Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 9/01/04

Artist's Statement

I’ll assume that if you’re looking at this website you already share my speechless, open-mouthed disbelief that the Republicans are shameless enough to attack John Kerry’s war record. Their accusations been patiently refuted, one by one, as lies (which refutations have, inevitably, gotten way less media time than the lies themselves), but this, of course, doesn’t matter. It’s the tactic best summarized in the apocryyphal story about Lyndon Johnson, in an early campaign, spreading the rumor that his opponent had enjoyed carnal knowledge of his own barnyard hogs. “Christ, we can’t call the man a pigfucker,” protested one of his advisers. “No one’ll belive it.” “They don’t have to believe it,” Johnson is supposed to have said. “We just have to make the son of a bitch deny it.”

What’s more astonishing is that they’re going on the attack in an area where their candidate is so obviously vulnerable to counterattack. Let’s just say it: George Bush never even went to Vietnam. His Congressman daddy pulled strings to get him bumped to the front of a waiting list for the Texas air national guard--which was unlikely ever to engage in any dogfights over Lubbock with the Viet Cong air force--ensuring that some poor kid whose parents weren’t millionare politicians had to go risk getting killed instead. Would I have exploited the same advantages, if I could’ve? It’s hard to say—no one knows what they’d actually do in any hypothetical situation—but I am famous for my rigorous avoidance of physical danger, so I can’t pretend to any moral superiority as far as that goes. However, I can tell you that even if I had gotten a deferment, secured some stateside assignment, registered as a conscientious objector, or otherwise avoided the draft, you wouldn’t catch me hanging out in bars years afterward telling Vietnam vets that they were a bunch of lying pussies who probably never really saw any real combat. George W. Bush deserves to be taken outside and get his teeth knocked out and his ribs kicked in by anyone who was ever shipped overseas and shot at for his country. And the Democrats, as always, are acting like some pale four-eyed fat kid brought up by repressive liberal pacifist parents, who’s incredulous and helpless the first time some bigger kid whose own mean-drunk dad routinely beats the shit out of him pushes him over on the playground. If John Kerry had any balls he’d ask George Bush at the first debate whether he’d care to step outside to settle it like men.

For the record, George Bush has been arrested three times: once for theft, once for drunk and disorderly, and once for driving under the influence. This last arrest was in 1976, but it seems plausible to imagine that he’d been pulled over before and gotten off by dropping his daddy’s name. George’s people claim that in the ’76 incident he was pulled over for “driving too slowly,” but the arresting officer testified that he was weaving off the road. Ladies and gentlemen, the President is not just a drunk driver; he’s a bad one. I will admit that I, in years past, would sometimes get behind the wheel of a vehicle after drinking alcohol (very poor judgment, not to be recommended), but then I am not running for President by sucking up to the religious right or purporting to share their, or anyone else’s, values. I’ll also admit that it was I, not George Bush, who broke a collarbone, but this was in an heroic lightsaber battle, not some dumb barfight.