It was maybe 1988, maybe 1987. I was the proud rider of a Sims Pocket Knife 1440, duly emblazoned with a variety of me-defining stickers, the proudest of which were Fishbone, Sturtevant's and Ban Apartheid. I'm not sure why that Sturtevant's one meant so much. Maybe I was thumbing my nose at the fact that I couldn't get the coveted Sessions sticker. I still remember that one day at the base of the lift, my teal green Gore-Tex jacket sensibly keeping out the snow my adolescent's rebelliously worn blue jeans could not, the slightly older punk ski bum lift operator, too cool for my school, sneered and panned my artwork: "Yeah man, ban apartheid, nyaaaaaah." It made me feel equally pea size and wildly angry then, and still fills me with some distant anger now. There is an absolutely stunning series of Anti-Apartheid posters on NYTimes.com right now. Immensely worth the context.
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To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.
— Voltaire
http://takimag.com/article/mandela_what_the_obits_omit_jim_goad/print#axzz2muYjjJJT
And there is some truth there in that column, while I'm not so sure some of the facts I'd translate as such indictments as the author does. Certainly Nelson Mandela deserves postmortem respect in my book no matter what Voltaire may think, painting me as the same sort of iconoclast, apparently.
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