Total running time: 19:19
Music by: Rations and Utter Failure on 86′d Records

Ron Douglas, producer of this documentary, is an Assistant Professor of Multimedia Communications at Wesley College, Delaware; he was a student activist involved in the anti-globalization movement at the turn of the century (this one) and became a fan of my work while wheatpasting my posters for the 2000 Spring IMF/World Bank mobilization.

Fast-forward 15 years — Ron has become an accomplished filmmaker and documentarian, producing films about police brutality, and about Native American boarding schools in the US and Canada. Last summer, he contacted me about being the subject in one of a series of documentaries on the emergence of citizen journalism on the Internet, and specifically the creation of the Independent Media Centers across the US and the world in the wake of the Seattle WTO mobilization of 1999, and the “A16″ mobilization at the IMF and World Bank in the spring of 2000.

This film provides a brief history of my cartoon work going back to the Yipster Times in the late 1970s, and my art and media activist involvement with the antiglobalization and antiwar movements of the ’00s, and my work with the DC Statehood and marijuana legalization campaign of 2014.

You can follow Ron Douglas on Twitter at @alchemicalmedia, and check out more of his documentary work on YouTube here.

Continue reading "Flugennock, the Documentary" »

I caught this item on Buzzfeed last week, about the near-total silence from the antiwar “movement” about President Sparkle Pony’s desire to intervene militarily in Syria. Almost all the quotes from organizers and activists are full of weak rationalizing about fundraising and contorted tap-dancing around the fact that most of the people who filled the streets in the early ’00s were just pissed-off Democrats who promptly put away their signs and banners and went home when the ‘08 Presidential freak circus kicked off, leaving those of us who really cared about ending militarism — no matter which wing of the Party was doing the bombing, murdering and torturing — high and dry.

The most gobsmacking quote in the whole article — the quote which inspired this cartoon — comes from our old pal, Code Pink founder Medea “Media” Benjamin:

“Those of us still working on this have been mobilizing. The online protests are proliferating. There’s petitions to Obama, there’s calls for Congress to get involved — so many groups from Code Pink to Win Without War to Just Foreign Policy — all have put out calls saying no war in Syria.”

Dear god, what a great, steamy slab of thumbsucking. This makes me want to just bang my head on the desk. Medea Benjamin thinks we’re going to have an effect on policy by “protesting” on the Internet, sending petitions (which will be promptly ignored) to President Sparkle Pony, and beseeching a bunch of greedy-assed sociopathic politicians to act against their own interests. You’d think Medea Benjamin, of all people, would understand that real movements are built — and real change brought about — by real, live, honest-to-god, in-person “street heat”, not by sitting on one’s pasty ass in front of a computer, signing useless Internet petitions, bitching on Farcebook, and remaining essentially invisible to the public and the media.

Christ, I need a drink… or perhaps several drinks. Actually, on second thought — screw the drinks, just give me some friggin’ heroin.

11×12 inch medium-res grayscale .jpg image, 504kb.

Continue reading "The U.S. “Antiwar Left” Mobilizes!" »