Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 03/12/03

Artist's Statement

An unironic nostalgia piece, really. In the last week, as it's become dismally clear that nobody in the world sees any justifiable reason for the U.S. to attack Iraq and that we're just going to go ahead and do it anyway, a number of old friends have written me in what I think it's fair to describe as despair. A couple of them, both with finely honed senses of black humor, complained specifically that "it isn't even funny anymore." I've heard people who are by no means political radicals or violent revolutionaries--moderate, respectable, taxpaying, married people--admit, sotto voce, that it really might be for the best if someone would just shoot that little fucker.

I thought we could all use a poignant reminder that things were not always so grim--that once, not so long ago, Big Bill was in the White House, gettin' sucked off by interns in thongs and eatin' big ole baskets of gravy fries on the hotline to Boris Yeltsin. Oh, admit it--don't you miss him? Look, I don't know of anyone who voted for Bill Clinton who wasn't bitterly disappointed by his cynical, gutless policies, but I'm not saying I actually admired him as a President--I just sort of love him. This big, lusty, gluttonous guy in the White House, who'd grown up dirt poor and threatened to kill his abusive drunk stepfather when he got big enough, who got teary-eyed over the jobless--Republicans can't even fake that--who smoked pot and played sax and told teenage girls what kind of underwear he wore, beloved abroad and apoplectically despised by exactly the sorts of people I hate. Further: I know of no woman, regardless of her politics, who would not go down on Bill Clinton in a second.

Jesus--what a Golden Age it was, and we didn't even know it! Maybe it just looks brighter in comparison to the current darkness. Now look what we're forced to endure: That twerp. That ninny. That feeb. That nitwit. That dorkwad. That illiterate Yalie. That born-again cokehead. That simpering, sneering, puling, loathesome little monkeyfaced millionaire's son who seems beadily determined to drag the entire country back to the recession and the Gulf War, to say fuck you to the international agreements that have kept the world more or less from collapsing for the last fifty years. I can't even stand the sight of him. I'm ending this artist's statement before I say something I'll get arrested for.