What, another Ric Grenell cartoon? Oh, well — Scott Bessent will have to wait for some other time.
So I was mindful of being inclusive when creating the host in this week's cartoon. She's completely made up, by the way; any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
I suppose I could have drawn Eugene Daniels or Jonathan Capehart, but there is no way that Grenell would be caught dead on MS NOW.
This week's Graphical History Tour ventures once again into the Bergetoon vaults to haul up the stuff I was drawing about forty, thirty, twenty, and ten Mays ago.
1986
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| in Ranger, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, May 1, 1986 |
Today, Donald Joffrey Trump complains that our NATO allies are not stepping up to help him in his unilateral war excursion in Iran. Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan was similarly disappointed that only Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain lent any support to "Operation Eldorado Canyon," air attacks on purported terrorist centers in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya.
The two military operations have some elements in common, Libyan involvement in significant terrorist attacks chief among them. Yet several distinctions must be made. Reagan consulted Congress before initiating this military action. The administration also kept our European allies up to date. Operation Eldorado Canyon was launched in express retaliation for a Libyan-sponsored bombing of a Berlin nightclub popular with U.S. servicemen (two were killed in the bombing and 79 injured).
And whatever other faults he had, at least Reagan didn't start bickering with the Pope.
1996
The university newspapers for which I drew way back in the 20th Century always suspended publication in May for finals and graduation, so my cartoons in those months were mostly on local or special interest topics.
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| in Journal Times, Racine Wis., May 3, 1996 |
The NIMBYism at the heart of this one is probably fairly universal, however.
Lutheran Social Services (LSS) provides housing, counseling, and child care services to underserved and at-risk communities. Its bid purchase a house on a semi-rural road in Mount Pleasant as an eight-bed halfway house for male parolees raised instant objections from neighbors.
One neighbor complained that the parolees would get to "live in a $170,000 home because they committed a crime." Another told the Journal Times, "If it's not safe for these men to go home, it's not safe for them to be in my neighborhood. ... Some little child is going to be molested. Some woman is going to get raped. Someone is going to get beat up. Someone's house is going to get broken into."
LSS countered, "We will know exactly where every resident is every moment of every day." Their residents were to be carefully screened, and offered alcohol and drug abuse treatment, occupational and educational opportunities, and counseling.
But at a packed community meeting, LSS yielded to pressure from residents and state legislators, and announced that it would look for another site elsewhere.
No, it didn't end up being at the local shopping mall.
But these days, our local mall would welcome just about any tenant at all.
2006
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| May, 2006 |
To get really, really parochial, this is a cartoon I was asked to draw for the 25-year reunion of my college graduating class. It must have gone astray when I sent it in (perhaps because recipients of my e-mails see my husband's name as the sender, and we've both kept our maiden names). In any event, it didn't make it into the evening program.
It was a challenge trying to winnow down the collective experience of our four years; I was by not the sort of undergrad who participated in every major occasion, and lived off campus one year. The snippets that I focused on included:
The hardest part of the drawing? Definitely the grooves of the record album.
2016
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| for Q Syndicate, May 2016 |
Here's a cartoon that brings together local, national, and special interest topics.
My hometown congressional district was represented by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) ten years ago. In May of 2016, he employed the power of his gavel to prevent passage of a component of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill proposed time and time again to afford workplace protections to LGBTQ+ employees.
In this case, it was an amendment by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) to a Defense Department bill; his amendment would have mandated that defense contractors not discriminate against LGBTQ+ employees and applicants. With time expired for House members to cast their votes, Maloney's amendment appeared to have passed by a vote of 219 to 206.
But Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) held the vote open so that Republican party whips could pressure enough of their members to switch their votes to defeat the amendment. As soon as seven Republicans had changed their votes from Aye to Nay, the gavel finally came down.
Maloney's amendment was thus defeated by a single vote, and the defense contracts of antigay wedding cake bakers and florists were saved.
Sort of. An Obama administration executive order was already in place protecting LGBTQ+ defense contractor employees.
Until, of course, the Electoral College awarded the presidency to one Donald Bifftannen Trump four years later.
ENDA is likely to come up presently in another Graphical History Tour, so please keep it in mind.
Congressional Republicans have proposed five anti-LGBTQ+ riders to the National Security and Department of State Appropriations Act, a must-pass funding bill for the State Department.
The riders range from restricting Pride flags in federal buildings to banning transgender healthcare; all attack the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans and have nothing whatsoever to do with funding the State Department or national security.
You might be thinking, wait, haven't Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ executive orders already accomplished all of the crap in those riders? Yes, exactly.
But the point of Congress passing these discriminatory and homophobic provisions into law would be to prevent some future, more enlightened administration from signing an executive order to return things to pre-Trump conditions. It would take another act of Congress to undo this act of Congress.
So I came up with this literal interpretation of the figurative term "riders." Since primatologists have recently discovered that homosexual behaviors are not exclusive to humans and bonobos, I might have tried to depict the Republican riders as some creature more associated with LGBTQ+ophobia instead.
But having the bicyclist carrying five GOP elephants would have been a difficult draw.
Besides, pachyderms aren't all that straight and narrow, either.
This week's Graphical History Tour celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first flights over the North Pole by people who weren't puffins.
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| "Over the Top" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, May 11, 1926 |
U.S. newspapers excitedly reported that Admiral Richard E. Byrd became the first explorer to fly over the North Pole on May 9, 1926. Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett announced that they had flown their tri-motor monoplane, the Josephine Ford (named after Edsel Ford's daughter) from Spitsbergen, Norway, circling the pole in a nearly 16-hour flight.
According to Byrd's account written for the New York Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"I took my calculations and found that we were at the Pole. We reached it at 9:04 Greenwich time, just about the hour we had hoped to get there. Bennett and I shook hands simply, and went back to the cabin, stood at attention and saluted for Admiral Peary. The Navy had reached the pole again, the blessed old Navy. I did not drop an American flag. Peary had done that.
"The ice and snow were similar to that which Peary had described, but the ice was not the same as in the polar sea. There it is in constant motion. It was slightly rougher here than it had been when I first described it, but criss crossed in the same way.
"We flew several miles further, circled and then took some still and motion pictures. As we flew there at the top of the world, circumnavigating it in a few minutes' of flight, I regretted that we had not found land, and that our leaky oil tank would prevent our returning by way of Cape Morris-Jessup."
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| "The Eagle Over the Pole" by Wm. A. Rogers in Washington Post, May 11, 1926 |
Byrd was an instant American Hero in the press, and editorial cartoonists rushed to crank out jingoistic cartoons, most of them very similar to each other.
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| "Our Private Flag Pole" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, May 11, 1926 |
Aside from the flags and eagles, a commonality that strikes me in these cartoons is that nearly all of them show North Pole as a huge inverted icicle, rather than the barber pole that I think of as cartoon cliché. This is only a guess, but the striped pole with the ball on top must have been popularized later.
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| "The First Over the Top" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1926 |
John McCutcheon celebrated the news of Byrd's flight as a relief from all the dismal news he was typically faced with — although by bringing up political scandals, wars in Morocco and Syria, labor strife in London, a riot in Paris, and a rum-running ring in New York, McCutcheon was being the wet blanket at the party himself.
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| "The Hurdle Race" by Dean O'Dell in Dayton Daily News, May 13, 1926 |
Meanwhile, Norwegian aviator Roald Amundsen was also heading for the North Pole in a semi-rigid airship christened the Norge. The Italian-made airship was delayed by weather on each leg of its journey from Rome, but eventually headed north from Vadsø, Norway on May 11 with a crew of 18 men and one dog.
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| "Fremdenverkehr" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, May 30, 1926 |
The Norge crossed the North Pole at 1:25 a.m. GMT on May 12, dropping U.S., Norwegian, and Italian flags onto the ice. In Amundsen's account published by the New York Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"[W]e went down to a low height, slowed the engines, and [engineer/financier Lincoln] Ellsworth, [pilot Umberto] Nobile and myself dipped our countries' flags. We mounted banners on steel-pointed rods. These rods we steered vertically into the ice as we dropped them, and they remained standing. The crew took their caps off during the ceremony, and it was a beautiful sight to see the flags standing against the glittering snow."
I have colorized the flags in Arthur Johnson's cover cartoon; the copy scanned by the University of Heidelberg appears to have faded considerably. His version of the Norwegian flag somewhat resembles the obsolete Norway-Sweden union flag, except that the faded blue broken bar that I have darkened ought to be yellow, and a black cross in that quadrant of the flag is missing altogether.
The airship, its propellers damaged by shards of ice during its flight, suffered further damage as it landed at Teller, Alaska. It was dismantled there, short of its announced goal of Nome, and shipped back to Italy; it was never repaired.
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| "Die 'Norge' Zurück" by Wilhelm Schulz in Simplicissimus, Munich, June 7, 1926 |
Wilhelm Schulz lampoons Italy's involvement in the flight of the Norge, and perhaps the fate of the airplane itself, depicting an expedition member presenting Benito Mussolini with a helmetful of melted ice.
Italian hubris over its part in the journey was a valid target for satire. Somewhat contrary to his newspaper account, Amundsen was peeved that the Italian flag dropped at the pole by Nobile was larger than the Norwegian and American flags, and that Nobile continued to drop so many other flags that Amundsen later complained of Nobile turning the Norge "a circus wagon of the skies." Mussolini sent Nobile on a speaking tour of the United States to tout the genius of Italian engineering, putting Amundsen's nose further out of joint.
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| "Amundsen am Nordpol" by Oskar Garvens in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, May 30, 1926 |
In German cartoons, at any rate, Amundsen was the star of the show. Berlin cartoonist Garvens gave us something other than an inverted icicle at the north pole: some sort of pepper-, nut-, or coffee-grinder.
As for the caption, it must be a play on the name of Admiral Byrd. My best, albeit wild guess is that un-byrdlich might be a pun on unberührt, untouched; while that might explain the open tin and the eaten sardines, that cactus remains a mystery.
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| "Another of the Great Silent Places Opens to the Tourist" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, May 11, 1926 |
"Ding" Darling's cartoon makes a similar point for us English-speaking readers. The aviators in the cartoon have left behind not just empty sardine tins, but also empty Uneeda Biscuit boxes, a spent campfire, and graffiti on the pole itself, while planning to "bring the folks up here some day for a picnic."
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| "Men Must Be Men to Wrestle with Me" by Ernest R. McTaggart in Vancouver Daily Province, British Columbia, May 15, 1926 |
I am duty-bound to point out that the general consensus since Admiral Byrd's death in 1957 is that he could not possibly have flown his trimotor monoplane, with its maximum speed of 85 mph, from Spitsbergen to the North Pole and back in sixteen hours.
There is evidence that his flight records were erased and modified. Yet even though doubts of Byrd's claims were raised not long after he landed, he was still awarded the National Medal of Honor and celebrated with a New York ticker tape parade.
This is on top of adding his scraggly signature to paper currency, minting gold coins bearing his likeness, tacking his name above John F. Kennedy's at the Kennedy Center, proposing a fleet of so-called Trump class battleships, and unfurling ginormous banners of his puss (when you're a star they let you do that) outside every government building in D.C.
Not to mention the Arc de Trump and that goddamn Gaudy Ballroom, intended as permanent monuments to the nation's shame for having elected such a preening peacock, not once, but twice.
Even Hitler, Mussolini, and Kim Jong Un never put their faces on German, Italian, or North Korean passports.
I'm so glad I renewed my passport last year.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was a guest on Stephen Colbert's show recently — it seems that there is a different Democratic politician on every night trying to get their fare-thee-wells in before CBS pulls Colbert's plug — and was asked about the possibility of his running for president in 2028.
It's too early for Democrats to declare candidacies for president, and Colbert acknowledged as much in his question, so Buttigieg naturally did not throw his metaphorical hat in the proverbial ring on late-night television. I nevertheless see a lot of his posts on my social media feed, even more than those of Gavin Newsom.
That's the fault of Al Gorithm, I suppose. Al and I have never met, but he seems to think he knows a lot about me.
Anyway, Mr. Buttigieg tells us that his main priority these days is getting Democrats elected to office around the country. That's the sort of thing a former Secretary of Transportation and small-city mayor has to do in order to have elected Democrats return one's calls after one launches a presidential campaign.
There isn’t much Buttigieg can do in the present Gerrymandering War, but he has been lending his star power to various congressional candidates. His strategy for helping get Democrats elected also appears to involve a good amount of showing up on TV.
He certainly has the skills to hold his own against the Republican mouthpieces on Fox Noise. Perhaps he should give Chuck Schumer some lessons.
Well, I hope you've enjoyed this little respite from the constant Trump Trump Trump of Invasive, Pervasive, Inescapable, Omnitrumpified Trumpitude.
If not, please tune in again tomorrow.
