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.