Never Forget

Never forget how the State used the attacks of September 11, 2001 as a pretext to shred the Constitution and encourage the escalation of police thuggery against citizens.

Never forget how the State used September 11 to encourage profiteering in the “defense” and “security” industries at the expense of citizens.

Never forget how the State used September 11 as a pretext for illegal wars and military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Never forget how the State used September 11 as a pretext for illegal imprisonment, secret courts and torture.

Never forget that the atmosphere of oppression, suspicion, paranoia and racism which has taken root in this country since September 11, 2001 has been fostered and maintained by both Republican and Democratic governments.

And last, but certainly not least…

Never forget how you, the American people, rolled over and allowed yourselves to be bullied and cowed into silence by the likes of Bush, Cheney, Obama, Ridge, Chertoff, Napolitano, Clinton, and Lieberman while they waged wars of aggression, built a gulag, committed genocide and torture and stripped away your liberty and dignity.

Never forget.
Happy Anniversary.

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The 9/11 Conspiracists: Vindicated After All These Years? by Alexander Cockburn at CounterPunch.

Bite the Big Apple

ya got rats on the West Side, bedbugs Uptown!
What a mess! This town’s in tatters!
–rolling stones

So, what’s the deal with New York City, anyway? Is it hypocritical — or schizoid? I’ve been asking this question a lot lately, while checking out the news from NYC about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and the attendant right-wing racist street zaniness. New York City’s always had this outward image of a progressive, multicultural, hip city — a cradle of the US labor movement, the birthplace of outfits like the Yippies, the city where people like Andy Warhol, Peter Max, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith first emerged as major artists — versus a long-present simmering vile nasty core of racism and class war, where Amadou Diallo and a host of other Black Americans and African immigrants were brutally tortured and murdered by the police, and systematic gentrification drove the poor and working class out of places like Tompkins Square and Brooklyn.

I was recently discussing this with my friend Isis, a cohort in the Town Hell Posse and native New Yorker. She seemed totally down with the wormy, rotten core idea, and filled me in on New York City’s historic record of racism, xenophobia and classism. “Y’know that old Stones song, ‘Shattered’? That pretty much says it!” Suddenly, the conversation shifted to sketching in some plans to go to NYC to cover the big anti-Islamic hate rally being held on September 11, and how we could use “Shattered” for our motif and background music; my mind suddenly fixated on the line that goes go ahead, bite the Big Apple — don’t mind the maggots!

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Let's Roll!

A friend of mine noted that it'd been quite some years since I did one of my good old-fashioned blood-spattered antiwar cartoons, so I came roaring back with "Super Service", and the even more brutal piece here. As I recall, it was about this time that Lisa Beamer, wife of a 9/11 victim, went on a whirlwind promotional victimhood-pimping tour including a stop on the NBC Today Show plugging her book, and -- what really sent me over the top, inspiring this cartoon -- her attempt to register a trade/service mark on the phrase "Let's Roll". Sweet friggin' Jayzus, I thought, does this goddamn' woman have any shame at all?



While pretty much everyone I knew in the antiwar activist community was totally down with the message, many found the imagery disturbing (much to my delight). Washington DC media activist Zoe Mitchell wrote:

...the argument he chose to present his argument with disturbs me. It's violent. It's bloody. It makes me sick. Unfortunately, it's dead-on accurate. US soldiers driving SUVs have shot and killed Iraqi civilians. Contrary to the US Media's imagery, Persian Gulf War 2.0 is violent and bloody. It should make us ALL sick.

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America's Towers O'Terror

Tragic though the event may have been, I got tired quickly of all the TV talkers howling about the thousands who died at the Pentagon and World Trade Center without once considering the USA was responsible for at least a hundred times as many over the course of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, ten years of Vietnam, the 1991 bombing of Baghdad, and the decade of sanctions against Iraq following Iraq War I.



Also -- stop me if I'm wrong -- but didn't Bin Laden's targeting of the World Trade Center classify as targeting on a "military asset" under the Pentagon's own current rules? Was he really doing anything different from the US in Iraq Wars I and II, or the US/NATO action against Belgrade?

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Madness of George II

This is one of the pieces I was happiest about, in terms of people getting the literary/dramatic reference in the context of the initial mass Tourette's outburst of almost WWI-like zaniness from the US Government and society at large in the weeks after 9/11. I honestly didn't think enough people in my audience would've seen The Madness Of George III to get it, but it turns out lots of folks had. I was rather embarrassed to have forgotten that the kind of people who collect my work aren't going to be the kind of people who like films with hot babes, high-speed chases, robots turning into airplanes, and stuff blowing up.



It was another weirdly poignant piece: done originally for the October issue of The Progressive (without the headlines and captions) it dealt with the emerging imperialistic tendencies of the then-early Bush Regime and drawn a good month or so before 9/11.

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