Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 02/19/03
Artist's Statement
Of course all public political pronouncements
are elaborately coded so as to avoid any allusion to the speaker's actual
agenda, but the current debate at the U.N. is the most transparent example
of this I've seen since the 2000 election controversy, when Gore's handlers
and apologists were talking about making sure every vote was counted and Bush's
dad's friends were talking about the need for a speedy resolution, while the
real content of the debate was as sophisticated as two toddlers screaming
at each other over a tug-of-war for a plastic toy in a sandbox. The one thing
about which nobody on either side of this debate disagrees--that Saddam Hussein
is a brutal dictator--is also the one thing about which neither of them gives
a shit.
So I was at the antiwar protest in New York this Saturday. I realize this
is not strictly related to the artist's statement, but I figure the more eyewitness
accounts that get out there the better. First of all I have no idea how many
people were there, but I can tell you that First, Second, Lexington, and Third
Avenues were all closed and flooded with crowds for over twenty blocks. Cars
were abandoned in the middle of the streets as they would be again the next
day in the blizzard. It was actually fun. It was the first time I've ever
gone home from one of these things not feeling like, well, that was pointless.
Protests on the mall in D.C. are like drawing something on pieces of paper
the teacher gave you to keep you occupied; protests that occupy major cities
are more like doodling in Algebra class, or drawing graffiti on the bathroom
wall.
I mistrust conspiratorial thinking as reductive and wacky, but I can't help
but find it creepy how the corporate-owned media (What? I know I sound like
shrill leftist but that's what they are. Corporations own them.) try not to
allow these events to have happened by declining to cover them. The front-page
photo of the Sunday edition of my own hometown paper, The Baltimore Sun,
was of a massive antiwar protest--in London. Those fickle, cowardly Europeans,
ready to surrender to the next moustachioed dictator who comes along! Mention
of the protest in New York was relegated to page 16A. I find this depressing.
If there's any reason why I keep going to these protests, or drawing cartoons
like this week's, it's this pathetic, irrational suspicion, surely a vestige
of my eighteen years of enforced churchgoing, that it somehow matters when
the truth gets spoken, even if nobody's listening.