Remembering the Revrunt Pat

I had another Graphical History post all set to publish today; but if those cartoons could wait 100 years, they can wait another week. For all the material he has provided me over the years, Pat Robertson deserves his cartoon obituary here.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., August, 1986

By the way, Mike Peterson noted approvingly that the angel in the cartoon I posted yesterday was Black. Now, whatever his other sins, I have no reason to believe that Robertson was racist. As the above cartoon may remind some of you, when he was publicly praying to God in 1986 whether he should run for president, his co-host Ben Kinchlow was Black.

By the same token (if you'll pardon the expression), my point in the above cartoon was not so much about the idea of Robertson running as Second Banana to a Black man, as it was that Robertson and Jackson were two men of the cloth who agreed on absolutely nothing other than the name of their Lord and Savior.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Feb. 4, 1988

Well, that and wanting to run for President. (With or without God's blessing.)

Jackson was able to hang on in the 1988 presidential race longer than Robertson, but I would suggest that both had a greater influence on their respective political party than most of the other politicians in my cartoon.

Besides, Jackson had his Rainbow Coalition to keep himself busy, and Robertson his 700 Club.

Q Syndicate, Sept. 2001

Then came 9/11, and a dastardly, unforgivable exchange between Robertson and fellow televangelist Jerry Falwell on Robertson's TV show two days later.

It was Falwell who blamed the deadly terrorist attack on "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians," but it was Robertson who answered, "I totally concur."

Q Syndicate, 2010

Robertson's flock kept sending in their fleece no matter how inflammatory the rest of us found his repeated attributing every disaster that befell anyone in the country to God being pissed at lesbians and gays. Thus Robertson's Club marked its 50th anniversary in 2010, and so did I.  

Q Syndicate, August 2011

As his own editor, Robertson perhaps realized that he was saying a lot of silly things on his show. Not all of them were as hurtful as the 9/11 diatribe:

"Ladies and gentlemen I don’t want to get weird on this so please take it for what it’s worth. But it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power, it has been the symbol of our great nation, we look at that monument and say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it, there’s a crack in it and it’s closed up. Is that a sign from the Lord? Is that something that has significance or is it just result of an earthquake? You judge, but I just want to bring that to your attention. It seems to me symbolic. When Jesus was crucified and when he died the curtain in the Temple was rent from top to bottom and there was a tear and it was extremely symbolic, is this symbolic? You judge."

Or perhaps the Washington Monument was over 150 years old. You decide. 

Q Syndicate, Sept., 2013

Others were less benign.

Prior to yesterday, my last Robertson cartoon was about him fulminating against gays' and lesbians' influence on American academia.

Q Syndicate, April 2017

“We have given the ground to a small minority,” he said. “You figure, lesbians, one percent of the population; homosexuals, two percent of the population. That’s all. That’s statistically all. But they have dominated — dominated the media, they’ve dominated the cultural shift and they have infiltrated the major universities. It’s just unbelievable what’s being done. A tiny, tiny minority makes a huge difference. The majority — it’s time it wakes up.”

Robertson may be gone, but we still have DeSantis, Abbott, Pence, and the rest of the lot who have declared war on intellectuals, science, philosophy, art, literature, history, and compassion.

Not to mention the lesbians and gays and, of course, the transgender menace.

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.

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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.

It All Makes Sense Now

Another Nine Eleven

It has now been fourteen years since terrorists piloted four passenger jets into the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Osama bin Laden has been dead for four years, and Al Qaeda has become overshadowed by other terrorist groups.

It is almost cliché to hear that our men and women in uniform were inspired to go into the military because of the events of that one day. This fall's incoming freshmen, however, the newest crop of eligible military recruits and voters, probably have no memory of the original 9/11. I don't remember JFK's assassination, which happened when I was about the same age they were in 2001 -- but then, TV didn't devote a day every year to rebroadcasting every second of their assassination coverage. If some of these new adults do think they remember 9/11, it's only because they've seen Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble struggle to come to grips with what was happening that morning again and again and again, year after year after year.

They certainly don't remember what "Pre-9/11" was like. They don't remember that the Cold War ended and we had something called a "Peace Dividend" and even "the end of History," whatever that was supposed to mean. Sure, we sent troops to Kuwait and Yugoslavia and Somalia and Haiti; but those military actions weren't about us the way Afghanistan and Iraq would be (and they didn't drag on and on with no end in sight, either. Somalia did get worse instead of better, but we threw up our hands and left and paid no further attention to it). For a dozen years, we entertained the novel notion that mankind wasn't likely to bring civilization to an end just to prove a point.

Their generation has grown up with the fear that at any moment, some fanatic might commit mass murder right here in this country out of religious fervor, political desperation, or sheer spite. Yet perhaps that's only background noise to this generation; America's deathly infatuation with guns was cranking out one mass murder after another, and a steady drumbeat of stray bullets from drive-by shootings, well before that sunny Tuesday morning.

The Civil War gave us Memorial Day; World War I gave us Veterans' Day. Many of us remember December 7 as World War II's day of infamy, even if we have to Google when V-E and V-J Day were. Someday, September 11 -- Patriot Day as we now call it -- will recede from vivid memory. But for now, for those of us for whom the memories are clear, we take a moment to honor those people who were going about their Pre-9/11 business when their world came to an end and ours changed forever.

Q Toon: Remember Me?

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) was indicted last Thursday, accused of  paying someone known as "Individual A" $3.5 million in hush money over a case of sexual misconduct with a male student when he was a high school wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois.

Hastert is not accused of the actual sexual misconduct, the statute of limitations having expired long ago. Instead, he is accused of lying to the FBI about why the former congressman began making large cash withdrawals from his financial accounts in 2010; he had claimed it was due to a lack of confidence in the banking system and that he was keeping the cash.

Making huge cash withdrawals isn't illegal, but banks are required to file a "currency transaction report" on all cash transactions exceeding $10,000 thanks to the Patriot Act, which Hastert had taken credit for crafting and passing in a 2011 interview.

My cartoon, riffing on a 2014 appearance by Hastert on C-SPAN currently gone viral, deals less with the idea of the Patriot Act coming around to bite Hastert in the butt than his voting record on LGBT issues. In addition to Hastert's antigay votes on marriage equality and employment non-discrimination, I could also have included his stance on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

In case you are too young to remember, the Republicans in Congress had forced the appointment of a special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, to look into Whitewater, an Arkansas property scheme in which the Clintons had lost money. Finding nothing impeachment-worthy there, Mr. Starr moved on to investigate charges by Paula Jones that Mr. Clinton had sexually assaulted her while Governor of Arkansas. Finding insufficient evidence of wrong-doing there, too, Mr. Starr proceeded to investigate an apparently consensual extra-marital affair between the President and Monica Lewinsky, a 20-something intern at the White House.

Mr. Starr subpoenaed the President to testify under oath, wherein President Clinton flatly denied the affair. Physical evidence contradicted the President's testimony, so the House voted to impeach. Not over the sex stuff, Republicans protested, but over the perjury.

"Mr. President, I am saddened that there is clear and convincing evidence that the President lied under oath, obstructed justice, and abused the powers of his office in an attempt to cover up his wrong-doing. I regret that the President's behavior puts me in the position of having to vote for these Articles of Impeachment and to pass this matter on to the U.S. Senate for final judgment. ... In this nation, all men are created equal. Simply put, the President in our representative democracy is not a sovereign who is above the law. Tomorrow, we shall pass a difficult vote. The President's inability to abide by the law, the Constitution, and my conscience have all led me to the sound conclusion that impeachment articles must be passed." — Rep. Dennis Hastert, in the Well of the House, December 18, 1998

It is ironic, then, that Hastert, is now charged not with whatever sexual shenanigans he engaged in at Yorkville High, but with lying under oath and paying Individual A off in an effort to evade justice.

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A propos of our discussion the other day of racial and gender diversity in cartoon characters, I blew an opportunity to be ethnically inclusive when I changed the C-SPAN interviewer from Pedro Echevarria to Steve Scully. Mea culpa.

Remembering 9/11

Memorial to 9/11 in Stresa, Italy

National Coming Out Day

I didn't draw a National Coming Out Day cartoon this year, so here's a look back at the one I drew ten years ago. At the time, it felt a little too early to turn attention to such personal concerns, so my approach was to turn that feeling around.

September 13, 2001

Much has been said about the period of national unity that followed the 9/11 attacks. This cartoon is a reminder that the first to hurl accusations against other Americans were those on the religious right.
(Okay, there was also Ted Rall.)

9/11

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;

though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

Psalm 46:1-3

September 10, 2001

The day before 9/11 was a Monday like any other Monday. In the morning, I scanned the above cartoon and sent three versions to Q Syndicate: a TIFF, a bitmap, a grayscale JPEG at 600 dpi and another at 100 dpi. I had drawn the cartoon Sunday night about Lynn Johnston's cartoon, "For Better or For Worse," in which one of the young characters had recently come out as gay. Some newspapers were deleting references to Lawrence's sexuality on the grounds that it was inappropriate for the funny pages.

I went to my job after that. I don't remember anything about the workday; the church where I work was planning for Sunday School Rally Day the following Sunday, so there would have been certain out-of-the-ordinary considerations for getting the bulletin started. An elderly woman was scheduled to come play piano for the senior citizens' group on Tuesday, and I remember that she was anxious about it and phoned for directions and details about how much music she should expect to play.

That evening, I got the e-mail from the Milwaukee Business Journal containing the first draft of that Friday's editorial, a eulogy for Milwaukee philanthropist Jane Bradley Pettit. My job for the BJ was to draw a weekly editorial cartoon to illustrate the editorial; my editor kindly attached a couple of photos of Mrs. Pettit to his e-mail. I spent most of the evening drawing the cartoon below, listening to Monday Night Football on the TV. (The Denver Broncos beat the New York Giants). I'm pretty I spent longer deciding what to draw than actually drawing it.

Mom Remembers 9/11

The local newspaper, the Journal Times, asked readers to send in their memories of 9/11/01. Apparently, they liked my mom's submission enough that she was one of a half dozen people they asked to come in and tell it to the camera. This is her story about learning about it at her cabin out in the southwestern part of Wisconsin:



She gets the day wrong -- I can't forget that it was a Tuesday, because I had a cartoon to send to the Business Journal that morning.

I got off on a rather late start to my day and skipped the usual routine of eating breakfast while watching the Today show. I ate at the computer, scanning and e-mailing the cartoon I'd drawn Monday night. Getting in my car to go to my day job, I heard NPR's reporting on the story and thought that they were interviewing someone with a book about the February, 1993 World Trade Center attack. But the details seemed all wrong, and then they went to their Pentagon reporter as alarms started to sound around him, and it was clearly live reporting.

Tuesday was the day the senior citizens center met at work, and we had no cable television in the building -- just a TV used for watching VHS tapes and DVDs. The seniors spent the morning watching TV news coverage with extremely poor reception while I (along with hundreds of thousands of others) discovered that CNN.com and the other news sites were essentially overloaded for the morning. Washingtonpost.com had live video feed of the Pentagon from a traffic cam or some other fixed camera, so that and the radio were my source of news.

As in New York, the weather here that day was absolutely beautiful -- in total contradiction to the events of the day. And that weather continued as all air traffic over the country was grounded over the next several days; cloudless skies absolutely free of jet contrails for the first time in my life.

As for my Mom's recollection, I have to believe that she saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center on her TV, not the first one, unless she's talking about several hours later when the footage of the first crash made its way onto TV. But 9/11 became for all of us who lived through it one of those days about which we will always remember where we were -- no matter how far removed from the actual events that happened to be.

Q Toon: Tony Perkins

I was almost done drawing this cartoon Sunday night when I turned on the TV for the local news and instead found George Stephanopoulos, Christiane Amanpour and Mike Boetcher eagerly awaiting an announcement from the White House. They had already spilled the beans that Osama bin Laden was dead, and were filling the time by getting reactions from New York firefighters and 9/11 widows.

Clearly, terrorists this week were not going to give a rat's ass that the president of the Family Research Council said on April 29 that terrorists are just like LGBT activists.

The actual quotation isn't exactly as brief as one would like for a cartoon. He's talking here about gay and lesbian activists, boycotts against corporations that support antigay constitutional amendments and candidates, and publicizing the names of those who sign antigay petitions:

"This has moved from cultural terrorism to corporate terrorism. That's what this is. Now, back in the '80's and early '90's, I worked with the state department in anti-terrorism and we trained about fifty different countries in defending against terrorism, and it's, at its base, what terrorism is: it's a strike against the general populace simply to spread fear and intimidation so that they can disrupt and destabilize the system of government. That's what the homosexuals are doing here to the legal system."

At the risk of mockery from Editorial Explanations, I went ahead and finished the cartoon (I had nothing left to do but ink the background). By morning, I hadn't thought of any way to tweak the cartoon to take the previous night's news into account, so I sent it in to my syndicate for distribution. Q Syndicate, after all, is interested in providing LGBT content to LGBT publications, and would be less interested in the cartoon that I posted here yesterday.

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And since I've brought up yesterday's cartoon, a few words about it.

A number of my friends posted that misquoted quotation of Martin Luther King yesterday, so I have to ask myself whether it was unseemly to crow about the death of an enemy. Looking back, I did not exult in the death of Saddam Hussein; and even though I would hold him responsible for the deaths of innocent Americans, Britons and Canadians, I probably wouldn't feel any elation over the death of Muammar Khaddafy were that to come to pass. How I would have felt about bin Laden's death if the U.S. had succeeded in bombing him to smithereens in 1998 I can no longer remember, although I would probably have forgotten his name by now. (Like that blind cleric who fomented the first bombing of the World Trade Center.)

Maybe it was the sheer scale of Al Qaeda's appetite for death and destruction. Maybe it is the lingering memory of Al Qaeda sympathizers exulting in the carnage of 9/11. Maybe it's the nagging feeling that we'd better celebrate while we may, because somebody somewhere is eventually going to do something horrible in retaliation.

Jesus' admonition to love one's enemies notwithstanding, I'm happy that bin Laden is dead and that it was Americans who dispatched him. And I just can't apologize for that.

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And then there is Christian Broadcasting Network commentator David Brody, who not only let his heart rejoice over bin Laden's death, he actually criticized President Obama for not gloating, too:

"I know President Obama understands that getting Bin Laden doesn't mean an end to the war on terrorism but how about a smile? How about showing a little joy? How about a word or two saying something about how this is no doubt a happy or joyous occasion for Americans? We got nothing like that at all... Any hint of gloating or happiness might be rubbing it in the face of some of the crazies in the Arab World and heaven forbid we get them upset! How dare we Americans look like we’re celebrating his death! The travesty of it all! Give me a break. Isn’t it time to stop catering to thugs?"

Apparently, Brody forgot about President Obama cracking a great big smile over Osama bin Laden the night before: