A Fox Five Exclusive!

So, while I'm just finishing choking down the news about the DC Gummint -- at the urging of Fox Channel 5 News -- trying to sock the ANSWER Coalition with a fine for exercising basic Constitutional rights, I get a mailing from Rob Naiman's "Just Foreign Policy" list mentioning that their Iraqi Deaths Estimator has just rolled over a million. That's right, a million Iraqi dead since the "Shock'n'Awe" of March 2003 -- or 1,012,979, to be exact, as I write this.

That's right, one Friggin' MILLION. Jesus Herbert Walker Christ. And that's not counting the million and a half or more Iraqis this nation murdered with sanctions throughout the 1990s (nobody died when Clinton lied? My ass.).

I'd been noticing lately that Fox News hasn't spent a whole lot of time reporting on Iraq because, y'know, there just isn't any goddamn' good news coming out of that goddamn' place, unless you count some oft-repeated DoD press release mentioning that the Army has rebuilt some goddamn' stretch of highway from the airport (that they bombed the piss out of just a while back).

Yeah, when your Empire's crumbling, the outrage and dissatisfaction are so palpable you can cut 'em with a goddamn' knife, the one thing you need your press to be doing is exposing the nefarious doings of bands of left-wing wheatpasters defacing the Seat Of Our Empire with free expression.

Left-wing posters? In OUR Capital?

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"Poster Boy of Protest", in the Washington Post

For a number of years in high school and college, one of my big dreams was to take over Herblock's job at the Washington Post -- or, perhaps, to hit the front page in the Post's Style/Arts section. Needless to say, as my work took a more radical turn, I realized that my chances of making the Arts page -- let alone becoming the successor to Herblock -- were slim at the very best, and I got a little more realistic and focused my attention to creating cover cartoons for the Yipster Times or trying to break into High Times or Rolling Stone.

So, imagine my surprise when I found myself the subject of a front-page "personality profile"-type story appearing on the front page of the Post Style section a good twenty-odd years after my giving up on the idea of ever breaking into the Post at all. The Post had done a couple of previous Style profiles on local antiglob/antiwar movement figures, and apparently, now, it was my turn; it turns out that a certain Post reporter who'd been covering the local movements since Seattle had been a fan of my work for quite awhile, ever since it began appearing with regularity, wheatpasted on DC's streets beginning with the original "Blood For Oil" series during Iraq War I.

It was with a mixture of surprise and ironic glee, then, that I found myself and my work "writ large" on the front page of the lifestyle section of a major US city daily, getting top billing over -- of all people -- Catherine Deneuve (ooh la-la) and Robert Duvall. I was even more surprised to see myself getting an even-handed, quite positive treatment, as I was worried at how I'd be portrayed in print after seeing how the op-ed columnists were savaging the anti-globalization movements ever since Seattle/WTO and A16.

Story by David Montgomery; photographs by Andrea Bruce Woodall.
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Out With the Crew for an Evening's Postering, Fall 2001

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room,
where I got me a date with a pretty little girl from Greece;
she told me she would be there with me
when I paint my masterpiece!
--Dylan.



I try to think more about the guy we met at Dupont Circle who was overjoyed to have finally discovered where these posters came from, or the students from the George Washington Action Coalition out for a late-night bicycle ride on P Street who stopped off and jazzed us up with a quick blast of solidarity ("Yo, wheatpasters!") to take my mind off the "neighbor" on Connecticut Avenue who stalked us -- tearing down posters -- for two blocks, and the DC cop who became frustrated with his own piss-poor knowledge of the law and inability to cite us for anything and proceeded to stalk us and tear down posters all the way down P Street from Dupont Circle almost to Georgetown, committing no less than half a dozen separate basic Constitutional violations in the process against our crew.

So, the next time you bump into some pacifist liberal who wants to "negotiate" with the police, direct them to this video.