Democracy Dies

P.S.: Thanks a lot, Bezos.

P.P.S.: If you're looking for this week's cartoon cartoon, I posted it last night, while there was still a faint glimmer of light amid the gathering gloom.

Q Toon: Status Quo Anti

Well, folks, this is my gamble on Sunday on a cartoon idea that I thought would still be relevant after Tuesday.

I could have been delightfully wrong, I suppose. A blue wave could have swept all the transphobes out of office on Tuesday. But as our experience in Wisconsin has shown, they would still be able to wreak all sorts of mischief on their way out the door. Including refusing to leave.

Even a cartoon celebrating the end of instant fund-raising messages from the political parties and candidates could have gone awry.  All it would have taken would be for there to be some run-off election needed somewhere that would tip the balance of the House or Senate or governorship or state legislature, as Georgia foisted on us all the last two elections.

As I noted in Monday's sneak peek, we've had two presidential elections in the 2000's in which the outcome was still uncertain when Wednesday morning's newspapers went to press. We are now told to expect that to be the norm (and not just because Wednesday morning's newspapers are printed a couple hundred miles away these days).

One of my cartooning colleagues posted on Facebook the other day that the editor of one of his subscribing publications had asked him to supply them with some cartoons about something other than the election. It's a reasonable sounding request; nobody wants to go to print with this year's DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

Or Harry Murphy's cartoon congratulating President-elect Charles Evans Hughes.

But my colleague said no. He's not the type to draw cartoons about sports scores or how sad it is that there was flooding in Valencia — although fresh carnage in Gaza or Lebanon might have piqued his interest. The guy has managed to crank out a cartoon every day almost without fail for several years now.

The fact is that there is very little else to draw editorial cartoons about in this country this week. Even our foreign co-workers appear to be fixated on our presidential election.

Anyway, I've chosen to publish this post in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, regardless of whether we know for sure who the next President of the United States is or not.

And, of course, whether Donald The Terrible and all those Republican House and Senate candidates are able to carry out their campaign promises to criminalize and persecute transgender Americans and their families.

Election Week's Sneak Peek

 This is that most dreaded of all weeks in editorial cartooning.

The cartoon has to be drawn before election results are known, to appear after we know who won.

Or at least who's ahead.

Eight years ago, I drew a cartoon of a gay couple watching TV and rejoicing that that year's election campaign was finally over. But by the time that cartoon was published anywhere, to the shock and horror of gay couples everywhere and plenty of other Americans, Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton. Not in the popular vote, of course, but in the the all-important Electoral College.

Sixteen years before that, my better half and I were planning a vacation that would keep me away from my drawing board in the week following election day, so I proposed to the syndicate editor that I would send him two cartoons: one for use if the Democrat won and one for use if the Republican did.

My editor rejected that proposal, and it's as well that he did. While my better half and I were enjoying sunny Mexico, the United States was enjoying hung chads and lawsuits over recounts in Florida. We still didn't quite know whether Al Gore or George W. Bush had won the election by the time we got back home.

So here's one more reminder to get out and vote, if you haven't already, so that I know what the heck I'm cartooning about next week.

One More Reminder

I can’t believe that four years after the last time we were here on the precipice, our Graphical History Tour has to repeat this stop. But apparently there are a lot of Americans whose memories of the Donald Berzelius Trump administration are not just hazy, but positively gauzy.

March, 2016

His immediate priority upon assuming office in 2017 was to staff many of his cabinet departments with people opposed to those departments' missions.

March, 2017

For the Department of Education, public education foe Betsy DeVos.

March, 2017

For the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights, civil rights foe Roger Severino. 

Few of us noticed Trump also tossing the Obama administration's preparations for pandemic response into the garbage. But have no fear. Trump is promising to put brain worm-addled Robert "Let's Strap A Rotting Whale Carcass On Top Of The Car And Drive Down The Highway" Kennedy Jr. in charge of the nation's health in his second reich.

June, 2017

Starting under Administrator Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency abandoned its mission, repealing nearly 100 environmental protection rules and regulations.

July, 2018

And then there was the Trump foreign policy. Bashing our NATO allies. Fawning over Kim Jong Il. Keeping even his translator out of his private meeting with Vlad the Defenestrator, his handler at the Kremlin.

I don't even have a cartoon about the time he wanted to bomb Mexico and pretend someone else did it.

March, 2020

Then, we come to the defining moment of his presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic. His first reaction, as it has been with immigration, was to wall off the whole country against foreigners, returning tourists and business people, imports, birds, and wind. When it became painfully obvious even to Trump that it was too late for that, he discovered that he could be the center of attention by going on television every day to promise that the pandemic would miraculously be over by Easter. Then summer. Then Columbus Day.

April, 2020

He spouted ridiculous phony cures, from horse tranquilizer to bleach to shining bright lights up everybody's ass. And the death toll kept mounting. Although Kim Jong Un did not end up on that list.

We didn't know that Secret Agent Trump sent a COVID-19 test machine to Putin at Kremlin headquarters when they were still scarce in the country he supposedly wanted to make great again.

October, 2020

Turned out that Trump was COVID-positive himself when he appeared on stage to debate Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Trump's utterly unhinged performance that night was but a foretaste of the shitshow Trump and his gangsters thrust upon the nation after we decisively voted to toss him out of office. Refusing to concede, he sent his consiglieres to argue a pack of lies in the courthouses, on the airwaves, and over the intertubes.

January, 2021

The cartoons I drew of Trump protesting his election loss paled next to the riot he fomented at the U.S. Capitol. The assaults on police officers. The wanton vandalism. The threats to kill the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and any other member of Congress they might happen to stumble upon.

The Senators who were sent scurrying for their lives only to come back and decide that no impeachable offense had ever occurred.

February, 2024

Revenge upon his political enemies as a campaign theme wouldn't poll well, to Trump decided to make vilification of darker-skinned immigrants the primary focus of Trump 2024. The issue was so important that he made sure that the bipartisan immigration reform bill hammered out in Congress never made it to the floor of the House.

September, 2024

Just in case those brown-skinned immigrants miraculously stopped showing up at the southern border, Trump had another target for persecution: American transgender persons. 

Oh, I haven't even gotten around to his stealing thousands of classified government documents he had never gotten around to reading and stashing them in his bathroom, ballroom, and garden shed. Or his holding Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds for ransom, then showing up to throw paper towels at people. Or his history of sexual assaults. Or his 34 felony convictions.

I could repost more cartoons, but frankly, this post is way over the limit already.

For now, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that enough Americans will decide that Donald the Grouch Trump was in the wrong end of that big ass garbage truck this week.

Q Toon: Cancel Culture

The odd couple of Liberal Leo and MAGA Max make their third appearance this week, telling a vote canvasser that they had both cast their ballots early. (I had to script their dialogue so that it would work in case the deadline for early voting had passed in the locales where they might be published. Originally, I had the canvasser herself promoting early voting.)

My better half and I have already voted, which has done nothing to stop the instant messages, phone calls, and hysterically desperate emails hounding us to vote, volunteer, and THIS IS THE FIFTEENTH TIME WE'VE WRITTEN YOU TO SEND US MONEY!

(No it isn't. I delete 100+ such requests every freaking day.)

In the final panel of this week's cartoon, Leo and Max reference the decision imposed by the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to spike editorials by their respective editorial boards endorsing Kamala Harris for President. Thus granting tacit equivalence to the candidacies of center-leftist Harris and fascist, racist, extremist grifter Donald Berzelius Trump, the decisions by Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have resulted in a deluge of subscriber cancelations in protest.

Soon-Shiong’s daughter claims that her father’s diktat comes in protest of the Biden administration’s supplying weaponry to Israel in spite of its on-going wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. Fair enough.

But the chances of a Harris administration reining in Mr. Netanyahu, while slim, are much greater than a second Trump administration doing so. The first Trump administration’s only action regarding the Palestinian problem was sending his son-in-law to sit down with Netanyahu and draw up the Palestinians’ terms of surrender.

For his part, Bezos had the Post publish his excuse for killing its endorsement editorial. As I understand it, he's just returning the Post a simpler, more innocent time before color television when it didn't make such endorsements. And pay no attention to the corporate interests behind the curtain.

He did not explain why this sudden policy change came a mere eleven days before Election Day — as opposed to eleven months ago — or even eleven weeks ago when the Post editorial board was writing editorials essentially calling upon President Biden to drop out of the race for the good of the nation.

(I apologize to those of you among the 200,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions this week for those three links to articles you cannot read. I still value its news department's reporting too much to cancel mine, not to mention the wit and wisdom of such as Ann Telnaes, Eugene Robinson, Alexandra Petri, and Dana Milbank. They can't all have their own substacks, can they?)

Anyway, to nobody's surprise, Trump is now telling his devoted minions, “The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and all these papers, they’re not endorsing anybody. You know what they’re really saying — because they only endorse Democrats — they’re saying this Democrat’s no good. They’re no good. And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it.”

So, Bezos, ya wanna try writing another op-ed about how when they came for democracy, you said nothing, because you weren't a Democrat?

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon should be the last syndicated one released before Election Day, although not the last one drawn before the polls open.

By the way, if you weren’t aware that an election is coming up, congratulations on successfully becoming a complete ignoramus. That must have required a great deal of effort and determination.

Please don’t vote next Tuesday.

Rapport du Livre ce Samedi

I can't attend a convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists without coming home with at least one book to report on here, so today's Graphical History Tour is devoted to Sketches from an Unquiet Country: Canadian Graphic Satire 1840-1940, edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney. 

It's a dense tome; a reader must occasionally cut one's way through scholarly language such as “critical tradition that bifurcates aesthetic forms” and “historiographic metafiction.” The collected essays deal with the century between the failed rebellions of the late 1830's and the start of World War II. All of them address the nature of satire itself; some of them emphasize historical events, and others societal mores. Artistic styles also come in for assessment.

Nancy Perron displaying the work of Albéric Bourgeois at ACC-AAEC Convention

Some of the content was covered during presentations to the ACC and AAEC members at the Musée McCord-Stewart earlier this month.

One of them, as I mentioned in this blog, was Christian Vachon's essay arguing that the character of Uncle Sam as we know him today originated in Canada.

"Uncle Sam Kicked Out" by John Henry Walker in Grinchuckle, Montréal, Sept. 23, 1869

The idea of Uncle Sam existed earlier than this John Henry Walker cartoon, but Walker dressed him in striped breeches and a star-spangled coat weeks before Thomas Nast first did the same. In earlier cartoons, there is little to distinguish Uncle Sam from his predecessor, Brother Jonathan, a wise-cracking Everyman appearing in cartoons from the earliest days of nationhood.

To bolster the case of Nast getting his inspiration for Uncle Sam from Walker, Vachon cites examples that Nast also borrowed Uncle Sam's Canadian counterpart, Johnny Canuck, from Walker's cartoons. Uncle Sam, however, has survived Johnny Canuck as a cartoon stock character. (Johnny Canuck's revival during World War II as an action comic hero and again as the mascot of Vancouver's professional hockey team is outside the purview of this book, but it does include some examples of 21st-Century Canadian politicians cast as Canuck in editorial cartoons.)

Another essay follows the development of Miss Canada, a daughter of Britannia and sister of Columbia. All three are based on Greek goddesses; only one of them was typically accompanied by a beaver. Nowadays, all three are attic has-beens, and only the beaver survives in cartoons.

Cartoons of Arthur G. Racey, whom we featured here two weeks ago, appear with Jalene Grove's essay on "The Pretty Girl," chronicling Canadian artists' resentment of U.S. ideas of what constitutes female beauty.

Selections from "The American Girl" by A.G. Racey in The Moon, Montréal, 1902

 I've edited out some of the racist examples that accompanied Racey's satires above of U.S. cover girls (offensive cartoons are not limited to the chapter on anti-Semitism). The essay charts the progression from turn-of-the-century grotesque caricature to later cartoonists whose sly, wink-and-a-nod parodies may require a second glance nowadays to catch their satirical aspects.

It is unfortunate that the chapter on women's suffrage in cartoons does not include any cartoons arguing in its favor. Perhaps Pierre Chemartin and Louis Pelletier couldn't find any (U.S. cartoonists were certainly slow to come around to the idea). 

"Ulysse and the Sirens" by Henry Mayerovich in New Frontier, Montréal, Sept. 1936

The unfeminine harridans of women's suffrage are followed by a chapter showcasing the anti-Semitic, pro-fascist cartoons of Le Goglu (The Bobolink). Le Goglu's editor is at center in the above cartoon from the next chapter, about the anti-fascist press in Canada. Those two essays really have to be read as a pair.

Most of the essays are translated into English from their original French. The cartoons include the work of both Anglophone and Francophone authors; translations are offered for many but not all of the latter. One of the exceptions, "Les Pouilleux de Québec: Skidou!" is excerpted on the book's cover. It's a parody in Le Goglu of someone else's cartoon about hobos; I would translate the title as "The Lousy Ones of Quebec: Skidoo!"

The text gives an English translation of the seemingly innocuous poem accompanying the first panel of the cartoon, showing a woodsman settler in colonial times. The three other quatrains are given only in French. The book's cover illustration comes from the fourth panel, the poem for which proposes kicking all the Jews out of Canada to Palestine, the land of flying lice ("le pays de poux-volants"). 

The penultimate essay, on Albéric Bourgeois and his alter ego, Baptiste Ladébauche, by Laurier LaCroix serves as a welcome palette cleanser after the bitter and salty fare from the fascists and socialists.

In the end, I can't fault the scholarship in this book in any way. There are a few passages where cartoons are cited in the text without including them as illustrations, which is regrettable; Al though I understand perfectly well that some of them may not have been available, at least in the high-resolution quality of the cartoons that are included. The cartoons printed in color in the middle of the book, while limited, come as a pleasant surprise.

The U.S. educational system barely acknowledges the existence of our neighbor to the north, so much of the history here is bound to be new to us readers "from across the line." If you're interested in appreciating more about Canada than its back bacon and poutine, this book is a fine place to start.