Waiving the Flag

This week's cartoon isn't about any particular Condo Owners' Association out there; I'm mixing together a couple items which may or may not have come into conflict somewhere.

It seems as if there is some Condo or Home Owners' Association every year that objects to a resident hoisting a rainbow flag; there was just such a story in my hometown this past spring. Told that they couldn't fly the rainbow flag that they had flown for the past five Pride Months, Memo Fachino and Lance Meir lit rainbow floodlights instead.

Nothing in the HOA rules against it.

Meanwhile, although some of you securely ensconced in our larger urban settlements may never have seen this, there are some areas in this country where you can see a lot of flagpoles sporting Trump 2020 flags — even now. My better half and I didn't have to drive through Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia to see them (which we just did a couple weeks ago); we can drive through any rural area in any direction from home to find them.

Not only are there no Biden 2020 flags waving in the breeze these days, I don't recall ever seeing one anywhere last year. Lawn signs, yes, but not flags. And the Biden lawn signs were put away before the snow fell last year. Even at that one house I pass every day on my way to work, where someone was keeping a Bernie for President sign out front ever since the 2016 Wisconsin primary, the Bro has finally taken it down.

But those Trump flags keep flapping in the breeze. Those Trump cultists worship a tremendously needy god. He desperately craves their adoration and validation. And they are happy to give it to him.

Which is why there's going to be a recount in Texas. Just to give him a Win.

The Distracted Boyfriend Meme

Cartoonist Kevin Huizenga recently credited the "distracted boyfriend" meme — you know the one: a young man turns around to admire a shapely young woman in the foreground who has just walked past him and his none-too-pleased girlfriend — to Frank King, who included just such a situation in his "The Rectangle" feature in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, April 2, 1916.

Here's another, from 1921, by St. Joseph News-Press editorial cartoonist William Hanny:

"You Just Can't Help It, That's All" by William Hanny in St. Joseph (MO) News Press, Oct. 7, 1921

Now, granted, this cartoon comes five years after King's; but it's the sole focus of the cartoon, whereas King's distracted boyfriend is just one vignette among many. King drew a bird's-eye view of an entire neighborhood, taking up the top half of a page of a broadsheet newspaper, back when broadsheets were printed on broad sheets.

Furthermore, as the caption for Hanny's cartoon makes clear, distracted boyfriends were familiar and relatable enough. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't some even older versions of this gag to be found. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon is a four-panel oeuvre, which involved figuring out how to draw that fellow in the far right of this panel in profile. In other panels, he is shown from the front.

The pencil rough looked okay to me, but he looked utterly wrong when I inked him; so I had to white him out completely and draw him over again. It is nearly impossible to erase pencil from white-out without pulling up some of the white-out or staining it with the graphite off the eraser. So I re-inked him without pencil, trying to copy the best drawing from my sketchbook.

It would have been easier if I had just drawn everybody wearing masks.

Back in the U.S.S.R.

I was looking through the cartoons I drew 30 Septembers ago to see if there were any that were worth a Saturday History Tour for today. There was so much in the news just then: 

• the U.S. Senate was considering Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court; 
• the George H.W. Bush administration continued granting China "most favored nation" trading status in spite of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June; 
• the possibility arose that our war with Iraq might not be over after all; 
• and the U.S.S.R. was dealing with the aftermath of the attempted coup in August by Soviet hardliners against President Mikhail Gorbachev.

But I've already re-posted in This Humble Blog just about every cartoon I drew that month — in most cases, just five years ago. It hardly seems right to dredge them up again, unless I can find something new to say about any of them.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee WI, Sept. 9, 1991

 

This 30-year anniversary, however, the attempted coup in the Soviet Union can be considered in light of the attempted coup here in the States last January 6.

Perestroika and glasnost notwithstanding, the U.S.S.R. was still a single-party dictatorship — albeit only for the next few months — so President Gorbachev (and more to the point, Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Soviet Federalist Socialist Republic) was still able quickly to purge the politburo of coup supporters. We're not talking about a Stalinesque purge here, but the likes of Josh Hawley or Lauren Boebert would certainly not have continued in office.

And nobody, by the way, mistook the coup conspirators for a bunch of tourists.

By the time I drew my cartoon, Gorbachev had resigned from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. had suspended all party activities.

But by the end of the decade, Yeltsin handed power over to a former KGB agent named Vladimir Putin, who has since then adopted a style and ironfistedness of power of which the 1991 coup plotters would certainly have approved.

You might want to keep that in mind if you thought that January 6 will remain a thing of the past.

Q Toon: Cot in the Act

Hong Kong was selected in 2017 as the host city for next year's Gay Games, the LGBTQ+ version of the Olympics complete with all the hoopla of opening ceremonies and at least three dozen sporting competitions. Founded in 1982 as the Gay Olympics (but immediately forced to change its name by the IOC), the Gay Games have been held every four years since, featuring LGBTQ+ athletes from around the world — including from countries where it would be dangerous for them to be out.

This will be the first time the Gay Games will have been held in Asia, but there are rumblings that the Games — and the athletes — may not be officially welcome.

Now, attacks on the Gay Games from local lawmakers aligned with Beijing are revealing bigotry in the financial hub, where space for promoting ideas such as equality and diversity has shrunk under China’s tightening control. Amid a crackdown enabled by a national security law introduced last year, the Hong Kong activists who would typically push back against such attacks are either behind bars or in exile.

Leading the crusade is Junius Ho, a pro-Beijing lawmaker who has called the Gay Games “disgraceful” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” that could violate the security law. Another lawmaker, Priscilla Leung, said activists could use the sports and cultural event to promote political causes. Peter Shiu, a member of a center-right party, said Hong Kong can “tolerate” but not promote homosexuality. ...

Attacks on the event started in June during a legislative session, when Ho said the Games would yield “dirty money.” He upped the ante last week when he cited Article 23 of China’s national security law, which states that the country should “guard against the impact of harmful culture.” Previously, Ho, who did not respond to requests for comment, had called a TV show that featured homosexual relationships “marijuana coated in sugar.” 

This comes at the same time that Chinese officials have launched a campaign against "sissy culture," trying to convince Chinese youth that heretofore popular "boy bands" are a dangerously androgynous threat to the future of godlessness, ginseng, and moo goo gai pan. Having survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beijing has no intention of succumbing to BTS.

In July, the Chinese messaging app WeChat blocked accounts of LGBT student clubs and university organizations in China. A month later, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, banned a male video blogger after receiving complaints about his “feminine” behavior. A leaked document reported by SupChina, a New York-based news outlet that focuses on China, separately revealed that Shanghai University has been collecting names of LGBT students for an unclear purpose.

Why do I suspect that it's not for assembling Shanghai U's Queer Ping Pong League?

Major Make-over

I've just returned from a week away from home visiting family, so the last several posts here were written in the weeks before I left, and set to publish automatically in my absence.

That includes Monday's "Sneak Peek" in which I made reference to the single-panel newspaper comic "Our Boarding House with Major Hoople." Unbeknownst to me, last weekend happened to be the centennial of the very first publication of "Our Boarding House." (Major Hoople didn't make his appearance in the panel, originated by Gene Ahern, until January, 1922.)

D.D. Degg's post marking the centennial includes several examples of the comic; I had forgotten that there was a Sunday color comic version. I think I had been surprised to see it somewhere during a family vacation out west in 1973.

Most of the characters are easily recognizable even as the comic was passed down from Gene Ahern through a series of younger artists. But I got to wondering how Ahern — or his successors — accomplished the Major's transition from his original appearance...

"Our Boarding House" by Gene Ahern, ca. 1922

...to the Major I used to know, whose mouth always appeared to be sewn shut.

"Our Boarding House" by Jim Branagen & Tom McCormick, February 5, 1971

Was it sudden, when Hearst hired Ahern away in 1936, or was it more gradual?

This Week's Sneak Peek

This is going to be another one of those cartoons which reminds me of "Our Boarding House with Major Hoople."

"Our Boarding House..." by Bill Freyse & Tom McCormick, March 11, 1969

No action, but plenty of dialogue.

Saturday Sports Report

I was preparing this review of century-old cartoons a few weeks ago, only to shelve it when Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg. I figured that such a momentous event was of more immediate import; these 100-year-old cartoons could stand to wait a few weeks longer.

"The Pep and Vigor of Their Grandparents" by Gaar Williams in Indianapolis News, ca. Aug./Sept. 1921

When I had originally planned to publish this post, the U.S. Open was about to start, which is a big thing in our house. I had always assumed that tennis had remained a genteel sport until, oh, I don't know, John McEnroe showed up; but Gaar Williams here shows that genteelity on the court went out of fashion along with the bustle. I can't tell, however, whether the players in the lower panel had yet adopted the habit of loudly grunting, groaning, and shrieking with every shot.

"What We May Come to..." by Herbert S. Thomas in London Opinion, by Sept. 1921

Shrieking aside, if Bert Thomas's cartoon from London Opinion is to be believed, Messrs. MacEnroe, Connors, Borg, et al. had some catching up to do before they achieved the athleticism of their female forebears. 

"Man, the Master" by Alfred G. "Zere" Ablitzere in New York Post, September 12, 1921

Turning to other popular summertime sports (we do still have a couple more days of summer, don't we?), there's baseball — of that storied American trilogy with motherhood and apple pie.

"Dad Rushes Out..." by Fontaine Fox in Providence Journal, Aug./Sept., 1921

Meanwhile, the grown-up Boys of Summer were closing in on the World Series; New York's Giants and Yankees were in hot pursuit, respectively, of the American League Pittsburgh Pirates and National League Cleveland Indians.

"The Baseball Stage" by Thornton Fisher in New York Evening World, August 30, 1921

Thornton Fisher's complaint about the National League centered on a number of rules changes, described by Evening World sports reporter Robert Boyd thusly:

"Rules makers introducing drastic measures, the livelier ball and reducing the size of the parks to increase the revenue of the club by avaricious magnates, has changed the game. Where close games and a touch of the dramatic atmosphere once prevailed, wild batting orgies now predominate. Loose fielding, pitching that once would have turned the rawest 'busher' to shame, has now robbed the great national institution of much of its former grandeur."

"In the Sportlight" by Daniel "Bud" Counihan in New York Evening World, September 30, 1921

A month later, the New York ball clubs were riding high, having just drubbed the Indians and the Philadelphia Athletix.

Sports page cartoonist Bud Counihan would later go on to pen the comic strip version of Betty Boop. (An earlier strip of his, "The Big Little Family" showed up in this here blog back in May.) 

"Outdoor Sports" by Thomas A. "Tad" Dorgan in New York Journal, ca. Sept. 16, 1921

And finally, let's check out the action on the links, where we find "Tad" Dorgan, taking his New York Journal comic panel "Indoor Sports" outside from its usual office milieu.

Whether you know it or not, you are familiar with several phrases Dorgan contributed to American slang as cartoonist and as a sports reporter: he is responsible for dumbbell (meaning idiot), cat's pajamas/whiskers, for crying out loud, cheaters (meaning eyeglasses), hard-boiled (meaning tough and unsentimental), 23 skiddoo, dumb Dora, and —earworm alert!— "Yes, we have no bananas."

"He Got Madder and Madder..." by A.B. Frost in Life, September 29, 1921

Perhaps we had best leave these duffers alone. I'd hate to see how this guy handles a sand trap.

Q Toon: Usurp, Isurp, WeAllsurp

Republican state governors and legislators who very recently were busy passing mandates against transgender students using school lavatories have lately become convinced that mandates are bad things.

That is, as long as those mandates are protecting students from a real, unimagined threat that has actually killed 4.5 million people worldwide in less than two years.

For some unfathomable reason, they insist that requiring measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 and its variants is nothing at all like previously existing requirements to protect students from measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio, and the like.

It is not as if this were a novel question of whether the general welfare is outweighed by an individual's right to be Typhoid Mary. The Supreme Court ruled in 1905 (Jacobson v. Massachusetts) that local boards of health could be authorized to mandate vaccination of the general population against smallpox. That ruling left open the possibility of exempting children from the mandate; but seventeen years later, the Court (Zucht v. King) let stand a school board edict — in Texas, no less — barring unvaccinated kids from classrooms.

It remains to be seen whether the current right-wing Court will overturn these long-established cases — nothing is certain under its present partisan domination. What is inevitable is that Big Government Republicans like Governors Abbott and DeSantis will do everything within and beyond their power to deny local school boards the ability to protect the staff and students in their charge.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Ya know, sometimes the context of a cartoon necessitates having the characters in it wear masks nowadays, and I have to say it's no fun drawing that. I had penciled in what the characters would look like, and liked the expressions on their faces, and then had to cover those expressions up.

Damn you, coronavirus. 

Kill Bill, Part 2

"A Great Nation Prostrate" by Canfield in Pittsburg [sic] Press, September 14, 1901

You were probably expecting something commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 today; but I haven't drawn any new cartoons about it since the last time I marked its anniversary. And besides, I started commemorating the 120th anniversary of the assassination of President William McKinley last Saturday, and I wasn't finished yet.

So anyway, doctors were able to remove one of the two bullets in the president's body, and within a week after the shooting, they were optimistic for his recovery. They also felt that rummaging around for the second bullet was riskier than leaving it in. But on September 14, 1901, President McKinley succumbed to infection around that second bullet.

"William McKinley" by Wm. C. Rogers in Harper's Weekly, September 21, 1901

By chance, a new X-ray machine had been on display at the Pan-American Exposition where McKinley was shot, and would have been able to show the president's doctors where the bullet was. But the opportunity, and the president, were lost to history.

"In This Day of Mourning..." by Carter Simons in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 14, 1901 

There were a lot of mourning Columbia cartoons, rather than the weeping Uncle Sams that would flood editorial pages 100 years later. Columbia predated Uncle Sam as the personification of the U.S. by over 100 years; she flourished as a cartoon character in the 18th and 19th Centuries. But by World War II, if a cartoonist wanted to depict the U.S. as a woman, he or she was more likely to draw the Statue of Liberty.

I've come across a couple of cartoons that are more interesting than all those mourning Columbias:

Felix Mahony in Washington (DC) Evening Star, September 14, 1901

Felix Mahony's sketchbook illustration highlights the story of James "Big Ben" Parker, a Black American in the presidential receiving line immediately behind the assassin Czolgosz. According to a Secret Service agent present, "Parker struck the assassin in the neck with one hand and with the other reached for the revolver which had been discharged through the handkerchief and the shots had set fire to the linen. While on the floor Czolgosz again tried to discharge the revolver but before he got to the president the Negro knocked it from his hand."

There is a poem by Lena Doolin Mason extolling Parker's deeds that day.

"It Is God's Way" by Canfield in Pittsburg Press, September 18, 1901

The sangfroid of Canfield's cartoon of Father Pitt, drawn as the train carrying McKinley's body passed through Pittsburgh, would probably get any cartoonist into a heap of trouble today. The president is dead? Oh, well. Que será será.

But I can see certain right-wing cartoonists who might to get away with it these days.

"What, Wouldst Thou Have a Serpent Sting Thee Twice" by Wm. Walker in Life, September 26, 1901

Aside from grief-stricken Lady Columbias, there was another theme that ran through a lot of editorial cartoons after Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley.

"Now, Uncle, Come Down Hard" by Canfield in Pittsburg Press, September 8, 1901

It's as if some memo came down from Cartoon Headquarters telling the nation's scribblers that everyone had to represent anarchists and anarchism as snakes. This presented Pittsburgh's Canfield with the dilemma of how to depict a snake holding a gun and a bomb.

He evidently decided, what the hell, I'll draw it with ears, too.

Felix Mahony in Washington (DC) Evening Star, September 9, 1901

Felix Mahony was content that a snake is threatening enough without adding limbs and ears. But you don't want to try to kill a snake by stomping on its middle.

"While I'm About It..." by Gennette in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 15, 1901

Gennette adds in a few more vipers for Uncle Sam to bludgeon, notably including "lynchings" and "burnings at the stake." The cartoon is more aspirational on Gennette's part than factual on Uncle Sam's part; the ensuing crackdown on anarchists was not accompanied by much civil rights legislation. As President Theodore Roosevelt put it, "When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance."

"No Room on This Ship" by Wm. A. Rogers in Harper's Weekly, October 5, 1901

Czolgosz was quickly brought to trial, and readily admitted murdering the President. He told authorities that he had been inspired by the speeches of anarchist Emma Goldman; but as it turns out, he had never been able to ingratiate himself into her inner circle. He had been the sort of guy who is too eager, and asks too many questions. Some of her associates were convinced that he must be a government spy.

"A Proper Concert of the Powers" by Wm. Walker in Life, October 3, 1901

Most anarchists disavowed Czolgosz, but for her part, Goldman refused to condemn what he had done. She instead characterized him as a "supersensitive being" and likened him to Julius Caesar's assassin Marcus Brutus.

Czolgosz tried to plead guilty at his trial, which began on September 23, but was overruled by presiding Judge Truman White. His jury deliberated for less than 30 minutes before returning guilty verdicts the very next day.  

"Wasn't You Present at the Execution?" by Rowland C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, October, 1901

On October 29, Czolgosz was electrocuted to death at Auburn State Prison. In order to prevent any macabre Czolgosz memorabilia getting out, prison officials burned his clothes and other possessions, and doused his corpse with acid before burying him on the prison grounds.

The Temple of Music where McKinley was shot, and the rest of the Exposition buildings, were razed that November. That wasn't entirely in order to erase unpleasant memories of the assassination; the Exposition buildings were never intended to be permanent structures.

But unlike with John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, or Sirhan Sirhan, (or, for that matter, Osama bin Laden,) the Spirit of Notoriety has kept its distance from Leon Czolgosz. Unless you've seen Assassins, chances are you don't even know how to pronounce his name.

We Can't Have Nice Things Any More

Okay, so this happened:

For the last week or so, I kept running into an error message when I tried to upload my cartoons to the AAEC site in the evening. I found that I had to upload to editorialcartoonists.com in the morning; otherwise, just trying to visit the site at all sometimes got me this page:

The other day, the AAEC site greeted me with one of those "We're verifying your web browser and this should only take five seconds" pages... but that's as far as I ever got. I was browsing on my iPod, and there are other sites and apps that don't like its web browser, so I didn't think much of it.

The official explanation was in the e-mails the other day:

Hey all,

As you may have noticed, we've been having some issues with the AAEC website.

Last week we were targeted by a DDoS attack (as were, it turns out, so many US companies over the long Labor Day weekend). Then today, as our new web developers were in the process of upgrading and installing a new firewall, we got hit again.

They are still in the process of determining if this second outage was an attack, or if one of y'all's cartoons went viral, but even with the new software in place, our site was overwhelmed by requests.

The new developers will continue to try and fix this, but if you run into difficulties again (either pages not loading, or 522 errors), don't hesitate to let me know. Thanks! —JP

In the meantime, my legion-and-a-half of fans will have to find my cartoons on this humble website, although they're also on line at qsaltlake.com and pridesource.com.

And be sure to tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion of the assassination of William F. McKinley.

Q Toon: Conveyor Pete

Congratulations to Pete and Chasten Buttigieg, who announced over the weekend that they have become the proud parents of newborns Penelope Rose and Joseph August Buttigieg.

Photos show each father holding an infant in his arm, so we're pretty sure they didn't pick two names for one child to choose from later. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

Happy New Year to Harvey and Sheila and all my readers of the Jewish faith!

And to anybody else who's feeling left out, Happy Taco Tuesday!

Keep the Labor in Labor Day!

100 Labor Days ago (yeah I know it's not Saturday, but it's a holiday, which is just as good a time for a history lesson) coal miners were on strike in West Virginia.

And then the government decided to bomb them.

Cartoon by Ryan Walker in New York Call, NYC, September 3, 1921

General Billy Mitchell told reporters, “We wouldn’t try to kill these people at first. We’d drop tear gas all over the place. If they refuse to disburse, then we’d open up with artillery and everything.”

"September Morn" by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, September 1, 1921

Upon their arrival to West Virginia, the chance of aerial bombardment by the Air Service was quickly snuffed out. Fully loaded with bombs and machine guns when they left their home base of Langley, VA, the 88th Squadron’s planes were stripped of all weaponry before flying over Blair Mountain. [Commander of federal forces during the Battle of Blair Mountain, General Harry H.] Bandholdtz’s orders were clear. “You will under no circumstances drop any bombs or fire any machine guns or do anything to unnecessarily excite the invaders,” he wrote in a dispatch. While the 88th Squadron was used to assess the situation on Blair Mountain from above, there would be no demonstration of the Air Service’s armed abilities in West Virginia.

There were, however, a trio of private biplanes rented by Sheriff Chafin that were not under the strict orders of restraint from General Bandholtz. On September 2—the same day as the Squadron’s arrival in West Virginia—Chafin ordered his own small air force to drop gas and makeshift bombs on the miners’ positions on Blair Mountain. Though none of these aerial assaults struck their intended targets, Mitchell’s braggadocious comments to the Charleston press the week before led many to believe that the Army had conducted the bombing runs, a myth that remains today.

(Shades of Tulsa, Oklahoma over the Memorial Day holiday three months earlier!)

You might have thought that Americans would have recoiled in horror at the news of the Americans bombing Americans. But apparently the Chicago Tribune was all in favor of it.

"Show 'Em They Are Not Above the Law" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1921

As luck would have it, no miners were killed in the bombing, although three airmen died in a storm-related crash while returning to Maryland. Which may be why this remains the only time that the U.S. proposed bombing striking American workers into submission.

Now, go on and enjoy your holiday.

Aside from That, Mrs. McKinley, How Was the Expo?

This coming week marks the 120th anniversary of the assassination of President William McKinley. I will admit that vinticentennials tend to get overlooked, and McKinley's is generally ranked in the middle of U.S. administrations. But without McKinley's assassination, instead of ending up on Mt. Rushmore, Teddy Roosevelt would probably have languished in the obscurity endured by most vice presidents from Daniel Tompkins to Alben Barkley.

Besides, I have no idea whether I'll still feel like keeping up this Saturday history schtick for another five years for when the quasquicentennial comes around.

"Night at the Pan-American" by Lucius Hitchcock in Harper's Weekly, September 7, 1901

To refresh your American History 101, McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901.

"Put Me Off at Buffalo" by Rowland C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, May, 1901

The Pan-American Exposition was a chance for the U.S., fresh off its victory in the Spanish-American War, to show off to the world, and President McKinley had every intention of milking it for all it was worth. 

The previous decade had witnessed a wave of assassinations by anarchists in Europe: President Marie François Sadi Carnot of France in 1894; Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain in 1897; Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898; and King Umberto I of Italy in 1900. Because of this, McKinley's personal secretary, George Cortelyou, twice tried to take shaking hands with the public off McKinley's schedule. Having had to cancel a "President's Day" appearance at the Exposition in May when his wife took ill, however, McKinley insisted on getting to press the flesh on September 5 and 6.

"My Harp Is Also Turned to Mourning..." by Gennette (?) in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 7, 1901

Fired up by the speeches of anarchist Emma Goldman, Czolgosz decided on September 3 to assassinate McKinley. He was unable to get close enough to shoot McKinley at the Exposition on September 5, but returned the next day with his gun concealed in a cloth rag, and waited in the president's receiving line until he was right up in front of his target. He fired two shots at point blank range before he was wrestled to the ground.

"One Bandage Too Many" by Gennette in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 8, 1901

I'm having to guess at this Brooklyn Daily Eagle cartoonist's name from his signature alone. Whether the name begins with a J or a G, I have not come across any information about him.

"Why Not Make This a Law, Uncle" by Gennette in Brooklyn Eagle, September 10, 1901

This is a peculiar cartoon: to nobody's surprise, Czolgosz would be executed for his crime before the end of October, so what difference would making "an attack upon the President, the Vice President or any member of the Cabinet... treason punishable with death"?

In part, the Brooklyn Eagle was arguing in favor of making attempted assassination of officials of the executive branch a federal crime. Czolgosz would be tried and executed by the State of New York, in whose jurisdiction the crime took place. (Assassination of the president or vice president was not made a federal crime until after John Kennedy's assassination in 1963.)

"At the Threshold" by Wm. A. Rogers in Harper's Weekly, September 14, 1901

 

As McKinley lay in hospital for several days, cartoonists for the weekly newspapers had the difficult task of eulogizing him in case he died, without pronouncing him dead in case he didn't.

Indeed, banner headlines on September 11 proclaimed McKinley's recovery from his injuries.

"The Crisis Passed" by Felix Mahony in Washington (DC) Evening Star, September 11, 1901

Was he really going to make it? Tune in next Saturday to find out!

(Spoiler alert: I've already told you.)

Q Toon: OnlyG-RatedFans

When OnlyFans announced last month that it would shut down adults-only content on its app in October, it was in response to its financial backers — it wasn't because of celebrities or self-help gurus chary of associating with porn actors and sex workers.

The reaction by those porn actors and sex workers was swift and loud, and rival apps sprang up to offer them somewhere else to peddle their prurient wares. And in no time, OnlyFans reversed its decision.

Pornography was one of the oldest professions to capitalize on the internet, so it would be practically impossible to root it out of all its possible avenues into everyone's favorite apps any more. Unlike in the physical world, where zoning laws could limit where porn shops could be located, they can pop up anywhere in the virtual e-world. If you are someone who wants to avoid smut completely, you have to bone up on the tricks of the trade.

I've more or less learned how to distinguish between Facebook friend requests from strangers who are interested in my cartoons, and requests from strangers who are — or pretend to be — exhibitionist bimbos and gigolos. At the risk of offending whatever scantily clad buxom blonde from Eritrea who just joined Facebook hours ago, I'd rather she "follow" than "friend" me.

Here at the blog, I suspect that there is porn behind some of the flattering comments to my web posts that lack any indication that their authors ever actually visited my site. There again, they might not all have anything to do with pornography, like the one the other day that included a link that appears to be to a moving company. But who knows? Maybe the movers work in the nude.

For a while a couple years ago, a collection of referring URLs belonging to girlie webcams kept showing up as "referring URLs" in the web statistics for this weblog. It strains credulity to think that there were dozens of guys who, after wanking off to Veronica or Mindy, decided to check out what some middle-aged gay cartoonist had drawn that week, or to catch up on World War I cartoons.

But it takes all kinds out there. Whatever floats your boat.