From Contemporary Authors:
POLITICS: Democrat.
SIDELIGHTS: A poet and polemicist, Mall did not pursue a writing career until his early 60s. By training, he is an artist; by profession, an antiques dealer. But in early 2001, he found himself fuming whenever he saw George W. Bush on the evening news, and decided he needed a productive outlet for his anger. “I was really upset about the whole election,” Mall says. “I think it stirred me up emotionally to a point where I had to get rid of it.” One dreary afternoon, while brooding and surfing the Net, Mall discovered the anti-Bush site www.washingtonpest.com, which was holding a limerick contest. In three minutes, he wrote his first poem: “An ex-CIA spook named Bush / Who kicked old Saddam in the Tusch / Now dangles a puppet / As dumb as a muppet. / A coup or a theft or a putsch?”
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Passersby have often stopped to browse Mall’s headlines. Republicans have a lot of money, and they love antiques (viz., Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Donald Rumsfeld), but Mall seems not to care about alienating customers. The antiques market is doing poorly, anyway. If Mall’s store is not selling a lot of old lamps, it is at least warning the neighborhood about his 42nd-favorite president.
