Golden Dreams Were Shiny Days

 Today's Graphical History Tour rummages through my September cartoons from 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016. I'll bring up another September at the end of our tour.

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., September 1986

My cartoons for the NorthCountry Journal were drawn to accompany the month's editorial by Susie Isaksen, in this case warning that "Lake Charlevoix may be in Michigan, but what happened there could happen in Wisconsin."

Citing an editorial from Northwoods Call by Glen Sheppard describing Charlevoix as an ideal lake for swimming and fishing, with restaurants and "prissy gift shops" nearby, the alarm is raised: "But Charlevoix's shoreline has been scandalously polluted by some of the most god-awful ugly nightmares of the north — condos."

I've moaned here before how much I dislike drawing buildings. They are mostly impersonal and repetitive, and the perspective is unforgiving. That said, there was no choice here but to draw a lot of  late-20th-Century high-rises.

I did, however, like adding a swimming pool on the roof  of the condo in the upper right corner.

1996

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., September 22, 1996

One of the banes of electoral democracy has been the telephone push poll. Push polls have nothing to do with determining how candidates or issues rate with the public. I doubt that the alleged pollster at the other end of the line is recording your responses at all.

No, the caller first determines which candidate or issue you support, and if it's not the candidate or interest group that hired him/her, then moves on to a series of questions like: "Would you still support Your Candidate's Name Here if you knew that he drops little puppies into boiling water?"

I imagine there are still campaigns that employ push polling these days. Someone picking up the phone is unlikely to remember that the caller represents American Eagle Minuteman Opinion Research or whatever long enough to complain to anyone about it. Most people probably just hang up within the first minute.

Which is the same length of a political campaign or issues interest commercial on television; dishonest ads on social media are even cheaper, and get through to the vast majority who do not answer calls on their cell phones from unknown numbers.

2006

for Q Syndicate, September 2006

Twenty years ago, Gays were effectively banned from military service in the U.S. under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," a worthless compromise from the Clinton administration with the prior complete and total ban.

The reasoning was that openly gay homosexuals were somehow "bad for unit cohesion and morale." Unit cohesion and morale failed utterly to suffer deleterious effects once the Obama administration lifted the ban on LGBTQ+ soldiers. Even the neo-Nazi and gangster recruits got used to it.

Well, except for one Minnesota National Guardsman who got put in charge of the Pentagon nowadays.

I have a note in the margin of this cartoon that I should have drawn the recruiter with an open collar and no tie. I can't think of any later cartoon I drew set in a recruitment office in which I could have corrected this costume error.

2016

for Q Syndicate, September 2016

I was away from drawing board for much of September, 2016, on a family vacation to Italy, so I left my editors a couple of non-political cartoons to release while I was gone. This one could still be run again today, save that now the President of the United States has weighed in against this kid.

We've just been through the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I thought about basing today's Graphical History Tour on my experience of that day, but I've done that before. I've also blogged about 9/10. And 9/13.

I just don't have any fresh new insight on 9/11, and my own experience was not as directly connected as was many others'. I considered, and rejected, posting some 9/12 cartoons by cartoonists who are no longer with us (Pat Oliphant, Stuart Carlson, Steve Benson, and Mike Ritter, for example).

We were chatting with the owner of a local restaurant Thursday night, and she said that it's hard to believe that 9/11 was a quarter century ago. She was in high school back then, to give you some idea of her frame of reference in saying that. I could have pointed out that on 9/11, hardly any of us had heard of Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, K-Pop, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aaron Rodgers, or Game of Thrones. 

Donald Trump wasn't even host of The Apprentice yet. 

Speaking of that egomaniacal fascist liar, he came up with a fresh new memory this week of having been hauled away from Ground Zero by two brawny firemen (who, no doubt, had tears in their eyes and called him "Sir"). The organizers of this week's commemoration decided not to give him a speaking role in it, and I'd just as soon do likewise here.

I'll let others who have more personal connections to the events of that day share their non-fabricated, non-embellished memories and, perhaps, some cartoons for those of you too young to have caught them the first time around. Counterpoint's Substack yesterday had anniversary cartoons by some of my progressive, Pulitzer-winning colleagues, if you're interested. 

But as for me, I'm sitting this one out.

2011 in Headlines

For 40 years now, I've been marking the end of each year by taking a picture of newspaper front pages and magazine covers from the previous year. Originally they served as a sort of bookmark in my photo albums; nowadays, the only photos I print out for putting in albums are the best ones from vacations, but I've kept up the habit anyway.

The choice of reviewing a year this way tends to skew what stories are included. The Greek default crisis, for example, didn't make banner headlines in the newspapers in my corner of America. Silvio Berlusconi's resignation wasn't the top story of November 8 as far as midwestern editors were concerned, either. The independence of South Sudan was below the fold, if not on a back page.

Stock market plunges and rises in unemployment make headlines; economic recovery (or stagnation) rarely does. The end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? Almost a non-event once it finally happened. Marriage equality in New York? I don't get any New York newspapers here. Well, I can find the New York Times, but their headlines are seldom legible in these photographs.

Disasters usually make headlines, unless they happen on a Saturday night after the Sunday paper has gone to print. Monday's headline may be something tangential, such as "President Promises Aid Package." Even if the disaster is fresh, my local newspaper figures everyone has already heard about it on cable news and Facebook, so its headline is either the number of dead (in spite of the fact that the number is bound to have changed between press time and finding the paper on your doorstep) or some pull quote like "It Was Terrible!"

Other stories unfold over the course of several months. As significant as were Wisconsin's protests against Governor Walker and his Republican putsch -- and similar protests in Ohio -- and the Occupy protests -- it seems unfair to give them the same weight as the protests in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. (To say nothing of the protests in Bahrain, Yemen, and those in Tunisia that sparked them all... and these headlines indeed say nothing about them.) Time's "Person of the Year" cover will have to suffice.