Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 07/30/03

Artist's Statement

I actually came up with the premise for this cartoon last week, but I felt like it was too similar to "The War on Horror"'s, and not quite funny enough. The humor, as always, came in the details--Colin Powell gravely holding up that ridiculous sketch (a copy of H.G. Wells's own doodle of the Martians, by the way), the evidence he offers (crop circles, a faked U.F.O. photo, the "face on Mars," a clip from George Pal's War of the Worlds), those astronauts checking cautiously under a rock. (That's an astronomically correct drawing of Mars, by the way. A brecciated rock field, some thin dry-ice cirrus clouds, and that's Phobos and Deimos you see in the sky. We do our research here.) The point, such as it is, is pretty much the same as "War on Horror"'s--that the spectre of Terrorism is being used as a boogeyman to scare us into letting the Bush administration do whatever it wants, from taking away our birthright as American citizens to conquering the whole freaking solar system.

Also, obviously, it suggests that all the evidence for war was, if not actually forged like that "African uranium" document, still bullshit. All the clucking and gabbling in Washington over those sixteen words in the State of the Union address is certainly justified, but still seems sort of myopic and irrelevant since it was pretty obvious to me and a lot of other people that Bush's owners had made up their minds to topple Saddam Hussein since before they clawed they way back into the White House and just threw up a smokescreen of whatever wonky rationales they could think of or make up to get us to let them do it. The Democrats who sheepishly voted for the war but are now acting all outraged to learn that they may have been misled ("I'm shocked--shocked!--to learn that gambling is going on in here!") are far more contemptible than the Republicans who engineered it--gutless traitors who ought to be tarred and feathered and run out of Washington on a rail. Whatever happened to that, anyway? Those were the days.

Bush translations: "Astrologers" are of course bunk artists and flakes who purport to read your character and predict your personal future by consulting flaming balls of hydrogen and helium billions of miles away. (It is true, however, that they have been consulted by previous Presidential administrations). The scientists who actually figured out what stars and planets are and know things about them are are called "astronomers."

Also, the correct term for the inhabitants of Jupiter, should any exist, would be "Jovians." Speaking of which, I wonder whatever happened to old Jovi Nore, my friend and co-worker at Clearn Water Action, ca. 1991? God damn--she was one of the hottest girls I've ever seen. Hey Jovi, are you out there? E-mail me sometime.