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I did this drawing 20 years ago, when the Republican convention came to Dallas, where I was living at the time. It was published in BWANA-ART, a Dallas zine. I seem to be cursed to live in cities where Republicans flock to crown scary idiots.
A few fleeting reminiscences of convention '84: (1) Dallas still had two papers then, and the coverage in the Dallas Times Herald by John Bloom (AKA Joe Bob Briggs) and Molly Ivins was some of the best newspaper writing I've ever read. (2) A few orange haired punks went on a rampage downtown--meaning yelling and handing out some leaflets. The whole city (a place of insurance companies, Christian sales motivators, repressed non-whites, and tit bars) was scandalized. I'm sure those kids did hard time. (3) The co-op gallery where I was showing hosted a political exhibit, "Left/Right: The Political Show." Sculptor Greg Metz (a former classmate of Texas ex-pats Gary Panter and Georgeann Deen) made an ambitious sculptural tableau called Reagan's Temple of Doom, with a fanged Gipper rising from a toilet in a funnel cloud. A reporter and a photographer from Time came to look at the show--handsome blowdried dudes in tight designer jeans--but snuck out the back door, leaving us artists standing there like fools.
A recent poll cited in the New York Times says 53% of New Yorkers fear a terrorist attack during the convention. Well, score one for Tom Ridge and the Fear Machine. What I'm most afraid of is that New York police will forget who they're paid to protect and start busting heads of average citizens fed up with three years of Republican kleptocracy, lies about 9/11, and bloody war. Protest is a right, not a privilege as Mayor Bloomberg would have it. The presence of riot gear and heavy handed crowd control tactics during the anti-Iraq war marches of 2003, which I witnessed firsthand, make me concerned that repression will lead to violence, as opposed to the other way around. In the February 2003 march, the police used barricades to keep people confined to the wide avenues and off the cross streets--which was fine unless you wanted to get across town from the West Side to 1st Avenue, where the rally was, which tens of thousands did. Bloomberg's tactic was to make the crowd give up and disperse by creating an impossible, exhausting maze of barricades. I wanted to scream at the cops who wouldn't let us walk on the cross streets--I mean, this was not a gang of criminals or anarchists here, just people who wanted to go to the rally. I found myself imagining a flash mob suddenly appearing and (non-violently) restraining them, through sheer force of numbers, allowing everyone penned in on the Avenue to exercise their constitutional right to walk the shortest distance between two points.