It is political season in the land and one more Bush, and one more Clinton are running for
president. I know a whole lot about this Clinton and very
little about this Bush. I am old
and politically tired, or should I say tired of political spectacles, or is it spectacle
politics (?). Marx said that history repeats
itself, first as tragedy and then as farce; but these days history has been
repeating itself so frequently that it no longer even has the bite of
farce. Though it was not always the case, now the whole thing just tires me out.
Last week I had two young ladies come to the door handing out Jeb
flyers and asking me who I was voting for only to hear me say "undecided”. It was a warm day, but a rainy one in a whole month of rainy ones, not a fun day to be schlepping cards in the suburbs. As it turns out, my friend John was coming
down the driveway when the girls were leaving and he asked me what they were trying
to sell, I said, “Jeb”. He said, “Aren’t
they a little young for that?” We both answered with “Young Republicans” at about the same time and concluded that they must
really care if they were willing to trudge through that kind of crappy weather. We then started reminiscing about when we
were young and cared about issues.
John and I both had a similar experience in which we spent a whole night putting up flyers about something we cared about only to wake up and find them all gone after they were deemed inappropriate by some unseen and unknown power! At this point in our lives, the censorship and
affront to our first amendment right to free expression no longer surprises
us, but knowing how hard it is to make things happen,
we now can only marvel at the efficiency with which our expression was squashed and
how fast the pamphlets we spent all night putting up were taken down.
My studio has been out of commission for structural reasons and I decided to spend the time it will take to fix it setting up a website for pictures of my
work. I was in the middle of doing that
when the girls came by and when I then spent time shooting the shit with John. I’m still working on the website and, coincidentally, just
came upon the slide of the print I was telling John about, and from which I had made the pamphlets I had spent plastering all over Athens Ga that night in the political season of 1988. As it turns out, that was the year the first
Bush President, George H, and Michael Dukakis were duking it out about non-issues.
Heck, history promises to keep repeating itself; and with another of H’s sons running for Office together with the publishing of H's new book criticizing personnel choices made by W when he was in the Office, I figured it was time to dust out ye ol’ angry print and digitize it here in ye ol’ angry blog for electronic eternity. If I did not have other things to do, I would like to insert Hilary in the background cheering on. ...hmmmm, maybe I still care....
(for those too young to know or too old to remember: Vote for a Gentle America was George Bush's campaign slogan for that season)
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