Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 43-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
This gush of transparent cruelty pushing cartoon manhole covers 50 feet in the air in an exhausting demonstration of greed demands our chronic reassessment of gullibility, hatred and evil whilst tied to railway tracks, train whistle blaring, knowing they won’t stop in the name of frayed ecosystems, hope for humanity, entire populations at risk. Nothing. Turns out safeguards broke like rotten cattle catchers on 19th-century locomotives after a decades-long diet of misinformation cast those who broadly care about the health and well being of everyone as WWF villains, and evidently there’s no way back to the weird detente we didn’t know we were living through, when rednecks were written off as backward-thinking banjo duelers, but not full-blown Nazis. Who told you so, indeed.
“Who Told You So?” from Mecca Normal (Smarten Up!, 1986) (download):
