October on the Ones

I lead this Saturday Flashback with an unpublished cartoon I drew after Herblock died 20 years ago this past Thursday. The cartoon references several Herblock cartoons and recurring characters. I was tempted to put together a retrospective of his over 70-year career today — the man published cartoons almost up to the day he died — but you can visit the Library of Congress's exhibit of his work, or buy the book.

So rather than incur the wrath of the Herblock Foundation, I herewith present a smattering of the other cartoons Little Ol' I drew in Octobers of 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011. Let's start with the little oldest:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 1, 1981

President Reagan had an advertisement on TV, if I remember correctly, urging viewers to call their congressional representatives to express their belief in Reagan's "bipartisan economic recovery plan" —i.e., tax cuts. (Finding a few Democrats willing to sign on to a Republican bill was an easier lift than the opposite is nowadays, especially since there were Democrats to choose from who would soon start calling themselves Republicans.) For the moment, however, the stock market appeared shaky, and a recession was indeed around the corner.

There must be over 100 horizontal lines in that cartoon, all painstakingly drawn by hand. The thick ones behind the window were the most challenging.—

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 22, 1981

Somewhere along the line, all of my cartoons from the fall of 1981 have somehow gotten mislaid. I still had them a few years ago when I posted one I drew in October, 1981 about the situation in Poland; I had certainly scanned that from the original. The originals aren't where they belong now, so unless Mom or I clipped them for our respective scrapbooks, I have to resort to copying them from the University of Wisconsin Ranger on-line archives, like this one above.

Continuing along to 1991...

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Oct. 3, 1991

Members of the Supreme Court have been at pains lately to deny that they are "partisan hacks." What they cannot deny is that for over half a century, the selection process by which most of them made it onto the Court has been overtly partisan. 

Reacting to civil rights rulings of the 1950's and '60's, conservative partisan hacks have been determined to remake the Court in their own image. Liberal Congresses were able to block the most egregious nominees — Clement Haynsworth, G. Harrold Carswell, Robert Bork — but not right-wingers William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, or, in spite of allegations of sexual harassment, Clarence Thomas, now the most senior Justice on the Court.

in Racine, WI Journal Times, Oct. 17, 1991

Conservatives, for their part, have "Borked" Abe Fortas, Homer Thornberry and Merrick Garland, and pressured presidents of their party to name "No More Souters." Thus we have six currently serving Republican appointees who are all products of the right-wing Federalist Society. I was startled to hear it put this way on NPR this week, but the center of today's Court is no longer Chief Justice John Roberts (himself a conservative George W. Bush pick), but Kevin-Boofing-Kavanaugh!

in Milwaukee WI Business Journal, Oct. 5, 2001

Moving right along to 2001, the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee wrote an editorial critical of labor lawyers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. I drew a silly cartoon to go along with it.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2001

Of course, there were weightier issues in the fall of 2001 than genii safety. The Bush II administration was about to launch a 20-year war in Afghanistan, so naturally, the Christian Right weighed in with their reservations... about the nominee for U.S. Ambassador to Romania.

As with Bill Clinton's appointment of James Hormel to be Ambassador to Luxembourg, antigay groups such as the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America opposed Bush The Younger's appointment of Michael E. Guest as Ambassador to Romania. But unlike with Hormel, the Senate approved Guest's appointment. Also unlike Hormel, who was pressured into promising not to bring his then partner to Luxembourg, Guest's partner, Alex Nevarez, moved into the ambassador's residence with him — with Secretary of State Colin Powell's explicit blessing.

“It put the Secretary of State on record as supporting homosexuality as if it were as normal, healthy and morally sound as marriage," sniffed Concerned Women for America's Robert Knight. "This means that America will be represented to the Romanian people by an openly homosexual couple. How trendy. How decadent.”

for Q Syndicate, October, 2011

Ten years later, when antigay activists were pushing an amendment to enshrine marriage discrimination in the Minnesota state constitution, it only seemed natural to set a cartoon in the Mall of America.

Besides, I enjoy giving odd and punning names to imaginary specialty shops.