Januaries '4eign and Domestic

It's time to ease back on the wayback machine just a little bit, so here are a few cartoons I drew in Januaries of years ending in -4. (Which was coincidentally the high temperature here the other day.)

1984 was a presidential election year, of course; and like today, the United States was bedeviled by hostilities in the Middle East.

The U.S.S. John F. Kennedy had been on patrol off the coast of Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, in which 241 soldiers had died. In response to some hostile fire, the JFK launched a bombing raid on December 4. The plane of Navy Lts. Mark Lange and Robert Goodman was shot down by a Syrian ground missile. Lange did not survive; Goodman was taken captive in Damascus.

Unwilling to accede to the conditions set by Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad that the U.S. withdraw forces from Lebanon, the Reagan Administration's efforts to win Goodman's freedom were getting nowhere. Then a delegation led by by Rev. Jesse Jackson went to Damascus, and Jackson, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, succeeded where Reagan had failed.

Jackson nevertheless came in seventh place in the Iowa caucuses. Go figure. Must have been because there are no naval bases in Iowa.

I drew the above cartoon for the January 12, 1984 edition of the University of Wisconsin - Parkside student newspaper; but they still had an unused cartoon from December and ran that one instead.

Moving on to 1994, and the aftermath of more U.S. soldiers killed in a far-off civil war:

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 24, 1994

President Clinton's first Defense Secretary, Les Aspin, resigned at the end of 1993, tacitly taking the fall for the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia. Clinton's nomination of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman as Aspin's replacement was greeted initially with bipartisan praise — save for New York Times columnist William Safire, who alleged that Inman was biased against Israel. 

Inman withdrew his name from consideration at a stormy press conference, where he blasted Safire and complained that Republican Senators Bob Dole and Trent Lott were out to get him. Both Senate leaders expressed surprise and shock at Inman's accusation, and the White House was taken totally off guard.

Clinton's subsequent nomination of William Perry to the post went off smoothly. There was later speculation that Inman was actually trying to head off being connected to a scandal at International Signal and Control, where he served on the board of directors.

for Q Syndicate, January, 2004

I don't have a cartoon from January of 2004 that fits with the general topic of today's post; so instead, I'll include this homage to P.T. Bridgeport, a recurring character in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" whose dialogue always appeared in late-1800's advertising fonts. 

Lettering dialogue is usually my least favorite part of drawing a cartoon. This was an exception.

for Q Syndicate, January, 2014

Returning to foreign issues, I chose this cartoon from ten years ago because it gives me an opportunity to address a cartoon I haven't drawn this month.

On December 29, the President of Burundi, Évariste Ndayishimiye, was asked about respecting LGBTQ+ rights.

"For me, I think that if we find these people in Burundi they should be taken to stadiums and be stoned, and doing so would not be a crime," he said.

If any U.S. politician had spewed such hate-filled bile in the no-news week between Christmas and New Year's, I would have been all over that story in that week's cartoon. But doing so about a politician none of my readers had ever heard of from a country that many could not find on a map (present company excepted, of course) with a history of Western colonialism and yada yada is fraught with danger.

Would it be possible to condemn Mr. Ndayishimiye without risking accusations of racism and cultural imperialism?

We could debate whether homosexuality existed in Africa before Christian and Islamic missionaries preached anti-LGBTQ+ persecution there. Western colonizers did everything they could to erase local culture and history wherever they went; yet it beggars belief to imagine that homosexuality existed only in Europe and in scattered Native American nations before Christopher Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Francis Drake set sail.

Mr. Ndayishimiye, as it happens, is Roman Catholic, but with some glaringly apparent differences with the current Pope.

My 2014 cartoon attempted to argue that institutionalized homophobia rather than homosexuality is the Western export to Africa (at least as far as Christianity is concerned). Not that I have never leveled criticism at African politicians —viz. here and e.g. here — but I don't have much of a readership in Burundi, Uganda, or Kenya.

Or anywhere else on the continent.

Lo, mbaya sana. I'm better off sticking to cartooning politicians my readers can vote for or against.

One reference to The African Queen in that regard is probably my total allotment, anyway. At least until I manage to draw a better Katherine Hepburn.