August on the Ones

To follow last Saturday's post of cartoons published on August 1, 1921, here are some of my cartoons from August 1991, 2001, and 2011.

I would have liked to start this post with cartoons from August of 1981, but it looks like I didn't draw any. That's probably not entirely true; my best friend and I used to have a game called "Kill the Character" in those days. One of us would draw a person, either a caricature of a real person, comic character, or just some random anybody, and then we would take turns adding bad things happening to him/her on the page.

But I didn't keep any of those sketches, so I'll have to start with a cartoon from August of 1991 instead.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., August 23, 1991

I've re-run this cartoon before linking the failed Soviet coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev with Milwaukee Police Union displeasure with Police Chief Philip Arreola. The first Latino-American to hold his position, his firing of the three officers who returned a wounded 14-year-old boy, Konerak Sinphantomphone, to Jeffrey Dahmer to finish killing him (and who failed to notice the rotting corpse in the bedroom) rankled the rank and file. Arreola did, however, last five more years as head of the department.

Thirty years later, Milwaukee is just now resolving the demotion of another Latino Chief of Police, Alfonso Morales. I've never quite understood what the Common Council's reasoning was for demoting him to Captain last August; apparently, the courts couldn't understand it, either, and ordered the City to reinstate him as Chief. After a week or so of pushing back the effective date of his reinstatement, Milwaukee agreed to pay him a $627,000 settlement and Morales agreed to move on.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2001

Jumping ahead ten years, I've re-run this cartoon before, too — if not in the current blog, then on my old GeoCities page. It upset some Michigan readers who came to the defense of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, an annual event hystorically limited to womyn-born-womyn.

I don't recall anyone objecting to my use of the word "transgendered" twice in the cartoon, however. That word is officially frowned upon, "transgender" being a noun or an adjective but not a verb.

Once upon a time, "lesbigay" was the term of art for the community; transgender people gradually got the "T" appended to LGBT. But even though more and more letters keep getting added onto our increasingly awkward acronym, the transgender community still finds itself unwelcome in some LGBT-IAA2SQQ+ circles. 

Part of the womyn-born-womyn's objection to having transgender persons at this particular festival is, as I understand it, that people there enjoy the freedom to wear as little clothing and as much body paint as they please. (So I've heard.) What they don't enjoy is having non-womyn-born-womyn genitalia anywhere on display.

I can respect that; yet I have to wonder whether the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival Board is comfortable with the Republican social injustice warriors taking their exclusionary policy cues from them.

August, 2011

Leaping ahead another ten years, we find gaffe-prone Minnesota Congresscritter Michele Bachmann exhorting attendees at a campaign rally to wish Elvis Pressley a happy birthday. It happened to be the anniversary of his death.

The King could not be reached for comment.

✍

Well, since I couldn't dig up anything from August of 1981, here's a cartoon from all the way back on the day before yesterday.