Title Town, 1962

From the Wisconsin State Journal on January 1, 1962, comes this snapshot of the NFL championship game in the pre-Superbowl era:

NFL's Payoff Richest Ever
Green Bay (UPI) -- The payoff for each player in Sunday's National Football League title game was the richest ever.
Each member of the winning Green Bay Packers received $5,195.44, and each member of the losing New York Giants got $3,339.99.
The total take was $1,013,792, with $300,000 trimmed from the top for the NFL Player Benefit Fund before the proceeds were divided.
A slice of $42,333.25 was set aside for the winner of the Detroit-Philadelphia second-place game in Miami next Saturday.

The second-place teams got a trip to Miami, while the first-place contenders slogged it out on New Year's Eve in Green Bay?

Q Toon: The Exorcist

There must be a tie-in to the new Anthony Hopkins movie here...

This week's cartoon was inspired by this article by Candace Chellew-Hodge at religiondispatches.org. Chellew-Hodge excerpts an interview of former Navy chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt on the David Pakman show in which he describes having "exorcised" the gay out of a lesbian sailor:

"I looked into her eyes and said 'You foul demon of lesbian homosexuality, come out of this woman in Jesus’ name!' She began to weep and she loved Jesus. She began reading her Bible, became the best evangelist in our church. She got baptized and started dating boys."

Klingenschmitt, who was discharged from the Navy for wearing his military uniform to partisan political events (that's a no-no), frets that the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" will mean that other chaplains will no longer be allowed to exorcise those foul demons of lesbian homosexuality from the service members in their care.

Who ya gonna call? Ghost busters?

This Week's Sneak Peek

A propos of nothing: The Packers are going to the Superbowl! The Packers are going to the Superbowl!

Q Toon: A Hero in Tucson

Following the accolades given 20-year-old gay Hispanic Daniel Hernandez, the intern who held Congressman Gabrielle Giffords and kept pressure on her wounds until the ambulances arrived, National Public Radio reminded us of another gay man who stepped in to foil an assassination attempt.

On September 22, 1975, Oliver "Billy" Sipple, a marine veteran of the Vietnam War, saw Sara Jane Moore raising a gun to shoot President Gerald Ford as he left the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Sipple lunged at Moore as she pulled the trigger, deflecting her aim and saving the President. (Another man was hit by the bullet, but survived.)

Harvey Milk thought that America deserved to know that the president had been saved by a gay man, so he contacted the San Francisco Chronicle; legendary columnist Herb Caen subsequently reported that angle of the story.

Sipple had not been out to his family, and his mother refused to speak to him afterward. He had other personal demons, so not all of the trouble that ensued was entirely because of this one incident, but it is fair to say that it played a significant role in ruining his life. He was found dead in his bed in February, 1989, at age 47.

Sipple's story, one hopes, shows how much progress has been made in this country since 1975. It is encouraging that this time, the person who is a hero whether he accepts it or not, is an out gay man (he is a member of Tucson’s city commission on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues) whose parents are justifiably proud of him. One hopes the best for him -- one even expects the best for him (did you see how eloquently he spoke before a packed auditorium, in front of the President of the United States and many other dignitaries, without notes?).

So here's this week's cartoon. Editorial cartoons aren't the ideal medium for expressing approval, but every so often, someone really deserves the praise.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I stand corrected: there was indeed an LGBT angle to the Tucson shooting story -- albeit one that doesn't particularly inspire a hilarious, witty, or even clever cartoon.

What GOProud Stands For, Part II

In yesterday's blog post, I made an offhand remark in an attempt to describe what sort of LGBT activists GOProud are:

GOProud advocates that gay and lesbian couples deserve tax cuts just like everybody else, and that gays and lesbians who want to serve in the military have a right to purchase glocks at gun shows.

Today, Pam's House Blend reports that GOProud has unveiled its legislative agenda for 2011. Aside from the explanation of their views of "Defending Our Constitution" and a couple other LGBT concerns which they try to piggyback onto major conservative issues, their agenda is nearly indistinguishable from that of the Republican Right's most virulent homophobes.

1 – TAX REFORM
– We support replacing the current tax code with the Fair Tax. Until then, we support death tax repeal; domestic partner tax equity; cuts in the capital gains and corporate tax rates to jump start our economy and create jobs; and a fairer, flatter and substantially simpler tax code.

2 – HEALTHCARE REFORM
– Free market healthcare reform. Allow for the purchase of insurance across state lines - expanding access to domestic partner benefits; emphasizing individual ownership of healthcare insurance – such a shift would prevent discriminatory practices by an employer or the government.

3 – SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM
– The only way to permanent solvency in the Social Security system is through the creation of inheritable personal savings accounts. Personal savings accounts would give gay and lesbian couples the same opportunity to leave their accounts to their spouse as their straight counterparts.

4 – RESPECTING THE PROPER ROLE OF THE JUDICIARY

5 – HOLDING THE LINE ON SPENDING
– Standing up for all tax payers against wasteful and unnecessary spending to protect future generations from the mounting federal debt.

6 – FIGHTING GLOBAL EXTREMISTS
– Standing strong against radical regimes that refuse to recognize the basic human rights of gays and lesbians, women and religious minorities.

7 – DEFENDING OUR CONSTITUTION
– Opposing any anti-gay federal marriage amendment. Marriage should be a question for the states. A federal constitutional amendment on marriage would be an unprecedented federal power grab from the states.

8 – ENCOURAGING COMMUNITY ENTREPRENEURSHIP
– Package of free market reforms to encourage and support small businesses and entrepreneurship. Such reforms would create jobs for all Americans – including gay Americans.

9 – REVITALIZING OUR COMMUNITIES
– A package of urban related reforms; expanding historic tax preservation credits; support for school choice.

10 – DEFENDING OUR COMMUNITY
– Protecting 2nd amendment rights.

Q Toon: Religious Conservatives Boycott CPAC

"Family Values" groups (defined as groups which actively seek to devalue my family) are boycotting next month's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the inclusion of GOProud, a group of gay ultraconservatives. While the boycotters are primarily from the religious right (e.g., Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, American Family Association, Liberty Council), they also include some not expressly religious groups, such as the Media Resource Center and the Center for Military Readiness.

GOProud is a group created because the Log Cabin Republicans were insufficiently ideologically pure (as evidenced by their endorsement of then-maverick John McCain over George W. Bush in 2000). GOProud advocates that gay and lesbian couples deserve tax cuts just like everybody else, and that gays and lesbians who want to serve in the military have a right to purchase glocks at gun shows.

Having thus secured their position as the conservative movement's house faggots, the controversy now is over allowing them to sit at the dinner table.

I didn't label all my metaphors in the first panel of this cartoon, so I hope I haven't confused everybody by holding off identification of the runaway until panel 2, and "home" until panel 4.

Stretching things a bit?

Some people think it's stretching things too far to link right-wing talk of "Second Amendment remedies" and "Don't retreat, reload" and "It's time to water the tree of liberty" with some mentally unstable guy attempting to assassinate a Democratic Congresswoman and everyone in her vicinity.

Some of those same people are perfectly willing to buy into the links this woman is selling:

This Week's Sneak Peek

As this week's sneak peek suggests, I did not draw a cartoon about the shootings in Arizona on Saturday.

As tempting as it was to leap to the conclusion that incessant right-wing talk about "targeting" Democrats, "locking and loading," and "Second Amendment remedies" -- and protesters pointedly carrying guns to political events -- led to this tragedy as inevitably as "jihad," "fatwas" and "Death to [fill in the blank]" led to other affronts to civilization, it appears for the moment that the gunman may be mentally ill. Not that all the violent, paranoid ranting of tea partisans couldn't have helped feed the gunman's delusions, but you can't really blame Robert DeNiro for the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan because he made a film that fed into John Hinckley's psychosis.

At any rate, my Q Syndicate cartoons are supposed to focus on LGBT issues. So far, the only LGBT angle I've seen on this story has been a statement by Utah's brand new Tea Party Senator, Mike Lee, that has been interpreted to mean that somehow gay marriage made this guy shoot 19 people:

"I don’t know and I don’t think anyone pretends to have the answer to that, but some have pointed to the breakdown in the family structure, many people who engage in these activities come from families that have broken down in one form or another."

Does the phrase "the breakdown in the family structure" really mean "same-sex marriage" in rightwingese? It hardly seems enough to hang a cartoon on, especially when we know less about the killer's family than we do about the alleged killer himself.

Until the motives and motivations of the gunman become clearer, let's all agree that none of us can read his mind or diagnose the source of his paranoia from a distance. But let's take it easy with the shoot from the lip discourse.

And will you Second Amendment purists ever concede that more guns in more hands do not make anybody safer?

R.C. Bowman's Presidents

Perhaps I should have saved these for Presidents' Day, but here are three cartoons from Rowland Claude Bowman's book of his editorial cartoons from 1900 for the Minneapolis Tribune. I start with a cartoon of former president Grover Cleveland:

Grover: "Dad-rat-it, I've hooked a bullhead."
The fish is labeled "Gold Democrat Presidential Nomination 1900."

In addition to being the only U.S. President to serve two non-consecutive terms (and here, apparently, there were people who thought he should serve three of them), Cleveland holds the distinction of being the only Democratic president between James Buchanan (1857-1861) and Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921).

As such, he also holds the distinction of being the only Democratic U.S. president to sport facial hair while in office.

I've already blogged these next two cartoons. The book I have was published during the term of William McKinley, so it's kind of surprising that there aren't several cartoons of him:

Rah! Rah! Mac-Kin-Lee! Roosevelt! Roosevelt! G.O.P.!

The book contains more cartoons which include future president Teddy Roosevelt than there are of the incumbent:

They get real mad at Teddy for getting "solid" with the Dakota girls.

I was interested to find that while Google Books does not have the book I do, they do have The Minneapolis Cartoon Book for 1902: Being a Collection of Over 100 Cartoons by R.C. Bowman. Given that Bowman died in 1903, theirs is probably the last Bowman book.

Since Google has posted the entire book on line, I won't copy it here, but I do find a couple things of interest about the 1902 book, which covers the year 1901.

President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, but there is no cartoon about it in the book.* According to a review in Public Opinion (which I'll reference below), Bowman's cartoons appeared in the Minneapolis Tribune almost daily, so one imagines that he must have drawn Uncle Sam crying, or Uncle Sam solemnly resting a hand on Teddy Roosevelt's shoulder, or some other cartoon on the subject. Bowman and his editors must have decided that the cartoon wasn't worth including in the annual round-up. These days, they would have submitted it for a Pulitzer.

Curiously, however, there is this cartoon on page 82. If Bowman and his editors perhaps thought it might be indelicate to include a cartoon about the assassination of President McKinley, why did they include this cartoon of a self-satisfied Uncle Sam on his way to the exposition at which McKinley would be shot?

The other remarkable thing is that the 1902 book contains only two cartoons about Teddy Roosevelt. I almost didn't recognize him the one on page 37, but in the other, on page 72, the cartoon is more of a portrait than a caricature.

While trying to find the 1902 book a second time, I ran across this Bowman cartoon of Grover Cleveland on page 5 of Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Survey of the Press Throughout the World on All Important Current Topics; Volume XXX, January 1901 - June 1901 (Public Opinion, Waverly Place, NY).



Cleveland advises the Democracy to return to first principles.

This cartoon of Grover Cleveland is not in R.C. Bowman's books; but Volume XXX of Public Opinion includes (page 120) a glowing review of his cartoons and those of Minneapolis Journal cartoonist Charles L. "Bart" Bartholomew, whose cartoons also were published in book form that year.

"Readers of Public Opinion must already be aware that we place a high value upon the work of Mr. Bowman of the Minneapolis Tribune and "Bart" (Charles L. Bartholomew) of the Minneapolis Journal. With the cartoons of the press of the whole United States at our disposal, we find week after week that topics of the times are more effectively illustrated by these two men than by any others."

In the review, we find that Bowman's book cost 25 cents. Bartholomew's was only 5 cents and was published in color.


* P.S.: Looking through the book once more, I note that there is a cartoon about the execution of McKinley's assassin, anarchist Leon Czolgosz, on page 94. McKinley was shot on September 6 and died a week later; Czologosz was convicted of the assassination on September 24 and electrocuted at Auburn Prison on October 29.

Q Toon: To Bawdily Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

When I drew this cartoon, I thought that I would have to link here to the obscure news story about a Navy Captain (at the time, executive officer) who made and showed a bunch of puerile films to the sailors under his charge. As it turns out, the story blew up to be a major, if ephemeral, news event, and the Navy has quickly yanked Captain Owen P. Honors, Jr., from command of the USS Enterprise.

I'm sure that most of the crew of the USS Enterprise found XO Honors's films funny and a relief from shipboard routine. For that matter, editing himself in as multiple characters appearing simultaneously was indeed cleverly done. So, while Capt. Honors may not have much of a future as an officer in the U.S. Navy, or as a Hollywood filmmaker, perhaps we can look forward to seeing his videos on future seasons of Saturday Night Live.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Here's the subject of my first cartoon of 2011. Lights, camera, action!