Our Graphical History Tour today steps back 40 years (for the benefit of you who may be products of Ron DeSantis's Floridian educational system, that's 1982).
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| "Brisben..." in Mathematics Magazine, Washington, D.C., Nov., 1982 |
This cartoon wasn't published until the fall, but the original is filed in with stuff I drew in April of 1982, so in light of Florida Republicans' war on math, it gets to lead off today's post.
I don't recall how I came to draw a cartoon for the then quarterly magazine of the Mathematical Association of America (it now publishes monthly); perhaps it was through my father, a chemist, but I'm pretty sure that we didn't get Mathematics Magazine at our house. (They were nice enough to send me this issue, and I believe that they paid for the cartoon. If only I had been able to keep coming up with cartoons about math, but alas...)
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| "New Music" in UW-Parkside Ranger, various days, 1981-82 |
Balancing that April cartoon unpublished until November with one drawn well before the Feast Day of St. Misbehavin, here's one I drew to accompany the music review column, titled "New Music," in the student newspaper at University of Wisconsin at Parkside. The column, written by various members of the arts and entertainment staff, was intended to be eclectic, covering new and decidedly not-new music, so the references in my illustration ran the gamut from medieval to rock.
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| "Save the Library" in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 29, 1982 |
The Ranger, along with several other student organizations, planned a "Save the Library Day" to protest cuts to Wisconsin's university system in Governor Sherman Dreyfus's state budget. Raffles, a dunk tank, and other fund-raising activities hoped to counter proposed cuts in staffing and periodical subscriptions.
To publicize the event, I was asked to draw Gov. Dreyfus strangling a book. From the vertical format, the boldness of the lines and the minimal crosshatching — and my initials hidden in the governor's hair in lieu of my signature — I believe that this caricature was intended to go onto t-shirts, but I can't recall that for certain.
At the time, Lee Dreyfus was considered a moderate-to-conservative Republican; if he were still in politics, today's Republicans would no doubt denounce him as a RINO, a dreaded liberal, or even a socialist commie.
Nota bene: while the Grand Old Party has lurched to the extreme right nowadays, rest assured, gentle reader, that the party still had bona fide fascists back then:
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| "PAB Brazenly Presents," in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 15, 1982 |
Case in point: G. Gordon Liddy, one of the chief "plumbers" from the Nixon administration, whom the Parkside Activity Board paid $4,500 to speak in the Student Union cafeteria on April 19, 1982. Touring the country to promote his book, Will, Liddy forbade recording of his three-hour appearance, in which the convicted felon called Judge John Sirica "born stupid," claimed that the Watergate break-in was legal because laws do not apply to a president or those acting on his behalf, and made light of his having planned to kill investigative journalist Jack Anderson and White House Counsel John Dean.
To the end, Liddy, who died a little over a year ago, was proud of his role in the Watergate burglary, and I'm sure he was happy to have lived long enough to see fascists return to the White House in 2017. How he must have regretted that he wasn't able to participate in the January 6 insurrection with the others of his ilk.
Yet his theory of the Divine Right of Presidents was indispensable to Republicans' defense of Donald Berzelius Trump in the impeachment trials of 2020 and 2021.
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Well, I can't end this post on that note, so here's a bit of trivia for the locals:
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| UW-Parkside Ranger, April 8, 1982 |
The young fella elected Parkside Student Government President 40 years ago survived this recall attempt and went on to a career in politics. This past Monday, he handed over the reins as Kenosha County Executive after 14 years in the post.
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