This piece was pretty much the last political cartoon I did for nearly six years — for what was probably the last Counterinaugural event put on by the old NYC YIP posse that I know of. Not having the Internet in those days, getting your message out and networking with folks of like mind were damn’ near impossible in the face of growing media oppression (in the form of increasing Drug War propagandizing) and growing hostility by society at large towards anyone or anything “different”.

Left activism and political cartooning, in this kind of environment, were getting to be a seemingly hopeless grind of years with no hope of results, and often backward progress. The Yipster Times/Overthrow outfit put out its last issue at or about 1986 or so, and outlets were becoming scarce already before that. Rather than give myself a nervous breakdown howling into the wind, I went back to doing what I enjoyed in art school: happy partying hippie comix, hippies happily outwitting cops comix, hippies trying to nab spare Dead tickets comix, at the Dead Relix fanzine, also out of New York. It didn’t pay much more than weed money, but I already had a day job, and had an outlet to do entirely fun cartoons with no redeeming political commentary whatsofreakinever, at least for a few years.

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Oh, god, I thought, is it time for another goddamn’ Presidential Election already?

This meant even more intense ravings than usual from GOP politicians and flacks — and even more intense inanity from outfits like Moral Majority and the PTL Club — on the subject of those good old traditional values, and the way we lived in those good old days when life was so much simpler, when men were men and women were dragged around by their hair, and any man could nab as many wretched little mutated fish as he could spear if he had enough drive and entrepreneurial spirit.

For instance, in this poignant portrayal of a traditional American post-nuclear family, we see that the venerable Boy Scouts Of America is still in there helping young boys learn valuable outdoor skills, and to say no to drugs.

Still, it wasn’t as if Reagan couldn’t have phoned it in, seeing as how the Democrats certainly seemed to that year — nominating the most tepid, boring, centrist excuse for Liberal they could find, the guy who nearly kept us from going to the Moon, Walter Mondale, along with “fellow” centrist Liberal and boardroom feminist, U.S. Rep. Geraldine Ferraro. Darth Reagan, of course, took it in an “official” landslide, although a tally of all votes cast out of all eligible voters proved that the perennial dark-horse favorite “Nobody” finished first.

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One Yippie issue campaign I got the biggest kick out of was their “Nobody For President” campaigns — basically a campaign for not voting — that YIP began in the early ’70s and reached a peak around the late ’70s/early ’80s. It made perfect sense to me when I thought about it: who solved our energy problems of last decade? Who put a short leash on the nuclear power industry? Who ended human-rights abuses in East Timor? Who pushed for comprehensive campaign-finance and election reforms after the Watergate scandals? Who sought to end human-rights abuses by CIA-backed regimes in Central and South America? That’s right, nobody… well, except for that last one, which was Sen. Frank Church, but, still…

This was a proposed poster illustration for the Yippies’ traditional Counterinaugural Protest and Evening Bash, celebrating The Inauguration Of Nobody To No Office At All, held in DC to coincide with the “official” installation of El Presidente. It wasn’t picked, but then at the time, I was competing against the likes of Dana Franzen and Peter “Bugs” Bramley to publish work for national event posters, tough going for a fresh kid right out of school — and the Yipster Times had some serious circulation for an underground paper at the time. Still, this managed to make it into the DC Yippie ‘zine as part of a locally-produced poster, and was picked up by the Yipster Times, anyway, a couple of months after that.

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