enough to hold my attention for more than ten seconds, and my friends and I were already using it as a form of ironic, absurdist greeting, so when I let my mind wander a bit and started riffing on the whole Presidential Debate/Whazzuuuuuup idea, it didn’t take long to start asking myself what influence Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship will take. Would they be allowed to hang their logo onstage, like those old quiz shows from the ’50s? Would A-B be allowed final say on the questions…and have us reduced to an hour a night for three nights of Gush and Bore standing there going “Whazzuuuuuuuup?” This, while not the most likely, proved to be the more entertaining vision.
11×17 medium-res grayscale .jpeg image, 660kb
It was Sam Smith, writing in his Progressive Review, who beautifully characterized the Clinton Mob as “corporate lawyers with their own air force”, and nowhere was that more evident than President Bubba’s seemingly random, shits-and-giggles cruise-missile attacks on Baghdad in the early fall of 1996, right in the midst of his campaign for a second term, and probably for some random made-up “no-fly zone” violation or something.
11×17 medium-res grayscale .jpg image, 470kb.
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.
 |
 |
 |
|
Recent Comments