Joe's Politicians

JOE’S POLITICIANS Mendelson Joe

Mendelson Joe

JOE’S POLITICIANS

ECW

JOE’S POLITICIANS

Copyright © Mendelson Joe,  Published by ECW Press  Queen Street East, Suite , Toronto, Ontario, Canada   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior \written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.        Mendelson Joe Joe’s politicians / Joe Mendelson; preface by Gary Michael Dault. isbn 978-1-55022-821-2 1. Mendelson Joe. 2. Politicians—Canada—Portraits. 3. Politicians—United States—Portraits. i. Title. nd249.m446a4 2008

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c2007-906564-3

Photography by Mendelson Joe Photographs processed by Belinda Moretto at Cavalcade Color, Huntsville Typesetting: Mary Bowness Printing: Marquis

This book is set in Joanna and Flux. The publication of Joe’s Politicians has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

 : Jaguar Book Group,  Armstrong Avenue, Georgetown, ,  

    

JOE’S POLITICIANS Mendelson Joe Paints

ECW Press

Preface — A Studio-Cabin Visit with Joe Joe’s Politicians is a series of portraits by Mendelson Joe that parallels a highly charged exhibition from the spring of 2008 at the Art Gallery of Peterborough (AGP).The show will no doubt test the extent to which the gallery can explore freedom of expression, and as the AGP’s Director, I may have to defend the value of political critique within a public institution. Joe and his art demand a thorough reckoning of one’s faith in the morals of those individuals elected to lead Canada and the United States, a much needed experience during an epoch of growing political apathy. My knowledge of Mendelson Joe dates to the mid 1980s, as an art student at York University, when this towering man in paint-spattered coveralls emerged as a Toronto cult hero on CityTV. Joe’s controversial images of everyday life mirrored the biting lyrics of his quirky folk songs and both were perfect foils to the social gleam of the city’s rising corporate class. Upon returning to Ontario, after an absence of almost twenty years, I was heartened to view a 2006 episode of the Rick Mercer Report on CBC television featuring Joe and his political portraits. Shortly thereafter a telephone call to the artist was placed

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on my behalf by Patricia Dixon, an AGP trustee and longtime friend of this uniquely Canadian cultural critic. Our first conversation was rather matter-of-fact and centered on setting up a studio visit in fall 2006. The drive from Peterborough to Emsdale passes through middle Ontario, replete with its boxstore strips, boreal forests, gentle waterways, modest farm operations and small urban communities. Hand-made signs dot the laneway leading to Joe’s residence on a heavily treed thirtyacre lot, which warn trespassers that they have entered private property. Within seconds of arriving at the lane’s end the artist appears with a camera and begins snapping pictures of me before I even have a chance to exit my vehicle. In an effort to reciprocate his curious greeting, I take photographs of him in his trademark paint-spattered coveralls and road safety vest. My realization that this will be an intense encounter is immediate. Another hand-painted sign in the entrance way of Joe’s cabin-studio proclaims a set of house rules, the most important being “touch nothing” which the artist reiterates to me in what seems like a common drill. I soon find it necessary to converse with this eccentric individual in nothing short of completely candid terms, for he demands that your expressions of belief and knowledge are totally resolved.The next few hours pass quickly as the

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painter presents a variety of portraits, landscapes and figurative works, while espousing his views on subjects ranging from the environment to politics. Mendelson Joe has particularly harsh words for the current president of the United States George W. Bush and former Canadian prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien, all whom he considers sociopaths. In the visual equivalents to his diatribes Bush becomes America’s Idiot-ThugPuppet, a sinister looking individual surrounded by the infamous Iraqi invasion playing cards featuring Saddam Hussein and his compatriots. In the numerous paintings of Mulroney, the Progressive Conservative Party leader from 1983 to 1993, he is consistently depicted by the artist as an asshole-head. Such an absurd likeness in Thumbs Up for the American Way features Mulroney sporting military fatigues and framed by actual Canadian flags as a defiant reference to this nation’s participation in the first Gulf War. During our review of his paintings Joe also recited passages from newspaper articles affixed to the back of each portrait. Such reports served as a catalyst for the artistic contempt that he expresses towards politicians including Jean Chrétien, the Liberal Party leader from 1990 to 2003, whose suspicious business dealings in Shawinigan inspired Piece of Poo in a Suit.The pure vulgarity of this portrayal astounds me. I am

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tantalized by the painter’s popular disbelief in the morality of such dominant public figures as well as his adept visual skewering of the facile platitudes and fleeting promises that have become a mainstay of democratic discourse. These uncensored characterizations of the ruling class are likely to raise the level of cultural discussion in Peterborough, as they most certainly command direct and visceral responses. Nine months would pass between my first encounter with the “proud folkie ain’t no jokie” of Emsdale and my second visit to confirm the selection of works in Joe’s Politicians. The exuberance that I felt upon leaving the artist’s cabin-studio had faded somewhat by the summer of 2007 and a sense of trepidation regarding his AGP exhibition began to enter my thoughts. Fortunately, the car deer-whistle (a plastic bumper-mounted device that scares animals from the roadway) that Joe handed me as a parting gift in the fall served as a constant reminder of his genuine concern for the well being of others. I am careful to arrive precisely at noon, according to the hourly chimes of CBC radio, having come to appreciate Joe’s exacting nature through our written correspondence and telephone conversations.The futile bureaucracies and political double talk which draw a haze over institutional life have absolutely no meaning to Joe. He demands that you are

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totally honest regardless of how complex or controversial a circumstance may be. Over a lunch consisting of vegetables and nuts tossed in large bowls and covered with a vinaigrette dressing, we agree that this exhibition of twenty-four portraits is a risk for a municipally run gallery that depends on federal and provincial funding. A likeness of the present prime minister of Canada entitled Fastest Hypocrite in the West renders Stephen Harper as a blue devil against a background of dollar signs and crosses, while Premier Thug describes the former Ontario Premier Mike Harris as a rather glib man with fanged stumps for hands. Among the most contentious works in this series is a portrait of the current Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day revealing his face from behind a Klu Klux Klan hood. In a North American environment where freedom of speech has been curtailed by government-corporate interests that exert extraordinary levels of scrutiny over citizens, I am led to ponder what the ramifications of this sardonic collection of politicized representations will be in a public forum? My most obvious art historical question for Joe pertains to the connection between his portraits and editorial cartoons. I make reference to Honoré Daumier’s lithographs of the nineteenth century in the French newspaper Le Monde as an example. He immediately rejects

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the comparison and cites The Scream, a commonly known painting created by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1807, as an influential visual source. Perhaps it is the overriding visual couplet of anger and fear evoked by Munch’s oil on board that attracts Joe, whose unabashed response to the strong reactions that his art elicits is “it’s the job of a Jew to be murdered.” Birrell Josef Mendelson’s grandparents fled from the pogroms of Eastern Europe to New York around 1900 and later his parents would relocate to Toronto where they raised Joe and his sister. In 1966 Joe graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts degree; music (he is a self-taught musician) proved to be his primary source of income until he began painting in the mid 1970s. The majority of works in Joe’s Politicians are based on images gleaned by the artist from mass media sources over the past twenty years, which reflect Joe’s determination to expose those individuals he perceives as a threat to democracy. Such a socially conscious effort is underscored by the artist’s economic situation for he survives solely on the sales of his art and music royalties. These portraits were not produced for their commercial viability. They are, in effect, personal memoirs, a purpose that becomes painfully evident when he reveals to me an utterly obscene image of Brian Mulroney in the downstairs

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storage of his cabin-studio. It is a painting that Joe readily admits will never be exhibited in his lifetime for fear of legal prosecution. Among those politicians the painter expresses a deep admiration for is the late Richard Thomas, a Toronto radio broadcaster during 1960s and former reeve of Armour township, who in 1981 ran as a Liberal Party candidate for Parry Sound against the future Progressive Conservative Premier Ernie Eves. In his discussion of Thomas, who, as Joe notes lost the Ontario provincial election to Eves by a mere six votes, I sense a grassroots yearning for leaders that reveal themselves in an unfettered way and remain true to their convictions.Thus the artist’s portrait of such an individual is a simple rendition void of caricature or devices and yet he adeptly captures a genuine public persona. Similarly, the work entitled Anomaly (Parrish) was inspired by Caroline Parrish, a Liberal Member of Parliament for MississaugaCentre, who was kicked out of caucus in 2004 by Prime Minister Paul Martin for a succession of anti-American avowals. Joe’s obvious respect for such an unrepentant politician (she referred to the American government as “bastards” in front of reporters and stomped on a George W. Bush doll-size effigy for CBC television’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes) is rendered through an immediate

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interpretation of her determined countenance in acrylics. In fact, Joe contacted both Thomas and Parrish to sit for their portraits as a sign of his esteem. And as my visit with this incomparable Ontario folk artist came to a close, I wonder what their respective experiences in this cabin-studio were like. My own admiration for Mendelson Joe is fully replenished and unquestionable by the time I am about to leave when he asks me to consider sitting for a portrait. I will most definitely return to this person and place of moral certitude. Dr. Curtis Collins Director Art Gallery of Peterborough

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Foreword Any discussion of the nature of politicians — I refer to those turbo-charged egos driven by rabid ambition, even bonafide idealism in rare cases — these folks definitely deserve analysis by a savvy psychologist such as expert Dr. Robert D. Hare. Hare’s expertise is the study of psychopathy. I am no psychologist but I am a very engaged observer of human behaviour. I’m also an amateur bird-watcher. My main engagement with humans is illustrated by my obsession with beauty in the form of the human female (I’m an orthodox mammalian) and my obsession, no less, is with democracy. I am more than engaged with how we govern ourselves; I am what is known as an activist. Democracy affords me this freedom. No-one pays me for my activism. My political stripes are many. I lean right and left and, occasionally I can be moderate. This collection of portraits embodies mostly figments of my imagination. All but three subjects came from impressions I synthesized from observing these mostly glib charmers during their numerous appearances on television. Television is a very revealing medium. It’s a useful instrument! The three exceptions mentioned in paragraph three all

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sat for me at my behest. They were compensated for their time with a modest-sized Joe landscape each. Barbara Hall was mayor of Toronto; Carolyn Parrish was an outspoken federal Liberal MP who eventually got the boot from her caucus; and then there’s the late Richard Thomas, reeve of Armour Township at the time of his most untimely passing. Thomas was my hero! Despite ever-growing cynicism amongst citizens I still harbour a sliver of hope that not all politicians are pathological specimens. I still believe that former three-term prime minister Jean Chrétien started out with a semblance of heart and with a purpose to do some good for his constituents, maybe even his country. The question I ask is: What happened to the “little guy from Shawinigan”? He morphed. Chrétien’s predecessor, also a three-termer, was what my late father called “transparent.” Brian Mulroney had the pious baritone delivery of a consummate shill. Unlike Chrétien, Mulroney was clearly an unabashed sycophant of both Presidents, Reagan and successor, Bush. Yet despite the clear differences of personality, it’s a sad irony that when Chrétien inherited the throne so to speak (Mulroney had bailed before being thrown out), he (Chrétien) wound up appropriating the Mulroney agenda

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almost to the letter. At least Mulroney had an agenda whereas Chrétien was just a scavenging Liberal liar,* a stain on the term ‘liberal.’ Chrétien’s only saving grace was his wise decision to abstain from sending Canadians back to Iraq. I often wonder whether his wife suggested this abstinence. These portraits are not editorial cartoons. These works are more akin to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. No-one pays me to paint. I get the occasional commission but I don’t encourage commissions the way I may have in the 1980s. I operate outside the mainstream of the Art establishment and follow no trend whatsoever. Being self-taught in all my media of expression has freed me. And freedom is the lifeblood of this Joe Artist. The argument of whether my art is political is moot. All art is political but, with my work, I don’t hide. On the other hand, when I produce work of a subtle nature as I

*My nephew Dorian suggested a reasonable remedy to the seemingly endless succession of broken promises, lies and betrayals. He proposed that a law be enacted mandating that all politicians sign a contract of fidelity upon nomination. Such a document would guarantee a perjury conviction in the event an elected candidate breaks an election promise, vow or stated policy. It’s incumbent upon we the electorate to restore public trust if our democracy is to survive and improve.

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do with landscape, no-one notices. That’s the hallmark of success in subtlety. But these portraits ain’t too subtle. To me, these pictures are just portraits. Elected** individuals deserve our scrutiny because they’re shaping our future in this system called democracy. If we stay engaged, the system can work pretty well but if we nod off as we’ve done too, too long, we get accurate reflections, true personifications of our apathy and our dwindling national spine. So, it’s fair to say I’m actively attuned and engaged with our democracy albeit from the sideline beyond the stream. The issue with me is trust. As a chronic coiner of aphorisms, I said about twenty years back: “Few people want the truth; fewer would recognize it; that is the truth (and, it ain’t too couth forsooth).” Mendelson Joe November 14, 2007

**Dr. Kissinger and Dr. Rice are appointees.

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Acknowledgements I began painting in 1975 after finding some acrylic paints in the garbage. I’ve always been a garbage-picker. And from the beginning, art collectors like Ray Danniels expressed their respect and taste with loonage. So herewith is an abbreviated list of some of my most ardent advocates, the collectors. Many thanks to Mr. Danniels, Moses Znaimer, Brenda Oelbaum, Neil Peart, René Price, Barbara Allport, Raffi Cavaoukian, Madam Justice Denise Bellamy, Harvey and Louise Glatt, A. Jane Gray, Randy and Mary Russe, Marlene Chapelle, Patricia Dixon, Irwin Karnick and Joshua Latner, to name a few stalwarts. And, finally, I thank the Canada Council and my esteemed agent Karen Robinson.

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Mendelson Joe: The Political Portraits Mendelson Joe possesses a wicked, coruscating eye. Like all satirists, he turns it like a searchlight upon infestations and outbreaks of cant and hypocrisy wherever they lurk. And, again like most satirists everywhere, M. Joe finds endless, fertile pockets of corruption and doubledealing lurking in the usually dispiriting world of politics. Politics provides an endless supply of grist for M. Joe’s lethal, graphic mill. Like all effective satirists, Joe trades in a certain passionately applied vulgarity in order to effectively — devastatingly — pillory his subjects. Many, perhaps most, of Joe’s political portraits are not pretty. On the contrary, his subjects leer and fume and fulminate from his unsparing canvases, their expressions often housed in the obscene buttock-carapaces that have become the artist’s trademark. For Joe, offending politicians — those he has deemed culpable of strenuously applied dishonesty and other modalities of public inauthenticity — have become what they have promulgated. Their embodiment of duplicity and bad faith has become, in Joe’s hands, palpable. They have turned themselves into assholes. And M. Joe paints them as he sees them.

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The first paintings I knew of Mendelson Joe’s (back in the early 1970s) were idylls — golden-age pastorals in which sun-filled, toy-like meadows were animated by miniature figures (in one case — in a painting I own and cherish — a tiny but clearly priapic Adam lights out across the greensward in hot pursuit of a decorously fleeing Eve). And then there were all those serene landscapes, many of them blue-tinctured snowscapes, their brittle, visionary clarity generated by Joe’s many motorcycle journeys into the heart of Algonquin Park. I remember the first portraits. They were affectionate homages to his subjects: to his friends and fellowmusicians and culture-workers. Their aim was verisimilitude — albeit a sometimes tense and laboured verisimilitude — and their atmospheres were largely roseate. The coming of the politicians effected, inevitably, a change in Joe’s approach to portraiture. Now, his subjects seemed not so much chosen as deliberately thrust upon him. The warmth and joyousness of his brush gradually turned acidic, vitriolic. Now, rather than celebrating his subjects, he harried them. The patient search for likeness gradually turned into a headlong rush towards caricature. The rush, however, was only towards caricature. For while caricature can certainly be devastating, it ends by

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becoming two-dimensional — cartoonish. Joe’s political portraits, by contrast, had to stop somewhere short of the caricaturist’s graphic dismissiveness, in order that the human, all-too-human imminence and oppressive fleshly presence of his chosen subjects remain. (“All art is political,” Joe writes in the foreword to this book, “but, with my work, I don’t hide.”) Where caricature diminishes, painting enlarges — or sometimes, in M. Joe’s case, engorges, infests and rots (see, for example, his grey, cadaverous portraits of Stephen Harper and Dick Cheney). Joe’s politicians are not signs or icons or logos. Rather, they are larger-than-life embodiments of ideals gone wrong. And Hell hath no fury like that of an idealist scorned. (“Despite ever-growing cynicism amongst citizens,” Joe writes, “I still harbour a sliver of hope that not all politicians are pathological specimens.”) “To me,” Joe writes, “these pictures are just portraits.” Maybe so, but my feeling is that the word “just” in that sentence is a bit of dissembling. For, as a portraitist, Joe clearly brings to his mimetic task a rich and corrosive arsenal of satiric painterly effects. Satirists prick and prod their subjects — and their audiences — by the employment of certain kinds of exaggeration. And it is not the caricaturist’s exaggeration: it’s more than a coarsening extrapolation of the subject’s

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features.The satirist goes further than that, bringing to his already wanton, exaggerated likenesses a kind of bodily contamination that is always more horrifying than funny. In Joe’s hands, George H. Bush Sr., for example, comes to sport an adder’s black forked tongue. Dick Cheney possesses demonic, blood-red eyes. And where Stockwell Day’s emergence from a KKK hood is merely the timehonoured stuff of caricature, Ernie Eves’s yellowing fangs and satanic cow horns, by horrifying contrast, are emblems of the satirically transformative. The portrait becomes a conversion-kit by which a public and doubtless tv-generated image is made gleefully bestial in a way that aligns the picture with classic satire’s relentless delight in physical diminishment as a palpable outing of moral terpitude. In Joe’s Mike Harris portrait, for example, the hands have become piranha-like graspers and rippers (Hamlet’s “pickers and stealers”): “Harris’ mantra,” Joe notes wittily, “was to cut to the bone and privatize the marrow.” Satire literalizes. In Mendelson Joe’s metamorphic political portraits, eyes redden like the eyes of serpents. Teeth yellow. Tufts of hair are tweaked into devil-horns (Harper, Eves and Condoleezza Rice). And, most disturbingly, people turn into buttock-people, into perambulating assholes. Jean Chrétien now talks out the side of his anus. Preston

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Manning is both buttocked (the cheeks arranged like blinkers) and serpent-tongued. Bill Clinton partakes of assholedom even while being fellated. But the most generous measure of Joe’s savage buttock-joy is here meted out (and always has been) to his primary political target, Brian Mulroney, the unfathomable cleft in whose chin having now disastrously opened — like the San Andreas Fault — into the crack in his ass. Indecorous? Yes, of course. But also fully declared (the very lack of such full declaration in his victims drives the painter crazy).What is fully declared is always attended by a certain innocence. And there is a sense in which Joe’s political portraits — highlighted, clarified and shrill to the point of near hysteria — are as innocent as snow. Joe doesn’t preach, but he does wear his feelings about his bêtes noires on his sleeve. He is, he says, an activist. And he’s a joyously angry activist. There’s an aphorism in poet William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) that seems insistently relevant to Mendelson Joe and his scalding portraits: “The tygers of wrath,” Blake wrote, “are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Gary Michael Dault Toronto, December 20, 2007

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Dedicated to all humans who actively take responsibility for their actions and/or inactions. I quote my hero Anne Hansen (the artist, not the bomber): “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”

Table of Contents

George H. Bush Sr. George W. Bush Dick Cheney Jean Chrétien Bill Clinton Stockwell Day Ernie Eves Barbara Hall Stephen Harper Mike Harris Henry Kissinger Preston Manning Brian Mulroney Carolyn Parrish Condoleezza Rice Richard Thomas

George H. Bush Sr. As Reagan’s vice president, Daddy Bush (father to two-term militant ignoramus George W. Bush) had already made his real mark as former head of C.I.A. He created no waves under Reagan’s tent and always claimed to be “out of the loop” regarding Iran Contra. When Ronald Reagan’s two-term sleepover (Americans loved him and forgave his sins because he was avuncular in his best role as ‘B’ actor in the White House) ended, George Herbert Walker Bush took the presidency, warred on Iraq but withdrew leaving his ally-buddy dictator Saddam Hussein to carry on business as usual. If one looks at Mr. Read My Lips (“no new taxes”), his withdrawal from Iraq may have been his crowning glory though some might say the taking of Panama and capture of other old buddy drug-dealer dictator Manuel Noriega trumped the arms test (Desert Storm) in Iraq.

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That he and wife Barbara fathered two-term president George W. Bush deserves consideration. I attribute their bellicose son’s strange behaviour to having been the product of anal conception but that’s just a theory of mine.

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George W. Bush Few men who’ve ascended the peaks of power to global dominance can be compared with a cartoon figure, namely Matt Groening’s satirical patriarch boob Homer Simpson! George W. Bush, “the decider,” a product of the Bush dynasty going back to his grandfather Prescott Bush (who was an advocate of Hitler like so many Americans including Henry Ford, Walt Disney and hero flyer Charles Lindbergh to name three), he, Dubya, came up a party-boy spoiled brat, the progeny of wealth and privilege on America’s east coast. The Texas twang came later.

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When Bush beat Gore to become the leader of the free world, that frat-boy smirk was later to be replaced by the warrior’s grimace. Eventually, the Bush character appeared, not unlike the vacuous self-centred idiot cartoon character Homer Simpson. George ‘Dubya’ unraveled in front of our eyes virtually every time he was questioned on TV. Bush rarely spoke freely because he was prone to gaffs both in language but, more importantly, in policy. His knowledge of world geography and foreign cultures rivals that of a high-functioning baboon — I do not exaggerate.

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collection of Brenda Oelbaum

That George W. Bush enjoyed a second term at the helm bespeaks the decline of America, the most armed camp on Earth. It’s necessary to state that by equating the character and intellect of George W. Bush with a dunce like Homer Simpson (a fictional safety inspector at fictional Springfield’s nuclear power generating station), one might ask who’s really in charge? Who’s feeding Bush his lines, his policies, his instructions, etc.? Who’s the director?

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collection of Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk

The most obvious puppeteer manipulating Bush’s mandible was Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney is the face of hardened greed (Haliburton) and gunnery (he even shot his friend). With an advisor like Cheney directing all Bush babblings, we have an empty vessel who’ll say or do anything with one finger on the button. Dr. Strangelove as reality.

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Dick Cheney This is the face of America’s blood-for-profit policy to invade, occupy and Vietnamize Iraq. In reality, Cheney’s pitbull sneer is a mask for profiteering in oil and military contracts. Greed. Dominance. Aside from backroom boys Perle, Wolfowitz, Kissinger and Rove, Cheney has to be viewed as the evil puppet-master with his hand up the bottom of

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the pliable Homer Simpson–like twang-meister mouthpiece, boob George W. Bush. Cheney is incapable of uttering truth except by accident. Any psychologist versed in psychopathy would likely conclude in minutes that Dick Cheney was pathologically delusional and as rabid a medium-functioning psychopath at large as anyone could be. That’s my take.

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collection of Brenda Oelbaum

America’s democracy has fallen victim to the policies of this world-class goon from Montana. I’m not sure who’s more scary, Cheney or Bush. As for Bush, he’ll do or say anything he’s told to do. God save us from these lunatics. For the record, I do not God.

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Jean Chrétien Canada’s first and only woman PM Kim Campbell inherited an impossible mess after loathsome downsizer-privatizer–railway buster–taxcuttertaxmaker (GST), sycophantic servant to ReaganBush, Brian Mulroney, bailed before being booted. Chrétien had been with the Liberal machine since before Trudeau. When Kim Campbell called the election, it was Liberal leader Chrétien’s to lose. Of course Chrétien promised to kill the loathsome Mulroney tax — the goods and service tax — to assure an easy victory. And, of course Chrétien and party prevailed, Campbell disappeared, and the promise “to kill the GST” also disappeared. Chrétien won by default and Canada went on sabbatical. Canadians gave Chrétien a long honeymoon until just after what’s now known as 9/11.

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Up until this offence on America, Chrétien had enjoyed calm by appropriating the Mulroney agenda to the letter. Canadians slept despite growing homelessness and a major decline in the quality of our once great universal healthcare service. Most Canucks simply tolerated charmer Chrétien, a sly politician indeed, whereas they had grown to hate Mulroney. It’s worth stating that many conservative Canadians like myself abhorred Mulroney’s immediate compliance in sending our troops to assist in the first American invasion of Iraq in ’91. After 9/11, Chrétien declined to repeat Mulroney’s troop commitment in America vs. Iraq II because he, Chrétien, didn’t buy the spin of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and the bogus threat to America via alleged Iraq-born terrorism under Saddam Hussein. Chrétien didn’t swallow the whopper Cheney was selling to link Saddam to Osama. As I articulated up front in the

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foreword, it may well have been Mrs. Chrétien who favoured Canada’s exemption from Iraq II but the NATO mission in Afghanistan would nevertheless ensnare Canada in Chrétien’s wish to placate our bellicose neighbour George W. Bush in his pursuit of Osama Bin Laden. It’s understandable that Chrétien went along with the NATO plan to occupy Afghanistan. We were to serve as nation-rebuilders, not frontline combat forces. Backtrack. In the autumn of ’95, two years into his honeymoon with most of Canada, Chrétien just about blew it. A very cagey referendum mounted by Québec Separatists almost succeeded in dividing Canada right under the less than watchful eye of the palsied charmer from Shawinigan. Unbeknownst to Canadians, this lucky win for Canada (roughly 51% of Quebeckers) indicated to Chrétien that the Liberal government better start paying attention

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to Québec’s near secession. That’s when the socalled ‘Sponsorship’ loonage started to flow to ‘Friends of Liberals’ dans la belle province. I could write a whole book about how Chrétien played his hand from pimping CANDU reactors in China to the desecration of the CBC to the neglect of our commitment to Kyoto to his smarmy mockery at the Gomery Commission. Chrétien’s statement that he “took responsibility (for occurrences) on his watch” like his “promise to kill the (Mulroney) GST” amounted to lies. When Chrétien pulled out his golf balls to mock Justice Gomery during the hearing, I realized this guy was vindictive toward Canada and Canadians. Chrétien was the zenith of deception and hypocrisy. He was an insult to the term ‘liberal.’ I reached within to summon the imagery worthy of this egocentric maniac. In the end, he never wanted to relinquish power.

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Bill Clinton Americans finally jumped ship after three consecutive terms under Republicans Ronald Reagan and corollary George Bush Sr. It was Bush Sr. who gave us Iraq I, Desert Storm. Bill Clinton came from poverty. He was full of ambition and probably a few fragmented ideals. He thought before he spoke (most times) and proved to be a formidable leader, that is, until the Republicans caught him with his pants down in the Oval Office.

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It’s a sad comment on America’s corporatedriven media, especially the television networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox) that milked Clinton’s personal imbroglio to the extent the world laughed. A little fellatio while nearly a million in the world’s richest, allegedly freeist country, went homeless and hungry. Clinton’s refusal (denial?) to come clean over this international blow job only fuelled the salivating lackeys of the Right.

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Bill Clinton’s tenure will go down (no pun intended) as a two-term blow job. Pity.

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Stockwell Day

Currently relegated to the portfolio of domestic security minister under PM Stephen Harper, Mr. Day was the dashing man who supplanted Reform Alliance founder-leader Preston Manning to become official leader of the Opposition until replaced by Stephen Harper and his loyal lieutenant, former Progressive Conservative Peter MacKay (who today serves as Minister of Defence). Stockwell Day is famous for his strident views as a creationist-homophobe. Under Harper’s very stiff wand, Mr. Day is, like colleagues MacKay, Flaherty and Baird, kept in line staying with the script to the letter. No access is no democracy.

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Ernie Eves As Finance Minister under glib fat-trimmer, privatizer Mike (the butcher by my estimation) Harris, Ernie Eves functioned as a willing servant. Eves eventually bailed (before Harris bailed) but upon seeing an opportunity to succeed the glib butcher,* Eves jumped back in the fray to succeed Harris as premier albeit for a brief run. Eves lacked the charisma of Harris. Even butchers can be charismatic — witness the Russian President Putin. Imagine what a man like Harris would have done to the native occupiers at Ipperwash had he owned Canada as Putin appears to own Russia. *Harris was not previously in meat processing. He was a golf

pro.

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Barbara Hall

Madam served as Toronto mayor for one term. In retrospect, she was an anomaly when compared to the likes of predecessor lame-boy Liberal Art Eggleton (now a Senator thanks to lame-boy PM Paul Martin Jr.) or simian Mel Lastman. Madam Hall was a decent slow-speaking powerhouse who achieved little but civility. If that’s not a vote of confidence in a culture of liars and dogged developers, what is?? To term a politician an exemplar of civility bespeaks mountains of this person’s character.

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Stephen Harper He’s the awkward duck from the Calgary cabal born of Christian Reform in amalgamation with former Progressive Conservative turncoat Peter MacKay and crew. Canadians punished the corrupt Liberals for their major misappropriation of funds (the so-called Sponsorship Scandal) by handing Harper and his Republican guard a minority government in year 2006. Harper betrayed himself immediately by appointing a Quebecker, the unelected Monsieur Fortier, to the Senate. Harper’s mantra had long been to end the practice of an unelected Senate.

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I elect to devote less ink to “Steve” (President George W. Bush’s term of endearment) than his Conservative predecessors because he’s a droning policy wonker who refuses to allow his ministers to speak without a script. He stonewalls the media from access except when the climate is staged, scripted, timed and spun like an out-take from the

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great movie Wag the Dog. Until Harper became PM, he had never traveled to continental Europe, Russia, Middle East, Asia or South America. “Steve” is clearly a man with zero imagination but a style of control that rivals the puppeteers pulling the strings of his master in Washington.

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Mike Harris I present Ontario’s version of Alberta’s Ralph Klein. Though Harris was less conspicuous than the drunk from Calgary, he, Harris will be remembered by many, especially the residents of Walkerton, Ontario, the family of murdered son Dudley George (Ipperwash), and Harris appointee, Attorney General Charles Harnick. It was Harnick’s testimony in the extensive hearing into the death of unarmed protestor Indian Dudley George that fingered (the former)

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Premier Harris for his thug-like racist inflammatory language “get those fucking Indians out of there” — there being Ipperwash Provinical Park, territory allegedly belonging to First Nations people. That’s my take on Harris who reigned for two terms before bailing as conservatives generally do after plundering, deceiving and otherwise stabbing the hearts of folks who prefer healthcare, social services, and improved education over privatized jails. Harris hated teachers.

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collection of Bob Wiseman

Harris’ mantra was cut to the bone and privatize the marrow. I had a run-in with Harris and his circle of plainclothed protectors. Art Gallery of Ontario director Matthew Teitelbaum rescued me from the clutches of a Harris goon when I seemed threatening because of my attire whilst attending a memorial for the late respected CityTV reporter Colin Vaughan. Harris spoke at this gathering. My response to Harris’ reign was to portray the man as just another glib fascist.

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Henry Kissinger Dr. Kissinger like Dr. Condoleezza Rice was an appointee. Neither of these academics was elected to office and both rose to the position of Secretary of State of the once great nation United States of America. Kissinger’s stench still lingers today in that he serves doofus-thug George W. Bush as a noncredentialled consultant. The foul odour of nefarious conduct fraught by the ponderous thick accented baritone goes back to his meddling in the affairs of Chile (or likely well before with America’s most dirty war, Vietnam). Henry Kissinger was Nixon’s man, “the Jew,” as he was referred to on the tape-recordings Nixon made. And those tapes led to Nixon’s resignation (Watergate) and jail for all the principals including the Attorney General. Only one got away. Henry.

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Kissinger escaped prosecution. Nevertheless his role as adviser to subsequent presidents and his position as director on numerous corporate boards, not the least of which included one of Conrad Black’s holdings, confirms this cat Kissinger at age eighty-plus has nine lives at least. During George H. Bush Sr.’s presidency, Dr. Kissinger was employed to tutor Bush’s Vice President Dan Quayle. Mr. Quayle was a handsome idiot who ranked with President George W. Bush in the echelons of ignorance though I doubt Quayle would’ve been as militant an ignoramus as twangster “Dubya.”

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Preston Manning To appreciate the roots of Canada’s reconstituted right-wing party (formerly Social Credit, then Reform, then Alliance) recently rebadged “Conservative” and currently, at this writing, the minority government of Canada, one must look to the Christian evangelist Preston Manning. And his pater. The son of Ernest who ruled Alberta as premier, he, Preston had his eye on federal politics in fathering the libertarian style Christified Reform Party (an Albertan birth), Manning became the

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daddy-theorist who lost control to none other than homophobe-creationist, all-purpose charmer Stockwell Day. By the time Stephen Harper reconstituted Reform-Alliance into the re-minted Conservative nomenclature, Manning decided to step away from his lost progeny to serve as academic and think-tank policy wonk. Manning’s neoconservative views echo those of Republican Pat Buchanan in part if not a dash of Jerry Fallwell. He’s a charmer and lightning fast on his feet. I elected to portray Mr. Manning just after he shed his glasses, got a new tailor and hair stylist no less. The superficial remake failed to revive, reboot or renovate his folksy image. Ironically, I found his original package to be endearing and the new style, counter-productive to what was an otherwise unpretentious neo-conservative.

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Brian Mulroney I enjoy the benefit of both hindsight and a developing perspective as I approach age 64. When Brian Mulroney came to power in 1984, he did his best to mimic a statesmanlike demeanour. Nevertheless the pomp and selfaggrandizing personality, were no mask for the man’s enormously needy ego.

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My first portrait of Mulroney (ejaculating into the Canadian flag) deserves to stand as a sagacious foretelling about a man who years after leaping from office, would be the recipient of large amounts of cash ($300,000), a gift of arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber, a man Mulroney stated under oath with whom he “had no dealings.” This sort of thing kept Mulroney in the public view with the able assistance of the exemplary work by CBC television’s The Fifth Estate. No wonder Mulroney (and his Liberal liar-clone Chrétien) did everything they could to emasculate the people’s broadcaster. CBC is Canada’s best check and balance against the likes of Mulroney and Chrétien. Writing about Brian Mulroney necessitates a dose of Gravol. I’ll say simply that to know Mulroney, just read Peter C. Newman’s The Secret Mulroney Tapes. Otherwise, enjoy my depiction from a plethora of portraits begun in ’88 up to and including the Pasta gem herein.

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Carolyn Parrish Every once in a while a federal MP breaks with tradition by ignoring protocol and goes AWOL so to speak. Unlike heiress Belinda Stronach who betrayed her party (the newly minted Conservatives under Harper) to shore up the very tippy Liberals under impotent Paul Martin Jr., Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish simply spoke out of church. Carolyn Parrish had dared to speak a truth most Canucks (and most Europeans) concurred that the Bush administration was composed of “bastards,” a slang term to define the malfeasants feeding bellicose boob-bully Bush his every line

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and policy. When Parrish went a step further by desecrating a doll in Bush’s image on the CBC’s most popular satire The Mercer Report, she, Carolyn, felt the cold leather of the Martin boot. Parrish served out her term as an independent representing her constituents in Mississauga. It’s worth noting Parrish opposed same-sex marriage claiming her constituents’ views superseded her personal politics on this most unliberal position. Aside from her choice to paint homosexuals and lesbians as less equal than the rest of us, I admire her courage for expressing her disdain for the twisted deceptive blood-thirsty policies of the Bush administration.

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Condoleezza Rice The Republicans recognized they needed to broaden their brand because their Christian base is very important to keeping the conservative side of America’s faux democracy floating to the right. Many Christians are black and female so, to populate the Republican Bush cabinet with an obedient black female Christian (Rice’s father’s a holyman) academic, amounted to a coup in public relations. It’s worth noting that Colin Powell, also black and a former ten-star General who served as Rice’s predecessor, did not conform to Bush-gang expectations, especially in the area of obedience.

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Unlike Mr. Powell, Dr. Rice is a smooth glib mouth-piece at Bush’s side who clearly serves master-villain Darth Cheney. Condoleezza Rice appears to be without character or conscience. She turns on a dime parroting the non-sequiters of Cheney whose vile musings translate into twang delivered as semi-lingual utterings by President George W. Bush.

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Richard Thomas The reader may find this incredible but I can name a few politicians I value and trust. Highest on the list would be folks like Nelson Mandela (whose portrait I painted in celebration of his release from almost three decades of incarceration), Ralph Nader, Golda Meir, and my local reeve Richard Thomas. Mr. Thomas ran for office numerous times and came within a dozen votes of unseating Mike Harris’ lieutenant Ernie Eves. Thomas was the multi-tasker of multi-taskers. Farmer, environmentalist, consummate political pundit writer, voice-over performer, husband and father to four, Richard Thomas served his community as reeve at the time of his car crash and subsequent death. As politicians go, Richard Thomas has to have been as honest as sunflowers in August.

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Mendelson Joe is a multimedia artist. His books are available from ECW Press, Toronto. His paintings are exhibited at Karen Robinson Gallery, Emsdale, Ontario. Joe’s recordings are available on labels Anthem, Boot, EMI, Pacemaker, and Stonyplain.

ECW Press $24.95 Distributed by Jaguar Book Group www.ecwpress.com ISBN-13: 978-1-55022-821-2 ISBN-10: 1-55022-821-8

“In Mendelson Joe’s metamorphic political portraits, eyes redden like the eyes of serpents. Teeth yellow. Tufts of hair are tweaked into devil-horns (Harper, Eves and Condoleezza Rice). And, most disturbingly, people turn into buttock-people, into perambulating assholes. Jean Chrétien now talks out the side of his anus. Preston Manning is both buttocked (the cheeks arranged like blinkers) and serpent-tongued. Bill Clinton partakes of assholedom even while being fellated. But the most generous measure of Joe’s savage buttock-joy is here meted out (and always has been) to his primary political target, Brian Mulroney, the unfathomable cleft in whose chin having now disastrously opened—like the San Andreas Fault—into the crack in his ass.” — Gary Michael Dault, “Mendelson Joe: The Political Portraits”

“Mendelson Joe paints with more emotion than almost any other painter in the country.” — Peter Goddard, Toronto Star

“In a country not blessed with an overabundance of talented and eccentric artists, Mendelson Joe alone could count for several. He’s a painter and a musician, a serial philosopher and inveterate letter writer. What’s important about Joe’s work is that he invariably captures a truth of some kind.” — David Hayes, “Introduction,” Working Women