Swearing In "Nobody"

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.

jpeg image, 258k; full-size tiff image, 452k