Eyes on Julies

It's sabbath time again, so strap on your dust masks and join our Graphical History Tour as we rummage through my old cartoon files. What cherished treasures shall we find from Julies (that is the plural of July, isn't it?) of ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago?

for Q Syndicate, July, 2015

Ten Julies ago, the sovereign state of Texas spared no expense to monitor a U.S. military exercise named Jade Helm. A Russian disinformation campaign was apparently responsible for convincing Lone Star politicians that Jade Helm was part of some nefarious scheme by the Obama administration to round up political dissidents and ... I dunno, ship them off to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, I suppose.

Weeks before the exercise began, [Gov. Greg] Abbott wrote a letter to the State Guard asking them to keep an eye on the operation so “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”

Undeterred by embarrassment over his overreaction to a routine military training exercise, Gov. Abbott and the Texas State Guard have been keeping a close eye on the current round-up of political dissidents, and the infringement of safety, constitutional rights, private property rights, and civil liberties in Texas and elsewhere.

Ain't sneakin' a dang thing past them folks, pardner.

Insert here your own tasteless flooding remark that gets you cancelled by the vast right-wing conspiracy.

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Digging back another ten years to July, 2005:

for Q Syndicate, July, 2005

Dancing up a storm, four-year-old Jack Roberts upstaged his father's nomination to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in July, 2005. With a Republican majority in the Senate sure to confirm the President George Dubya Bush nominee, right-wing judicial activists also rejoiced.

He was replacing the far-right William Rehnquist, nominated to the Court by Richard Nixon and elevated to Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan, so Roberts's nomination wasn't exactly a tear-out-your-hair-the-sky-is-falling moment for liberal interests.

As Circuit Court of Appeals Judge in 2003, John Roberts had pooh-poohed concerns over what he called "a hapless toad" in a lawsuit brought against the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service by a San Diego real estate developer whose planned housing development included breeding grounds of the arroyo southwestern toad. Roberts, dissenting from the Court of Appeals finding, agreed with the developer's argument that the toads had no connection to any economic or interstate activity and had no commercial value, so their protection was unrelated to interstate commerce and thus unconstitutional.

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in InStep, Milwaukee, July 20, 1995

This was my first cartoon in one of Wisconsin's LGBTQ+ newspapers. I didn't start drawing regularly for InStep ("Wisconsin's LesBiGay Newsmagazine") until a year later, so I wasn't yet listed as a columnist or contributor on the masthead.

Jesse Helms, for those of you too young to remember, was a virulently antigay Republican Senator from North Carolina. His racist and homophobic campaign ads cemented his national reputation as the Senate's leading culture warrior. He authored an amendment, passed with President Reagan's full support, to the 1987 AIDS appropriation bill, prohibiting the use of federal funding for any HIV/AIDS educational materials that would "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities" served to exacerbate the spread of the disease.

He stubbornly opposed all federal spending on HIV/AIDS research in each and every budget cycle (hence my cartoon) throughout his Senate tenure. He retired in January, 2003, died in 2008, and I'm not sorry that he's gone.

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As it happens, I cannot find a single cartoon that I drew the entire month of July, 1985.

It's not for want of cartoonable news stories. At the time, I had discovered that while the local university newspaper was only too happy to have my editorial cartoons, daily newspapers around the country were, shall we say, a bit more discriminating in their tastes. With the UW-Parkside Ranger on summer hiatus, the impetus to keep drawing (particularly while maintaining a second-shift job that had nothing to do with publishing) just wasn't as urgent.

Since I have nothing of my own to show for the month, I'll close instead with a July, 1985 cartoon by Steve Benson, who succumbed this week to a devastating stroke that he suffered soon after retiring from the edtooning biz last year.

"Could You Describe Your Feelings" by Steve Benson in Arizona Republic, July, 1985

Benson, a grandson of former Agriculture Secretary cum Mormon Church President Ezra Taft Benson, started out his career during the Carter administration as a conservative. But by the time I met him, at the 2015 convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, he had gone fully left-wing libertarian, proselytizing atheist, and rabble rouser. 

At the 2015 AAEC convention panel "Free Speech or Hate Speech?" Per the October 2015 edition of AAEC's Notebook: "Steve Benson arose to pose the question he was asked by one of his editors. If he were to do a Muhammad cartoon, he would be putting himself at risk—but also every other staff member of his newspaper (Arizona Republic). By what right was he entitled to endanger everyone around him?" I remember it as having been a much longer question.

By all accounts, he held strong opinions, and wasn't the least bit shy about sharing them at length. His conversion from right to left and from religious to atheist must have been a seismic shock to those who lived and worked closely with him.

I was not one of them. I wish I had had the opportunity to get to know him better, but by the time I finally made it to another AAEC convention, he had stopped attending them — permanently, as it turned out. I don't know why.

Maybe it's not exactly appropriate to wish Rest In Peace to someone who rejected the whole idea of any sort of afterlife, but... well... So long. Peace out.

And thanks for giving us hope that not all conservatives are lost souls.