Remembering Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union, died this week, age 91; so for today's Saturday History Tour, here are some of my cartoons of one of the most transformative leaders of the latter half of the 20th Century.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Nov. 14, 1989

With his election by the Politburo in March of 1985, Gorbachev became the USSR's fourth leader in as many years. Leonid Brezhnev's ill health had been kept secret for years before his death in 1982; his successor, Yuri Andropov, was felled by kidney failure after 15 months in office, aged 69. Konstantin Chernenko, a heavy smoker, was at death's door almost from the start of his 13-month administration, and died of emphysema and complications at the age of 73.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, March 21, 1985

Gorbachev came to power eager to make his mark. He signaled his willingness to negotiate arms limitations with the United States, a topic whose progress had ground to a halt after Ronald Reagan scrapped the talks begun under Brezhnev with Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 10, 1986

The West added two Russian words to our vocabulary under Mikhail Gorbachev: perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). The former was actually a policy begun under Brezhnev in 1979, but to which Gorbachev announced a renewed and firm commitment. His reforms decentralized governance and economic controls while lifting some of the secrecy enjoyed by Kremlin bureaucrats.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Sept. 7, 1989

What Gorbachev hadn't factored in was the desire of the citizens of Soviet client states and some non-Russian S.S.R.'s to break away from Moscow entirely. It's not as if independence movements were unknown; Poland's Solidarność movement had been a headache for the government in Warsaw since 1980, and memories lingered of Moscow's brutal suppression of revolts in Czechoslovakia (1968),  Hungary (1956), and East Germany (1953).

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Nov. 9, 1989

When the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe completely collapsed in November and December of 1989, there were too many dominoes falling at once for Gorbachev to seriously consider sending the Russian military into every countries quitting the Warsaw Pact.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Nov. 16, 1989

Rough seas for Gorbachev's Mediterranean summit meeting with U.S. President George H.W. Bush were the perfect metaphor for the Soviet leader's predicament.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Dec. 5, 1989

(This was months before Bush would throw up into the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister, by the way.)

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Feb. 20, 1990

I still like this take-off on a scene from Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure, even though you could plug just about any politician going through a rough patch into this scenario. Similarly with this next cartoon. 

May, 1990. Unpublished?

Reunification of Germany certainly horrified the elder members of the politburo; Gorbachev was also old enough to remember World War II. This, as much as any other single factor, led to the hardliners' attempted coup in the summer of 1991.

August, 1991. Unpublished?

The coup met sturdy resistance from their own citizens. Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin emerged as the hero of the moment, representing liberalization beyond what Gorbachev had ever intended.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Sept. 9, 1991

The end of the Soviet Union happened over Christmas break at the UW-M Post, and I don't have any cartoons about Gorbachev after that.

The memorial cartoons I've seen this week have all credited Gorbachev with bringing his country out of the oppression of the communist regime. Many have contrasted him favorably with Vladimir Putin, who has imposed a new oppressive regime of деконструкция and закрытость, and clearly believes that Gorbachev's administration was a disaster. 

I have not yet seen how any Russian cartoonists have responded to Gorbachev's passing. Are memorial cartoons even a thing there? If so, was Mikhail Gorbachev someone you can praise under Putin's regime without buying a one-way ticket out a sixth-story hospital window?

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.

The Kurds in the Punchbowl

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., April 18, 1991

Continuing last Saturday's review of my cartoons from April thirty years ago, this post mortem on President George H.W. Bush's stratospheric post-war popularity starts with my one and only ever Brackets cartoon.

Bush looked unbeatable going into April, 1991. Doubters of his invasion of Iraq had expected a long, drawn-out desert war on the model of the 1981-1988 Iran-Iraq War, but the difference this time was that Iraq didn't have the benefit of U.S. support. Quite the opposite. 

in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 4, 1991

Quickly yielding Kuwait to the U.S.-led coalition forces Bush had meticulously assembled, Saddam Hussein almost immediately turned his toxic attention to the Kurds in his own country's north. During the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein had answered a Kurdish rebellion by gassing the town of Hallabja, killing 5,000 residents. 

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 18, 1991

My cartoon here was a play on Bush's "New World Order"; but if Bush didn't actually place this order, he did, in fact, encourage Iraqi citizens "to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside..." 

Once Hussein's army no longer had to defend Baghdad against foreign forces, they quickly went to work brutally putting down uprisings in the Kurdish north and in the south. Unable to hold onto cities and villages, the Kurdish militia holed up in mountains and caves, eventually protected by U.S.-enforced no-fly zones.

Unpublished. Hey, lookie! A world premiere!

I drew this cartoon for the UW-M Post's April 25 issue, but they re-ran a year-old cartoon about northern Wisconsin protests against Chippewa fishing rights instead. Whether this cartoon was spiked or simply late for deadline I don't remember.

Hey, thank you for coming along with me trudging through the sands of time. Look for some older than dirt cartoons next Saturday at this same dusty corner of the internet.

Gulf War I

It's time for the thirty-year-old thread of cartoons at this here blog to go to war with Iraq.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., January 14, 1991

President George H.W. Bush gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein an ultimatum: withdraw from Kuwait by January 15, or the international coalition Bush had been painstakingly assembling since Iraq annexed the emirate in August would attack. Hussein called Bush's bluff.

in UW-M Post, January 22, 1991

And it was no bluff.

There was no "Khattam Shud military base," by the way. Khattam Shud is the villain in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I had recently read. It also translates as "completely finished."

in UW-M Post, January 29, 1991

Not that we could know in January that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. As Hussein and his commanders pulled their army back from the front to defend the capital (and seemed more committed to shelling Israel than hindering U.S. military advances), coalition forces prepared for a possible siege of Baghdad, urban warfare, and the prospect of heavy civilian casualties.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha, Wis., January 31, 1991

The retreating Iraqi army burned oilfields in their wake, to the alarm of environmentalists the world over. 

"Don't Look Now" was a follow-up to "Before, During and After," even though my parents may have been the only people to see both cartoons at the time.

in UW-M Post, January 31, 1991

I liked this cartoon so much I drew it twice, once for the Parkside Ranger and a week later for the UW-M Post. The second cartoon is a slight improvement over the first, in which there was only one cot; the Bushes in the later cartoon are also doing more than just standing around in their cell.

Faces in the Crowd

The cartoon I posted on Sunday employed caricatures of a number of House Republicans, when I could more easily have drawn a single GOP elephant at a microphone. So why didn't I do that and knock off an hour earlier?

June, 1996 for the UWM Post.

Pardon me if I step back a few years in order to answer that. In 1996, I drew a crowd of (hopefully) recognizable Republicans, grinning smugly, because that made more sense than drawing a single elephant, and was more effective than a bunch of smugly grinning elephants. Behind Bob Dole in this cartoon, mocking GOP claims of having a "big tent" on the abortion issue in spite of the hardline plank in the party platform, stand, from left to right: Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed.

(Since the UWM Post didn't put out any editions that summer, the above cartoon was never published, but I ended up drawing another one a lot like it for them in September.)

in UW-M Post, March 5, 1991

My cartoon of sheepish Democrats at the peak of George H.W. Bush's popularity would have been less pointed if I had drawn a donkey or donkeys among the sheep. (From left to right: Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Dick Gephardt, Tom Foley, Al Gore, Mario Cuomo, Lloyd Bentsen, and George Mitchell.)

in UWM Post, September 28, 1989

Which is not to say that every editorial cartoon has to include caricatures of actual politicians. I liked the idea for my cartoon about multiple ethics investigations going on in the nation's capital in 1989, but there weren't enough politicians actually leading one investigation while being the target of another for me to have drawn a bunch of real people.

This idea is not far removed from Thomas Nast's "Who Stole the People's Money? Do Tell. 'Twas Him" cartoon showing easily recognizable members of the Tammany Ring standing in a circle, each pointing fingers at the man to his right. It's a great cartoon that had great impact when it was published and has stood the test of time, even though the real Richard Connolly was not accusing Peter Sweeney, who was not accusing Boss Tweed, who was not accusing James Ingersoll, etc.

for Q Syndicate, June 21, 2004

Here again, I could have drawn specific Republican senators pulling a prank in 2004, but I think this particular cartoon works better this way artistically.

Still, I believe it is useful for cartoonists to hold actual politicians accountable for their stands on issues. Thomas Nast's cartoons would have had little impact if he had tamely drawn generic "City Hall" characters — or comical Tammany Tigers — every week. Likewise, it's all well and good to draw a cartoon highlighting Lindsey Graham's or Matt Gaetz's craptasm du jour; but if one doesn't hold their feet to the fire, the effect is likely to be ephemeral.


We can't all be Thomas Nast, but we can still try.

Thomas Hearings

Scandalback Saturday hearkens once more to the thrilling days of 1991, when I was still striving toward my goal of being the world's oldest college cartoonist.

In September of 1991, the Senate held confirmation hearings on President George H.W. Bush's nomination to the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall. (That was three whole months after Thomas's nomination, believe it or not!) Where Civil Rights icon Marshall was a consistent liberal on the court, Thomas had a staunch conservative record during his career in United States Department of Education, later at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and then during his 16 months as a federal judge.

Civil rights groups opposed him on the basis of his record against affirmative action; women's rights groups suspected that he was against abortion rights. At the hearings, he stubbornly refused to discuss his views on the latter subject.

The congressmen in that cartoon are Democrat Senators Howell Heflin of Alabama, Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Paul Simon of Illinois, and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin. Most cartoonists at the time drew Ted Kennedy and/or Joe Biden to represent the committee, but I wanted to include my home state Senator whose place was at the end of the table.

When Anita Hill, who had worked with Thomas in the Education Department and the EEOC, came forward to accuse Thomas of sexual harassment, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee summoned her to one of the most bizarre hearings ever held in Congress. On live TV and radio, the nation heard such lurid details as: "Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, 'Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?'" The hearings were a national obsession.

Thomas scolded the Committee, calling of the hearings "a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."

Anita Hill's treatment by Republicans on the Judiciary Committee was no better, caricaturing her as a vengeful, delusional spurned hussy who concocted her story ten years after the alleged event.

The Republicans in that cartoon are of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, of Alan Simpson of Wyoming, and Orrin Hatch of Utah.

The Senate narrowly voted, 52 to 48, to confirm Thomas's nomination on October 15.  11 Democrats crossed party lines to confirm, while two Republicans crossed over to vote nay.

Meanwhile, Thomas's chief sponsor in the Senate, Missouri Republican John Danforth, was also a prominent supporter of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Citing opposition to racial quotas in the workplace, Bush had vetoed a stronger Civil Rights bill the year before — no other president has ever vetoed a Civil Rights bill successfully.

The watered-down 1991 version passed the House 381 to 38 and the Senate 93 to 5, more than enough to override a presidential veto if Bush had chosen to try it again.

The Second Time Around

For Stonetempleback Saturday today, I'm just going to throw out an example of A Better Idea hitting me after deadline.

In September 1991, months after pulling American troops out of the Iraq War I, President George H.W. Bush's administration was again being bedeviled by Saddam Hussein. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Department of Defense had to come up with another reason for their space-based missile programs and Hussein's refusal to accept defeat quietly was the best they could do.

That's Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff John Sununu flanking President Bush The Elder. Vice President Dan Quayle is the kid making the veiled reference to Communist China, a "most favored nation trading partner."

I can't say I was entirely pleased with that cartoon. Depicting Vice President J. Danforth Quayle as an intellectual lightweight was pretty low-hanging fruit in those days. Somebody actually devoted an entire quarterly publication to it, in fact.

Volume 1, Number 1, page 1.

I got the cartoon done by deadline, and that was the important thing at that moment in time.

Another issue in the news 25 years ago this month was the fear that the U.S. economy wasn't recovering as it had appeared to be: the talk was of a "double dip recession." And thence came a much better cartoon idea than the first.

For that matter, it resulted in a much better caricature of Bush.

By the way, The Quayle Quarterly was put out of business by the 1992 election. They did not move on to become The Al Goreterly.

Grim Anniversaries

Sloughback Saturday again...

A couple weeks ago, I included a cartoon about rank and file antipathy to the Latino-American Chief of the Milwaukee Police Department in 1991. Part of the MPA's grudge against Chief Arreola, stemmed from the suspension of police officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish.

Balcerzak and Gabrish had thwarted an attempted escape four months earlier by Konerak Sinthasomphone from serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer. In September, 1991, I depicted them behind then Milwaukee Police Association President Bradley DeBraska being interviewed by then Channel 4 news anchor Mike Gousha.

In panel three, I reference Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, the African-American women who called police that night in May, 1991,

When police arrived at 25th Street early in the morning of May 27, Dahmer told them that Konerak was 19 years old, that he was a houseguest who had too much to drink, that he was his lover.
The boy, really 14 years old, was reportedly naked and impaired by drugs or alcohol, and police believed Dahmer`s story.
Smith and Childress tried to tell the officers that the boy was in trouble, but they refused to listen, telling the citizens to "get lost," Smith charged.
"One of them said to me, 'I`ve been investigating for seven years, and I don't need an amateur telling me what to do.'"
The officers then pursued their probe, telling the boy (whom one police source described as incoherent at the time) to sit on the car. They talked only with Dahmer.

Had Balcerzak and Gabrish checked Dahmer's criminal record, they would have found that Dahmer was a convicted sex offender -- convicted of assaulting Sinthasomphone's older brother. Yet astonishingly, according to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, the officers entered Dahmer's apartment, where the body of Tony Hughes was rotting in the bedroom, and found nothing amiss.

Balcerzak would later be elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association from 2005 to 2009. Gabrish is currently the Police Chief of Trenton, Wisconsin.

🗽

Since tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I'm reprinting here the cartoon I drew on 9/10.

I drew this cartoon to accompany the Milwaukee Business Journal editorial that week, eulogizing Milwaukee philanthropist Jane Bradley Pettit, who died on Sunday, September 9, 2001. The daughter and niece of the founders of Allen-Bradley Corporation, she was married to Schlitz Brewing heir Joseph Uihlein prior to her marriage to Lloyd Pettit; you can find those names all over the city of Milwaukee.

(I'm not sure what happened to the electronic version of this cartoon; I like the softening of the caricature, but the words were originally much sharper.)

I was busy scanning, cleaning up and emailing this cartoon to the Business Journal offices that Tuesday morning as the planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I knew nothing of the attack until I was driving to work and heard NPR's reporting from the Pentagon as the third plane struck.

The 1991 Soviet Coup

Sovietback Saturday this week recalls the attempted coup d'etat in the Soviet Union 25 years ago this week.

On August 18, 1991, conservative members of the Soviet politburo attempted to put an end to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika. As far as they were concerned, Gorbachev's reform efforts had led to nothing but the loss of their puppet states in Eastern Europe and mounting disorder at home as citizens of non-Russian soviet republics clamored for independence from Moscow.

There is an unexpected link to current events in the cartoon I drew for the Racine Journal Times immediately after the coup. The Latino-American Chief of Police in Milwaukee was meeting a great deal of resistance from the rank and file to his attempts to modernize and humanize the force after decades of Chief Harold Breier's Old School, racist, authoritarian approach to law enforcement.

Resentment toward Chief Philip Arreola would boil over a month later over after he suspended the two police officers who had foiled the escape of Konerak Sinthasomphone from Jeffrey Dahmer, returning the naked, drugged 14-year-old Laotian boy to his killer.

But that's another story. This is supposed to be about the coup in the Soviet Union.

With Gorbachev held captive in Crimea by coup plotters, it fell to Russian President Boris Yeltsin -- elected in June over Gorbachev's preferred candidate -- to lead the resistance to the coup. Yeltsin's stirring speech from atop a Soviet tank won him worldwide admiration and respect and made him a hero at home. Three days after it was launched, the coup collapsed.

Gorbachev was returned to office, but the center of power was now with Yeltsin. And many of those anti-reform politicians were put out to pasture.

The Hazard of Duke

It's Schutzstaffelback Saturday again, so let's travel back in time to the late 20th Century. Because this is not the first time former Klan leader David Duke has been an embarrassment to the Republican Party.

In 1988, Duke actually did run for president as a Democrat, then as a Populist, switching his party affiliation to Republican that December. It was as a Republican that Duke was elected to the Louisiana legislature in a special election in 1989 (my cartoon about that is here). The next year, he ran for Louisiana's seat in the U.S. Senate and polled ahead of Republican Party-endorsed Ben Bagert; to avoid a run-off between Duke and the Democratic incumbent J. Bennett Johnston Jr., the GOP pressured Bagert into withdrawing from the race. Johnston won reelection.

Duke was back again in 1991, running this time for Governor. This time, he beat incumbent Republican Buddy Roemer in the primary, forcing a run-off between Duke and the ethically challenged Democrat, former Governor Edwin Edwards.

The most compelling argument in Edwards' favor was a bumper sticker that read, "Vote for the crook. It's Important." Edwards joked that the only thing he and Duke had in common "is that we both have been wizards beneath the sheets" and that being around so many burning crosses must have been bad for Duke's health.

Polls predicted an Edwards victory, but Duke countered that his supporters were merely reluctant to be honest to pollsters. In the end, a record 1 million votes were cast for the twice-indicted former Governor, versus only 671,000 for the klansman.

Duke tried running for President in 1992, this time as a Republican; but the GOP fought to keep him off the ballot, and there was already a much more prominent national figure who could appeal to the Duke Voter.

The high point of Duke's career was already behind him. Duke would later join the Reform Party to work on Pat Buchanan's 2000 presidential campaign. (Donald Trump explored running for the Reform Party nomination that year as well, but dropped out to host "The Apprentice" instead.) Since then, he has offered his support to various fascist and anti-Semitic politicians in Europe and the Near East.

Toon from the Archives: Shock Light!

This week's cartoon (see yesterday's post) reminded me of a cartoon I drew in 1991:

The cartoon was based, more or less, on a shampoo commercial airing at the time, as well as on various ads for lower-calorie malt beverages.