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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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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“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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